"When you guys wrote this song — you know, 'we'll make good pets' — you were talking about if these aliens came and visited us and we suddenly became a planet of pets."

Said Howard Stern to Perry Farrell in 1997:

I found that because I've been reading about Perry Farrell this week and it intersected in my head with all the loose talk about newcomers eating the pets of the people who live there in Ohio.

Here's the NYT story if you need to catch up on Perry Farrell's problems: "Jane’s Addiction to Cancel Tour After Onstage Fight/In a social media post, the rock band said it was halting its reunion tour after the group’s singer, Perry Farrell, hit its guitarist at a Boston show" ("Farrell’s wife, Etty Lau Farrell, said on Instagram after the concert that her husband had been upset throughout the tour about the band’s sound levels drowning out his vocals. He was suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat.... 'He was screaming just to be heard,' she said.")

Lyrics from the song "Pets": "Will there be another race/To come along and take over for us?/Maybe Martians could do better than we've done/We'll make great pets!"

There's always the question whether Martians will eat their pets. I come from the "Twilight Zone"/"To Serve Man" era of thinking about the aliens....

"Well, the funny thing is he can’t imagine any celebrities bigger than, like, people from northern Italy at the time. "

"You’re, like, Come on... what about the people who don’t die near the Tiber River? How are they going to get to Purgatorio? It never seems to occur to him. In all three of the Divine Comedy works, Dante’s always hanging out with the big names. Helen of Troy. Even in Hell, Virgil’s like, Boy, I wish I was baptized, but I know you love my work, so I’m going to show you around. And then, in Paradiso, he’s hanging out with the apostles and King David and the Virgin Mary."

Says Ken Jennings, quoted in "Ken Jennings Has Some Questions About Death/The 'Jeopardy!' host on the meaning of trivia, the awkwardness of personal anecdotes, and his new book—a travel guide to the afterlife" (The New Yorker).

"Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?"

A question asked at NPR — in "Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem," by Juan Vidal. Vidal begins a sentence with "As a Latino," so I'm reading that to mean that he identifies as Latino.

Myself, I identify as an American who was young in the 1960s, and back then, the word "identify" had a colloquial meaning that I haven't seen in a long time. We would talk about "identifying" with an idea or a situation. It made sense back then to say "I can identify." It meant you could immediately feel yourself to be inside of another person's situation.

It was related to the way we used to talk — and maybe still do talk — about "identifying" with a  character in a novel of a book. Some people would judge a book by whether you could "identify" with the central character. I remember a conversation I had with someone back around 1970, when I read a lot of novels. I was critical of that idea that what matters is whether you can "identify" with a character. I said "I never identify with a character." My interlocutor said, "I always do."

Should I marry that person, or is that a bad idea? That's water under the bridge, but do you identify with him or with me?

I'm sure many of you are thinking something along the lines of: You two just had different ideas of what it means to "identify." Althouse had some super-strong idea. To her, it meant that you get caught up in an intense delusion that you are the person in the narrative. To the interlocutor, it meant something more like understanding how things must have felt to the character in the book and having the capacity to imagine yourself in that position and to visualize how you would feel.

If it was a competition about who is the better reader, who won? Is it better to see the person in the book as a mysterious other with an entire subjective world inside that will be revealed to you? Or is it better to see that character as always essentially you, showing you that we are all the same?

By pure chance, last night, I watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "People Are Alike All Over" (1960):

You're looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They're taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we'll land there with them.

Marcusson tells Conrad that he's sure people are alike all over, but Marcusson dies in the crash landing on Mars. Conrad is greeted by creatures who look and seem exactly like human beings — white people, by the way. They take him to a house that they've built to look exactly like the house in his mind — the house they saw in his mind. He thinks it's lovely until he realizes all the doors are locked and there is no window. Then a wall opens up, he sees he's behind bars, there's a crowd of Martians gawking at him, and there's a sign that says "Earth Creature in his native habitat." Conrad cries out, "Marcusson! Marcusson, you were right! You were right. People are alike.... people are alike everywhere!"

