The Twilight Zone, S1E4, "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"

Opening: Picture of a woman looking at a picture. Movie great of another time, once-brilliant star in a firmament no longer a part of the sky, eclipsed by the movement of earth and time. Barbara Jean Trenton, whose world is a projection room, whose dreams are made out of celluloid. Barbara Jean Trenton, struck down by hit-and-run years and lying on the unhappy pavement, trying desperately to get the license number of fleeting fame.

“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” is an episode with several interesting ambivalences that I keep coming back to and turning over in my head. For part of its runtime, it’s a well-handled but fairly straightforward riff on Sunset Boulevard–and then, in its final moments, it becomes something that’s … kinder? Too indulgent? Oddly troubling? Progressive? Of its time? Bittersweet, to be sure.

But first, let’s talk about Ida Lupino, one of my all-time favorite TZ alums. She would go on to become not only the only woman to direct an original series Twilight Zone episode—the excellent “The Masks,” in the fifth season—she would also be the only actor from the show to direct an episode, period. She had a fascinating career as both a movie star and a director, one of the few female directors of this period: I particularly recommend her tense, well-paced noir film The Hitch-Hiker. She also did a metric ton of extremely varied TV work both behind and in front of the camera, but noir seems to have been a particular favorite of hers, so it’s only fitting for her to star in an episode that pulls from a classic of the genre.

Lupino plays Barbara Jean Trenton, a one-time Hollywood star (the height of her career was in the early ’30s) who now spends most of her time in her home screening room, day-drinking and watching her old movies. She knows them so well she can mimic her in-movie gestures even when her back is to the screen. Unlike her cinematic ancestor Norma Desmond, however, Barbara has contemporary ties who worry about her nostalgia-obsessed unhappiness and convince her to re-engage with the world.

She has a loyal housekeeper, Sally (Alice Frost, who will reappear in “It’s a Good Life”), and a possibly-even-more-loyal agent, Weiss (Martin Balsam, who will reappear in “The New Exhibit” and of course had a massive career), who may be quietly in love with her. They both genuinely care about her. This is the story of a fading star, true, but one whose agent is actively trying to get her work; he can recognize that her headliner days are over, but he encourages her to look at supporting roles and read the scripts he brings her. He sets up a meeting with Marty Sall (Ted de Corsia), a studio head she used to butt heads with and who now wants to cast her in a small but potentially interesting role.

The scene with Barbara, Weiss, and Marty is my favorite of the episode—multifaceted and with edges sharp enough to cut. It’s a good example of the emotional push-and-pull of the story overall. You can see how Marty would characterize their meeting: he’s the good guy extending an olive branch to a “difficult” former star, and sure, the role he’s offering her isn’t enough for a comeback, but it’s a part, isn’t it? It’s work. And Barbara throws it back in his face because, even after twenty-five years away from the movies, she refuses to play a mother. She’s Norma Desmond, circling the drain, tragic because she can’t recognize that she’s no longer young, no longer beloved by millions. No longer—perhaps—desirable.¹

But we’re looking at Ida Lupino, a striking woman in her early forties playing a character only a few years older, and while it’s true she’s old enough to play a character who’s a mother, that’s not really the point, is it? That’s not what “playing a mother” really means here. It means accepting that, having passed forty, she’s no longer going to hold anyone’s interest in a central role (something this episode clearly belies). The only way she’s going to be allowed back on the silver screen is as an appendage to the real characters.

She’s been out of the game for a quarter of a century. She’s not going to come back to the same status. That’s true and arguably fair.

She’s also a woman whose artistic career has been sharply curtailed because she’s already aged out of Hollywood’s narrow range of approved, fuckable femininity. And like her, we can recognize that this is bullshit.

The episode implicitly believes that Barbara’s fate is one her male counterparts could easily share, since her one-time costars have all died or drifted out of the biz too, but while it’s a universal possibility, we know that it’s not meted out equally across the board. I don’t think “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” gets all the way to an intellectual understanding of just how stacked the deck is against Barbara, but it feels that there’s an injustice here, even if the extent to which it’s a gendered one doesn’t really register. It certainly feels for Barbara and encourages us to do the same.

“Why do we always seem to fight, Barbara?” Marty asks, all fondly condescending paternalism. Why? Because you got older and got more power, Marty, and Barbara got older and got less. When she rejects his offer, he can’t believe the audacity of her rejecting his pity. He turns on her in the classic, suddenly vindictive manner of an asshole scorned, calling her an “aging broad with a scrapbook” and adding, “Any part you get at this studio won’t have to go through an agent. We can set it up at the community chest, because it’ll be charity.”

