The Eye of the Beholder
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- This page is about the Twilight Zone episode. For other uses of this title, see Eye of the Beholder.
“The Eye of the Beholder (originally titled "The Private World Of Darkness")” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
[edit] Details
- Episode number: 42
- Season: 2
- Production code: 3640
- Original air date: November 11, 1960
- Writer: Rod Serling
- Director: Douglas Heyes
- Producer: Buck Houghton
- Director of photography: George T. Clemens
- Music: Bernard Herrmann
[edit] Cast
- Janet Tyler: Maxine Stuart (under bandages), Donna Douglas (unmasked)
- Doctor: William D. Gordon
[edit] Rod Serling's opening narration
"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."
[edit] Synopsis
Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh surgery in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the surgery are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged, so her face cannot be seen. She is described as being extremely ugly by the nurses and doctor, whose own faces are always in shadows.
The outcome of the operation cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the doctor tells her that her face has undergone "not a single change", but the audience is shown that she is beautiful. Through many theatrical and optical tricks, none of the other characters' faces have been shown clearly until that moment.
The doctor, nurses and other people in the hospital are revealed to be ugly in the audience's perspective, with curled lips and misshapen noses. A handsome man afflicted with the same "condition" arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her own kind, where her "ugliness" will not trouble the State.
[edit] Rod Serling's closing narration
"Now the 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."
[edit] Quotes
- “Funny – the very first thing I can remember, is another little child screaming when she looked at me.”
- “There are times I think I’ve lived my whole life inside of a cave, and the wind that blows in through the mouth of the cave smells of ether and gauze.”
- “I want to belong. I want to be like everybody. Please doctor, help me.”
- “The state isn’t God! It hasn’t the right to penalize people for the act of birth.”
- The doctor: “What is the dimensional difference between beauty and something repelling? Why? Why aren’t people allowed to be different?”
[edit] Trivia
- Douglas Heyes cast this episode with his back to the performers, in order to pick the actors who had the most sympathetic voices.
- This episode is part of the Cable in the Classroom selection.
- The original title for this episode was "The Private World of Darkness." For reasons unknown, the version of this episode which is in syndication bears the original title rather than the correct title, "Eye of the Beholder." In The Twilight Zone's original DVD release the syndicate version was marketed as an "alternate version".
- Maxine Stuart was supposed to dub in the one line Janet says when she comes out of the bandages, but Donna Douglas ended up doing such a good impression of Stuart's voice that the line was left undubbed.
- This episode was parodied on the April 19th, 1997 episode of Saturday Night Live. Guest host Pamela Anderson played Janet.
- This episode was re-made for the 2002-2003 revival of the series, with Molly Sims cast as Janet.
[edit] Critical Response
“‘The Eye of the Beholder’ … is peculiarly evocative in that it serves as a blueprint for his later script adaptation of Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin Schaffner. In ‘Beholder’, the trick is to keep the audience in the dark as long as possible on what the ‘normal’ people actually look like. Ultimately, we discover that the normal people look like very close relatives of Miss Piggy, whereas the ‘freaks’ all look like beautiful movie stars. Our first impulse is to laugh at this nervy, simplistic gimmickry, but gradually an after-effect of terror sweeps across the screen as we realize that the pig-faced ‘normals’ actually consider themselves compassionate in even tolerating the existence of the freaks. We begin to enter their world, their consciousness, their perverted sense of aesthetics. The ‘joke’ is thus not so much on racist bigots, as it is on ‘tolerant’ liberals.” —Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Rod Serling: Viewed from Beyond the Twilight Zone
[edit] References
- Zicree, Marc Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition).
