The Twilight Zone, S1E9, "Perchance to Dream"

Opening: Twelve o’clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in a day’s routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death.

After the emotional agony of “Time Enough at Last,” it’s nice to have a breather episode: a fun tale of the uncanny, told with style. It’s here to entertain you, not break your heart into a thousand pieces.

It’s also the debut episode for writer Charles Beaumont, who will become a Twilight Zone mainstay. Beaumont mostly specialized in mind-benders and horror tales; when his episodes don’t work, it’s because they feel too shallow, but when they do work—“Shadow Play” and “The Howling Man,” as samples—they’re clever and chilling.

Beaumont had an exceptionally tragic life. He began slipping into senility and ill-health (and then drinking to dull his awareness of it) in his mid-thirties; by 1963, he was already in decline, and his scripts in the later seasons of The Twilight Zone sometimes saw his friends acting as under-the-table ghostwriters or collaborators because it was hard for him to think straight and even harder to think on the fly in the way production meetings tended to demand. Marc Scott Zicree’s book The Twilight Zone Companion, my source on Beaumont’s life, has an especially wrenching anecdote about his decline:

“The only time that he ever seemed to be aware of something dark and awful really happening to him,” says William F. Nolan, “was one night, late in ’63, when John Tomerlin and I and Chuck went to Musso and Frank’s in Hollywood. We were going to have dinner and go to a movie. And I remember that night, he put his head in his hands and he said, ‘I can’t go to the movies, guys.’ We said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I just can’t go to any more movies. I can’t think about them. I can’t follow them. I can’t stay there and watch all that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ And he just started to cry, and he said, ‘I love you guys, but I just can’t go to any more movies with you,’ and going to movies was one of the things that we all loved to do.

“That was a very said night. Driving home, we dropped him off, John and I, and we said, ‘Shit, something is horribly wrong with Chuck, and I wish to God we knew what it was.'”¹

Beaumont died at only thirty-eight, though his son said “he was physically a ninety-five-year-old man and looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch.”

… So much for skipping the emotional agony this time. Anyway, Beaumont was a natural storyteller and incredibly important in establishing The Twilight Zone’s range; he wrote several of the show’s best episodes and will always be remembered for it.

This episode’s plot is simple: a man knows that the next dream he has will kill him.

Edward Hall (noir mainstay Richard Conte²), who has been awake for days, visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Rathmann (John Larch³). Hall explains that he’s always had an exceptionally vivid imagination, to the point where his mind sometimes talks him into literally seeing things; when he was younger, he could watch a painting of a ship and see it actually bob on the waves. Hall also has a heart condition that means he’s supposed to avoid strenuous and risky activities—but he can’t hide from his own imagination. The fear is real, even if its source isn’t. He once crashed his car because news stories about a man hiding in the back of a woman’s car made him fixate on what it would be like, on some night drive through Laurel Canyon, to look in his rearview mirror and see a man rising up behind him. (Answer: awful.) He’s told he won’t survive another shock.

Unfortunately, no matter what he does when he’s awake, his imagination runs wild in his dreams … and lately he’s been having a dream about a nightmarish amusement park and a sexy, diabolical femme fatale who works there as Maya the Cat Girl (Suzanne Lloyd). In a clever and nicely under-emphasized touch, Maya’s face is the one that rose behind him in the car, even though he was thinking about a man: she’s been part of his imagination for a long time, and now she has the spotlight.

She entices him into a spooky funhouse and then, despite his reservations, sways him into joining her for a ride on the rollercoaster; she seems to have the power to irresistibly compel him. In the last dream he had about her, she was urging him to jump from the coaster, and since he always dreams in sequence, with one night picking up where the other left off, he knows that the next time he falls asleep, he’ll jump from the rollercoaster, and the plummeting sensation in his dream will kill him for real.

It’s a fun premise, but Beaumont asks us to buy into a few too many things in quick succession: Hall has a weak heart and an exceptionally vivid imagination and the quirk of always dreaming in serialized installments. It takes what should be a universal, Nightmare on Elm Street-style fear of death via nightmare and makes it into something too specific; it’s too easy to see the scaffolding that Beaumont’s employing to make his plot possible.