Have you considered that, if you identify as human and read only the work of human authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?

Keeping up with "The Great Gatsby."

This kid is the new Wint and will be making $1 million a year tweeting brilliant non sequiturs while his English professors collect piles of rejection letters for their failed Great American Novelshttps://t.co/aQdmHRgZxz

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 11, 2020

I had to look up Wint. He's "one of the most notable accounts associated with 'Weird Twitter,' a subculture on the site that shares a surreal, ironic sense of humor." Notable and duly noted. Don't let that distract you. Click on the image and read the wonderful English paper that still somehow gets a D.

ADDED: I think the 2 checks over "class role as a 'house cat'" suggest why he didn't fail outright. He'd absorbed some left-wing ideology. That was worth something.

PLUS: I had to look up "Midnight Society," written above "Submitted for the approval of English 101." To me "Submitted for your approval" is the classic line from "The Twilight Zone" (a show I watched when it originally aired and currently have 50+ episodes of on our DVR). The Midnight Society comes from a 90s TV show "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" where some teenagers who called themselves "The Midnight Society" told each other scary stories, beginning with "Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society..." The creator of the show intended that line as an allusion to "The Twilight Zone."

It's funny to me that the student wrote about Tom and Jerry instead of the older, grander "Great Gatsby" and the teacher wrote about "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" instead of the older, grander "Twilight Zone."

Do I watch those episodes of "The Twilight Zone"? Yes! I watched "Mr. Bevis" over the weekend after I read that Orson Bean had died. And I watched "The Howling Man" last night.

ALSO: Do I think the Tom & Jerry paper is real? No. I think it's a joke, a fantastic joke. Let's follow Alexis De Wokeville on Twitter.

"Believing America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970."

"He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, 'Me and the Orgone.' (The orgone was a pseudoscientific theory about a universal life force.) When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children and for years led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and 'househusband,' casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization. 'We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,' he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. 'We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.' In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another."

From "Orson Bean, Free-Spirited Actor of Stage and Screen, Dies at 91/The television, stage and film comedian starred on Broadway, was blacklisted as a suspected Communist, founded a progressive school and moved to Australia before returning to the U.S." (NYT).

If you remember Orson Bean, it is probably not for his hippie phase. As the NYT puts it, he is "remembered for early panel shows, which, in contrast to the culture of greed, noise and kitsch of modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated." You know, stuff like this:



He also acted in plenty of of movies and TV shows, notably the "Mr. Bevis" episode in the first season of "Twilight Zone." Clip:



Another distinction: Orson Bean was the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart.

ADDED: Bean did not die of old age. He was struck by a car as he crossed the street in Los Angeles.

And this is interesting, from 2014, 3 years after the death of Andrew Breitbart, "Orson Bean on God, America, and Yesterday's Hollywood that Embraced Both" (Breitbard):

Bean said Breitbart resonated with so many people because he was fighting to right that culture, which he said is decaying, with optimism and joy. And he did it in an unconventionally fresh and unique way that warranted Breitbart’s name to be a trademarked, one-of-a-kind brand. Bean said it was Breitbart’s larger-than-life spirit that makes people come up to him to this day with tears in their eyes, saying, “you’re Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law!”

Breitbart, who once was a fierce liberal, may never have been a conservative or built the foundation for his media empire had he not seen a Rush Limbaugh book in Bean’s library.

“Take it home and read it, Andrew,” Bean recalled telling his son-in-law.

And the rest is history.

"But Jeanne is less interested in men than she is in the park’s newest amusement: a twinkling Tilt-a-Whirl she calls Jumbo."

