Twilight Zone/Eye of the Beholder (the long haul series)

 

Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness, a universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of a swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment, we'll go back into this room, and also in a moment, we'll look under those bandages, keeping in mind, of course, that we're not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn't just a hospital, and this patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be The Twilight Zone, and Miss Janet Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.

Deeper than that pitiful, twisted lump of flesh, deeper even than that misshapen skeletal mask. -- Says the doctor with a certain face like those acceptable in his society about Donna Douglas during a conversation with his nurse.

I can still to this very viewing remember the first time I ever watched the masterpiece, "Eye of the Beholder". The shock and awe. This is what a twist has always been designed to be. Turn irony on its head and cast the astonishingly beautiful Donna Douglas outside the bandages mostly occupied by Maxine Stuart (in a sensational physical performance) on the bed in the hospital room awaiting results of an eleventh "treatment" in the hopes of an "appearance alteration". I never realized until a little research this time that William D Gordon -- the gangster with the vicious smile and cruel orders for small time crook, Jackie Rhodes in "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" -- was the actual caring, sympathetic doctor looking after Janet Tyler while she remains in her room with bandages wrapped around her head to cover her face. His doctor and a nurse who remain close to Janet discuss her "condition" and the state of the way things are in this episode's conformity society. This episode is in 1960 and human nature hasn't changed 60 years later. One tribe or another, one political affiliation or another, one ideology or another, it's all the same...YOU MUST CONFORM! Governments still demand it. So this episode hits really hard and close because we haven't evolved in the slightest. Rod Serling is always recognized as a genius for scripts like this one. Because he's been dead since the early 70s and what he saw in human nature was very true then and is still true to this day.

Now there're questions that come to mind. Where is this place, and when is it? What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? You want an answer? The answer is, it doesn't make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty *is* in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence. On this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned - in The Twilight Zone.