Weiss is effectively the episode’s voice of reason, the one who can see Barbara with clear-eyed compassion, and he hates Marty for this: “Remind me someday when you’ve gone over the hill and you’re down on your knees—remind me to give you a swift kick in the teeth so you’ll know exactly how it feels.”

With one avenue of engaging with the present effectively closed off, Barbara retreats even more into the fantasyland of the past. Weiss tries to draw her out again by reuniting her with an old friend—and, probably, lover—frequent co-star Jerry Hearndan; he tries to use the past as a way to get Barbara to connect with the present. But Barbara is horrified to find out that Jerry’s become a much older man in thick glasses who now runs a chain of supermarkets, a career utterly devoid of grand romance. As far as Barbara’s concerned, Jerry’s “dead like all the others.” (Ouch. Thanks for stopping by anyway, Jerry!)

There’s a neat little casting touch here. Old Jerry and Young Jerry—the one we see in Barbara’s movies—are two different actors (Jerome Cowan and John Clarke, respectively), as if there’s a sharp break in Jerry’s life, a continuity interruption between the past and the present. He’s left those days behind him and accepted that they’re gone, that he’s (literally) a different person now. Barbara, then and now, is only ever Ida Lupino—you can see how she might feel that letting go of the past means letting go of herself.

In the end, what she lets go of is reality. Like Norma Desmond, she steps into a glittering, make-believe world where everyone is thrilled to see her—but Barbara gets this not as a delusion but as a kind of dreamy portal fantasy. She vanishes into film, into a scenario that feels like both wish fulfillment and bittersweet fairy tale.

She comes into close-up as Weiss calls to her, and there’s happiness and fondness in her eyes. She knows she’s not coming back. She blows him a kiss and throws him her handkerchief.

It’s not a simple happy ending, though, because while we see Barbara’s joy, we also see Weiss’s grief. He begs her to come back. When he finds her handkerchief in the hall—where she let go of it in the film—he picks it up and breathes in her scent. The camera pushes in on him: confused, lost, and finally accepting (“To wishes, Barbie. To the ones that come true”).

I like this episode but don’t quite love it, and I think that’s because I keep worrying at the ending like it’s a grain of sand I’m trying to turn into a pearl. The Twilight Zone usually doesn’t reward nostalgia—as we’ll see in our next episode, the sublime “Walking Distance”—but when it does, it’s often with a disconcerting twist (at least in the Serling-penned episodes). Barbara’s ending has that faintly troubling quality to it. She’s happy in a private heaven of her own making, but we can see the real sorrow, confusion, terror, and pain her disappearance causes in at least two of the people she leaves behind. It’s as much like a suicide as an escape. Her life in the present was unfair but not miserable, and I can’t help but wish that she’d been able to find her way to a happiness that wasn’t such a complete retreat. Sometimes it feels too easy to me, and sometimes it feels depressing.

There’s a feminist reading of the ending—we see some Twilight Zone men learn, with difficulty, that they shouldn’t cling to the past, but Barbara gets not a lesson but relief; she gets everything she wanted; she escapes the punishing pity of Hollywood, which insists she accept that her stardom is over and done with, and finds relevance again. She resists the idea that maturity means accepting a life she feels lacks glamor, enchantment, and capital-r Romance. Women get told to settle more often than to aspire or dream, so there’s probably some gratification, and even a rare power fantasy, in Barbara’s ending.

There’s a more troubling take, though. In a way, Barbara’s retreat into a fantasy of the past echoes the popular conviction that she doesn’t matter as much in the present, that her best days are behind her: that for a woman, forty is a tragedy and twenty is heaven. Does she accept those terms? Does the story? Getting what she always wanted means that she doesn’t grow as much as a character; she’s well-rounded but static, and her victory is becoming more static still.

All of this is layered in a way that’s impossible to resolve, and that makes the episode both compelling and difficult. It’s not one I love, but it’s one I often think of.

Closing: To the wishes that come true, to the strange, mystic strength of the human animal, who can take a wishful dream and give it a dimension of its own. To Barbara Jean Trenton, movie queen of another era, who has changed the blank tomb of an empty projection screen into a private world. It can happen in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Mitchell Leisen

Written by: Rod Serling

Cinematography by: George T. Clemens

Up Next: Walking Distance

1. As the kids surely no longer say, “LOL. LMAO, even.” It’s Ida Lupino! ↩︎