"Massive and glowing, the ride by night looks less like a ride than an otherworldly spacecraft, radiating mystic light and energy. Scrubbing down its bulb fixtures in the dark, Jeanne will straddle the structure’s arms and sometimes talk idly, more comfortable speaking to herself than to any of the park’s daytime visitors. She’s content to live her life this way, until she slips and nearly dies one night, and the ride begins to come alive.... 'We are good together, aren’t we?' Jeanne coos to Jumbo at one point, which responds by blinking its lights in colorful patterns. Later, when Jumbo seems to go quiet, Jeanne cries, 'Don’t leave me alone with them!' In her world, humans have always been a 'them'; being with Jumbo is the first time she’s felt part of an 'us.'"

From "The Wild Sundance Movie About a Woman in Love With a Theme-Park Ride" (Daily Beast).

Sounds like an episode of "Twilight Zone."

"Late night congress is great stuff! I'm switching between Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock and the impeachment hearings and it's all starting to make sense."

Said Mr. Forward in last night's "Are you watching the impeachment theater?/I walked out."

Me, I conked out early, got a full night's sleep, and am up at 3 a.m. to view the wreckage.

Headlines on the front page of the NYT:

Senate Adopts Framework After Acrimonious Debate

Republicans blocked Democrats’ efforts to subpoena documents and seek testimony, including from John Bolton. Witnesses could still be summoned later.

Chief Justice John Roberts admonished the House impeachment managers and President Trump’s lawyers to “remember where they are.”

At Davos, Trump Scoffs at Trial and ‘Prophets of Doom’/President Trump appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on the day his trial began.

Impeachment Trial Begins in Acrimony/Republicans made last-minute changes to their proposed rules to placate moderates, but they held together to turn back Democratic proposals.

The headlines kept changing on me, and I don't think "Acrimonious" and "Acrimony" were up at the same time, but I infer that they wanted a negative word to describe the emotional atmosphere and they converged on "acrimony."

"Acrimony" is "anger and bitterness: harsh or biting sharpness especially of words, manner, or feelings." It's the same root as "acrid," which is used to describe a taste or smell.

Remember smellovision?



PLUS: "They'll have to have subtitles for the smelling impaired." Hey, thanks for thinking of me, Weird Al.

AND: The word "acrimony" also appears in the NYT headline, "‘Nobody Likes Him’: Hillary Clinton Risks a Party Split Over Bernie Sanders," which went up yesterday, and that's intraparty acrimony:

Since Mr. Sanders endorsed Mrs. Clinton in July 2016, the acrimony between the two camps has lingered. Mrs. Clinton and her former aides maintain that his endorsement came too late and was too lukewarm to truly unify the party. Some supporters of Mr. Sanders still argue that the Democratic National Committee “rigged” the rules to help her secure the nomination.

2020!

I just wanted to write that.

The twenties! It will be so satisfying to say that, to be in a decade with a real name, like the old-time decades I knew so well — the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties. We were verbally impoverished these last 2 decades. Now, once again, time will have the distinction of a name, a decade name.

The vague gray time is over. I feel so optimistic!

Happy New Year to all!

I hope you rang it in the way you like. I certainly did it my way by being asleep and then up at 5. We watched some episodes of "Twilight Zone" on the SyFy channel — "The Hitchhiker," "The Monsters Are Due on Main Street," "Eye of the Beholder," "The Invaders."

Observing "the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face."

"It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly... distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.... 'It’s Instagram Face, duh. It’s like an unrealistic sculpture. Volume on volume. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.'... There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. 'Absolutely... We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.... People are absolutely getting prettier... The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.'"

From "THE AGE OF INSTAGRAM FACE/How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker). Nice animated illustration at the link.

That made me think of "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" — summarized, with clips, perfectly in less than 2 minutes, here:



"I don't want to be transformed! I want to stay ugly!"

"When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?"

Asked Matt Zoller Seitz, back in 2012. Seitz was born in 1968, so he didn't live through "The Twilight Zone," 1959-1964. I was 8 to 13, in those years, and even today, seeing that question — "When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?" — I'm inclined to say, I never "realized" it, because I don't remember a time when I didn't know "The Twilight Zone." I immediately thought of the episodes "Eye of the Beholder" and "The Monsters Are Due on Main Street." And just the opening credits.

