The Twilight Zone, S1E23, "A World of Difference"

Opening: You’re looking at a tableau of reality, things of substance, of physical material: a desk, a window, a light. These things exist and have dimension. Now this is Arthur Curtis, age thirty-six, who also is real. He has flesh and blood, muscle and mind. But in just a moment we will see how thin a line separates that which we assume to be real with that manufactured inside of a mind.

Wanting to escape from a draining, oppressive life—and (at least partly) managing that feat through some kind of fantasy element—is a theme The Twilight Zone returns to over and over. We’ve already seen it with “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and “Walking Distance,” and we’ll go on to see it again in episodes like “A Stop at Willoughby.” So “A World of Difference” exists in a crowded field and alongside some pretty stiff competition. Within that field, it’s fine but not great.

Howard Duff¹ stars as … well, that’s the bone of contention. It’s probably simplest to talk about Duff as playing Gerry Raigan, an already washed-up actor on the verge of hitting the rocks for good. Yes, he has a starring role in a movie—but he has it on sufferance, with a lower-tier employee of his agency seemingly assigned to keep an eye on him. The director is losing patience with him. His ex-wife, Nora (Eileen Ryan²), feels such a searing hatred for him that I’m surprised he doesn’t catch on fire. As far as we can tell, Gerry spends his days drinking, failing to write out alimony checks, and watching his career circle the drain.

The only person in his corner is his agent, Brinkley (David White³). Everyone in the episode acts like Brinkley is a terror from hell—“I wonder what Brinkley wants,” Nora says, seeing his car. “Your blood, probably”—but he’s actually a compassionate, long-suffering man at the end of his rope. He cares about Gerry, but he’s about to have to drop him anyway. The only reason he doesn’t, at least not formally, is because the film drops Gerry first, shuttering production after he walks off set in an apparent fit of delusion.

Brinkley calls Gerry a “sweet, unhappy man, burdened with that harpy,” but I have to say that Nora’s almost incandescent ire feels more remarkable than this description. She savages Gerry, and she seems to feel nothing but searing hatred towards him at this point, yes—but Eileen Ryan characterizes her much more indelibly than Brinkley does. She somehow carries a sense of selfhood with her that other bad TZ wives lack, and it’s easy to see—or at least imagine—that she has her own side of the story. Brinkley’s knowledge of what it’s like to have an unreliable client with an out-of-control drinking problem doesn’t necessarily let him understand what it’s like to have an unreliable husband with an out-of-control drinking problem. It’s possible that Brinkley overestimates her fundamental cruelty just like she overestimates his.

Besides, the story is stronger if Nora wasn’t always bad to the bone. Gerry Raigan doesn’t just want to step out of his life, he wants to step out of himself, which has more impact if we can see he’s scuppered all his chances, that he has some key faults and mistakes he needs to escape. So let’s say, hypothetically, that Gerry Raigan has steered both his career and his marriage onto the rocks and burned his bridges in both cases. The studio won’t want him back now. His once-loved wife now only wants to bleed him dry. Even his one ally in all this is at the point of drawing a line in the sand.

You can see why Gerry Raigan wants to be Arthur Curtis.

Arthur Curtis is happily married—still so in love that he and his wife are planning a little weekend away. He’s a good father. He’s sweet, funny, and successful.

He’s also fictional, a fact Arthur only discovers when—to him—reality suddenly peels back, the fourth wall disappearing to show that he’s on a movie set. (This part is nicely staged, with Arthur’s office a free-standing oasis of light and relative normalcy in a sea of dark space where a crowd of people watch him with thinly veiled hostility.) Arthur—quite understandably, from his perspective—refuses to believe that he’s an actor playing himself, and he goes off on a mini-quest to unearth some proof of his identity.

A nice thing about this episode is that we’re in Arthur’s perspective this whole time. We started with him in his world, and we were there when it got ripped away. For a while, we can follow along coming up with alternate explanations—parallel universes again, maybe? But the more we see of Gerry’s life, the more we can understand why he would want to be Arthur—and why Arthur would build all the bulwarks he could to keep from learning the truth. This is more than just a delusion, as the ending will confirm: Arthur is, in a sense, a fictional character come to life, even if the known “facts” of his existence being confined to what’s in the script. But he didn’t just spring out into reality on his own: Gerry called him up, and now he’s losing him.

The sequence of Gerry rushing back to the set, frantic to get there before everything is dismantled, is nicely done, with a good POV shot of him driving at a breakneck pace. It’s technically a little too on-the-nose that the crew has stripped the photos out of “Arthur’s” picture frames, leaving nothing but black rectangles where his wife and daughter used to be, but I’ll admit to liking it anyway.

Gerry pleads for the relief of escape—“Don’t leave me here, don’t leave me here”—and he gets his wish. As with “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” the ending makes it clear that something otherworldly has happened here: Gerry escapes somewhere other than his own mind. (And as with “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” he leaves someone behind in the process, someone who cared for him the way he was.) I like how we get him hurrying away from the lingering, haunting sounds of the set being taken apart—you can instantly grasp his reasoning that he needs to get to a place in this world that doesn’t have even a partial existence on the set. He needs to get beyond the boundaries that, at the start of the episode, clearly indicated that his life was fiction … and he makes it, with us ending on a shot of him flying west for that vacation to San Francisco.

It’s hard to get around the fact that this is a conceit the show will do better elsewhere, but this is still a solidly executed, middle-of-the-pack episode with some quiet poignancy, and the sudden movie-set reveal is pure Twilight Zone.⁴

Closing: The modus operandi for the departure from life is usually a pine box of such and such dimensions, and this is the ultimate in reality. But there are other ways for a man to exit from life. Take the case of Arthur Curtis, age thirty-six. His departure was along a highway with an exit sign that reads, “This Way To Escape.” Arthur Curtis, en route to the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Ted Post

Written by: Richard Matheson

Up Next: “Long Live Walter Jameson”

1. I am enough of an Ida Lupino person that Duff, to me, is mostly “Ida Lupino’s husband,” but he had a long career, mostly in smaller movies, TV shows, or smaller roles in bigger movies. Wikipedia leads me to believe he might have gotten higher-profile work if not for the Red Scare. ↩︎
2. Mother to Sean, Chris, and Michael Penn. She had a long enough career that I’ve seen her in both this and shows like CSI and Men of a Certain Age, and, unsurprisingly, she also got a lot of film work, including in movies starring one of her sons, like I Am Sam and All the King’s Men. ↩︎
3. We’ll see him again in “I Sing the Body Electric,” not to mention numerous AHP and Alfred Hitchcock Hour episodes, but he was a frequent guest star in a lot of TV from the 1950s-1980s, and he also showed up in several great films like Sweet Smell of Success and The Apartment. ↩︎
4. Gotta say, though, this movie seems incredibly boring. ↩︎