Director Rob Florey makes a smart choice here and leans into that artificiality; this episode is stylish in a heightened, dreamlike way that really gels with its content. Its Expressionistic twist is most obvious on the eerie dream-fairgrounds—where, as Hall says, everything is “warped and twisted out of shape”—but it’s also built into shots like Hall’s arrival at the office building, which seems to stretch dizzyingly up into the sky. Maya likewise captures the point where the false and exaggerated becomes the archetypal—I love her dramatic cat-like eyeliner, her sinuous dance, and the dark amusement in her face. (Sometimes paired with a raucous, derisive laugh, one that was appearing in the background of the amusement park scenes even before she turned up.) There’s something genuinely shiver-inducing about the way she picks Hall out of a crowd and starts laughing at him, merrily and creepily: I know you. I know something you don’t know. Or, as she puts it later, “I know a lot of things. I’m Maya.”

The counterpoint to Maya and her shadowy carnival world is the doctor, who is reasonable, nonjudgmental, and calm. He has a comforting presence, and I like how much latitude and normalcy he gives Hall. Hall says he’s lost his marbles, and Dr. Rathmann just says, “Marbles can be found.” He mentions that running away is sometimes a perfectly valid and helpful option. He makes jokes. It’s an endearing, low-key, and thoroughly human performance that nicely offsets the exaggerations of Hall’s dreams.

From Dr. Rathmann’s point of view, reality continues on, uninterrupted and undisturbed. To us and to Hall, it’s different.

Hall tells Rathmann his story, concluding with the fact that he now knows Maya is trying to kill him, and that she’s going to push him out of the rollercoaster—but if he keeps staying awake, the stress will kill him too. It’s an unwinnable scenario. He goes out to get some fresh air—and sees Maya sitting at the front desk. The otherwise innocent receptionist is her doppelganger. Hall panics, runs back into the doctor’s office, and jumps out the window.

Except, as we soon see, he didn’t.

We find out that to the doctor, Hall came in only a minute ago; when we saw him briefly lie down on the couch before springing up again, that was Hall’s POV, but the reality is that he fell asleep immediately. The doctor then heard him scream, and his heart gave out. Rathmann is philosophical about it, thinking that—scream or no scream—Hall dying in his sleep meant he died peacefully, but we of course know that Hall’s last days were almost wall-to-wall fear. It’s an ironic little twist of the knife that makes for a reasonably good button on the episode.

I don’t think it does much else, though. Its payoff and its directorial cool aren’t quite enough to make up for its lack of impact. Partly, I think, it’s a structural flaw: the emotional hook is Hall’s exhausted terror, and we don’t spend enough time with him outside of the dream—at least in his perspective—to dig into it. It also means that the strongest part of the story is working on a separate track from the strongest images, which weakens the punch. I’ll admit to a bias here, though, because I’m hardly ever a fan of “it was all a dream” narratives, even when they come with this kind of consequence. I understand that what I’m watching is unreal, of course, but I’d like it to be real to itself, at least. Consigning the substance of something like Dr. Rathmann’s nuanced, humane characterization to Hall’s imagination rather than Beaumont’s always rankles me, fairly or not.

That being said, while this is missing that elusive something—and while I have never satisfactorily worked out how Hall’s serialized dreams work with the fact that the office visit is also partly a dream—its visual style, horror, and dream v. reality material really do make it memorable.

Closing: They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who’s to say which is the greater reality: the one we know or the one in dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth – in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Robert Florey

Written by: Charles Beaumont

Up Next: Judgment Night

1. Alzheimer’s or Pick’s disease, apparently. ↩︎
2. I’ve seen him in The Blue Gardenia, Call Northside 777, and The Big Combo; on a lighter crime note, he was also in the original Ocean’s 11. ↩︎
3. An older Larch is familiar to me from several movies, especially Dirty Harry and The Amityville Horror, but this is the age where he’s most recognizable to me, and mostly from his trio of TZ appearances: he’ll be a memorable part of all-timer “It’s a Good Life,” for example. ↩︎