But maybe you think "art" is more about serious adults in complicated, serious situations and rule out anything that accepts the label "science fiction." That's a conventional viewpoint adopted by Seitz:

As an American boy in the seventies, I saw plenty on TV that scared, disturbed, or upset me: the bigotry and brutality of Roots; naked prisoners being led into a gas chamber on Holocaust; Farrah Fawcett's torment in The Burning Bed. But I didn't realize commercial TV could be art, or even aspire to artfulness, until I started watching Hill Street Blues.

Seitz was 13 when that show premiered (in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became President).

In many ways the godfather of today's melancholy, morally ambiguous cable dramas, the Steven Bochco series imported seventies movie values to NBC. There were content restrictions, some of them jarring (the cops never used any curses milder than "damn" or "hell" )...

TV meant, for nearly all of us, broadcast TV, subject to government censorship, despite the First Amendment....

... but for the most part, the show's situations were rougher and rawer than TV's norm. The stories dealt with adult issues — sex, race, class divisions, petty office turf wars, political chicanery, alcoholism, drug addiction, you name it — and while some of the characters were more sensible and ethical than others, the show never seemed to judge any of them. There were no bad guys on the show, just people living their lives according to whatever personal code they'd cobbled together....

I'm reading that this morning — and thinking about TV art — because it's quoted — sad to say — in a tribute— written by Fred Barbash in WaPo — to Steven Bochco, who has died (at the age of 74). The most interesting material from that tribute is quoted from Bochco (from this book):

“The idea of almost every other cop show was that the private lives of these folks was what happened the other 23 hours of the day that you weren’t watching them,” Bochco told the New York Times, “and we turned that inside out. 'Hill Street' was a show where their personal lives kept bleeding profusely, hemorrhaging if you will, into their professional lives. Where you had ex-wives coming in inappropriately and disrupting proceedings. You had Furillo’s lover getting into horrible arguments with him about the law. And you had an alcoholic, J. D. LaRue. All of this stuff just kept intruding and informing how these men and women went about their business.”...

“On our scripts,” Bochco once said in an oral history, “we had double columns of dialogue, ’cause we scripted everything in the background. EVERYTHING in the background. We realized we had so many characters that the only way to service all those characters was to have multiple story lines. The only way to service multiple story lines was to let them spill over into subsequent episodes. So half the time, things that were going on in the background were in fact the elements of stories and character relationships that would emerge in the foreground two episodes from now.”

In “Trial by Fury,” for example, the rape of the nun and the confessions weren’t enough for Bochco. When Bochco first saw the script — featuring only that sequence — he felt there was something missing, “some sense of how life isn’t fair.... So we added a small story about another murder, of a bodega owner named Rodriquez, who had been gunned down in a robbery. It happens every day on the Hill....and is far less sensational than the rape-murder of a nun, which is why the bodega murder doesn’t get the cops’ full attention.... What we come to realize is that the bodega murder will go unsolved: the price of catching the killer of the nun …. The kind of systemic cynicism that the two stories, side-by-side, exposed dramatically made the hour terrific conceptually."

Topics I'm inviting you to discuss: What is art? Is cynicism or complexity or density the key to answering the question? Does it matter whether television can be art and whether a particular show was art or do you only want to talk about whether television is great? When is television art, but bad art? When is television not art, but nevertheless great? Was there ever a TV show that made you think, like Seitz, hey, wait a minute, this isn't just TV, it's art!? What's your favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Is it the same episode that would make you say, that one was art!? Did you watch "Hill Street Street Blues"? What impact did it have on you? Did it open up new vistas of what television could be? Do you realize now — with our endless access to complicated, adult dramatic series on HBO and Netflix and Amazon — how different and important "Hill Street Street Blues" was in its time? Do you think it had anything to do with Reagan?

I'm interested enough in that last question, that I just bought Bochco's book so I can see what he says about Reagan. If the answer's interesting, I'll do a separate post. If it's not, I'll update here, very soon.

UPDATE: Bochco never mentions Reagan in his book. I did a separate search for the word "President," and what I got were lots of mentions of various corporate presidents, a risky Obama joke...

I have been pissing, vomiting (lot of dry heaving — almost as much fun) and leading from the rear (apologies to the President) for about three or four days.

... and something about the TV show "Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis played the first female President of the United States. Bochco was asked to take over, 2 years into the show's run (in 2007). I'll make a separate post out of this part.

CORRECTION: Bochco was asked to take over after 6 or 7 episodes had been filmed and only 4 had aired. The show had been getting great ratings, but there were production problems, that the original show runner couldn't handle, which is why they brought in Bochco, who replaced the writers and changed the show, and the ratings crashed.

50 years ago today: The TV show "Star Trek" premiered.

Lots of tributes and memories around the web today — links collected here.

I was extremely interested in new TV shows in 1966, but this one didn't reach me. I was more of a "Twilight Zone" person. I was up for science fiction, but I wanted more interesting ideas, more mysterious phenomena, not campy adventure. To see the same cast of characters in their tight-fitting outfits might have worked on me if I'd perceived Kirk or Spock as virtual boyfriends. But they were not. Too old. And their hair was too short. For cute boys, I was watching "The Monkees."

Here are the TV listings from half a century ago. "Twilight Zone" wasn't on anymore, but "The Monkees" were. I know I gave "Star Trek" a chance, but can see that it had to compete with "Bewitched." I'm sure I watched "Bewitched" (and "That Girl"). I'd still choose "Bewitched" over "Star Trek" if I had to watch one of them right now.

The man who wrote the first episode of "Star Trek" and the "Nothing In The Dark" episode of "Twilight Zone"...

... George Clayton Johnson, has died at the age of 86.

Johnson also wrote the original "Ocean's 11" and the book (made into a movie) "Logan's Run." "Logan's Run" is the story about a wonderful, entertaining society that executes its citizens when they turn 30.

"Nothing In The Dark" is the "Twilight Zone" in which the unknown young actor named Robert Redford played Death and got inside the house of an old woman who'd been determined to keep Death from entering. Here, somebody compressed the episode into a 2-minute version:

"Prince is seated at a microphone behind a keyboard, which he keeps playing. This is quite disconcerting..."

"... if he doesn’t like a question, he strikes up with the theme from The Twilight Zone and shakes his head. At one point, he presses a button on the keyboard and the intro to his legendary 1988 hit Sign o’ the Times booms out of the PA. He looks at me. 'You wanna do this?' he says."

Prince does an interview and has his fun with the interviewers, one of whom writes for The Guardian, which — I don't know, maybe it's a British thing — doesn't edit out what to my eye is the run-on sentence of the year: "As skinny as a teenager, sporting an afro and almost unnecessarily handsome at 57 years old, Prince looks flatly amazing, exuding ineffable cool and panache while wearing clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny is just one among his panoply of talents."

I diagrammed that in my head and determined that there needs to be a period after "amazing." But what is the subject of that second sentence, the one with the verb "is"? Answer: "exuding."

And what were the clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny? Mainly the white platform flip-flops with white socks.

"All 156 episodes of 'Twilight Zone' ... at the same time."

"After several minutes, I started to doubt whether the cacophony of sound was truly the real audio output of all the episodes.

There were few discernible transient sounds, and it was nigh impossible to associate them with any given clip, so I started to suspect it was just either "overdubbed background noise" or maybe just the sound of 7 or 8 episodes overlaid.

Nope! It's the real deal. At about 7:08, there is the sound of electric buzzing. zzzzzZZZZIP! zzzzzZZZIP! It corresponds to the clip at 10x4 (10th from the left, 4th row down), Mr. Dingle The Strong, when he is being zapped by the martians.

"Mars Needs Women."

Movie title invoked by me in the context of critiquing philosophy departments. That's participating in my own comments thread section, where I also say something I'd like to reprint here:

"Little Chrissy, say sugar."

Here's a clip from one of my favorite movies, "Pecker"...



... which I was watching this morning, because I saw that I'd been mentioned on Facebook. It was Annie Gottlieb saying "Ann Althouse, do not watch" about a pre-production trailer to a movie called "Squirrels."



I said, " So... that did make me click, but I stopped at 0:43. I don't want to see the squirrel bite off the girl's finger. And isn't that the girl who played Little Chrissy in 'Pecker'?"

I looked it up and saw that "Pecker" was made a long time ago, in 1998. I am getting old! So is the actress that played Little Chrissy, whose name, I see, is Lauren Hulsey. She looks like this now and seems to work not so much as an actress, but in visual effects. Perhaps she got into that through her experience making "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," where they made her look like this.

I guess there's a creepy kid category within child acting. Back when I was a kid, the #1 creepy kid was Billy Mumy. And I mean pre-"Lost in Space," particularly the "Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life."

Recommended Amazon Instant Video: "It's a Good Life" and "Pecker."

"Things I Learned in My Twenty-Four Hour Althouse Comment Withdrawal."

From betamax3000 (at 12 midnight):

• the Shakes -- they Get Real Bad;

• Twenty-Four Hours is A Long Period of Time When You Deny Yourself;

• the Baby Spiders are Real;

• I Love the Commenters: Read All the Posts, All Day, Tongue Bound, and Realized in Retrospect that -- Perhaps -- I Occasionally Suck Too Much Oxygen From the Room;

• Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

• the Scientology "No Fear' Paradigm Crosses Neuropaths with Cruel Neutrality: when I get it Down to Four Paragraphs I Will Thrust it Sideways Into a Thread about Gabe Kaplan;

• it -- Technically -- is Not a Burning Sensation.

I do not discount the role of  El Pollo Raylan's summoning: "Beta come back!" — which took us to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Lem sighed relief:

I think I can say tonight that we are in Betamax debt. From now on it will be possible to risk loosing wifi knowing that it is a survivable non-event thanks to the courage and determination of one man. and his name is Betamax.

And:

Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

Its like Althouse politics, I think.

That's exactly right. And then betamax3000 said:

At the Metaphorical Althouse Denny's I want More hash Browns and Non-Dairy Creamer: I am building a Mountain.

And I say: This means something. This is important.



Loose the WiFi!

Pope Francis looks like...

... Ed Wynn!



A lovable face, I think. Something very sweet about it. Ed Wynn's real name was Isaiah Edwin Leopold. He made the middle name — we're told — into his whole name "to save his family the embarrassment of having a lowly comedian as a relative." You may remember him from the "Twilight Zone" episode "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" — about an old man who believed he would die if his clock stopped. Can you remember whether the clock stops and, if so, whether the man dies?

Jack Klugman has died.

At the age of 90. You probably think of "The Odd Couple" or, maybe "Quincy," but here he is in a 1960 episode of "The Twilight Zone," called "A Passage for Trumpet":

"If you’ve got, so to speak, the devil inside the elevator, press the call button. Call Otis."

"You’re trying to make this fun, I can understand that. But I’ve never heard of anything like this."

"Okay, what if one of your fellow passengers bites you?"

"Smack the person across the face."

Elevator expert is questioned a propos of this movie trailer:



Oh, I see. All our ridiculous primal fears about elevators are going to be exploited. IF... and I stress if... we subject ourselves to another M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It seems silly to make big expensive wide-screen movies about a few people stuck in a small space. Such things would do better on a theater stage. Like "No Exit." Or, even better, on TV. Like "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." ("Twilight Zone" video begins here.)

I truly loathe the movie techniques used in that trailer — music, swooping shots, editing — to try to make something inherently small fill the big screen. Our fears are in our heads. Put us in touch with that. Don't hurl screenfuls of flashing lights in our face and blast us with cheeseball music. That just makes me feel bad, and then I get angry. To scare me, you must be subtle.

Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children, there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight's cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.