The Twilight Zone, S1E24, "Long Live Walter Jameson"

Opening: You’re looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours of dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive. … In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn’t come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.

There is nothing particularly wrong with this episode, but I find it thoroughly unsurprising.¹ The inevitable unfolding of a storyline is fine—pleasurable, even—when it can evoke a sense of tragedy or satisfaction, or when it has enlivening, colorful characterization, but “Long Live Walter Jameson” falls flat. Its performances are uniformly solid, even strong, but they’re not exciting. The episode is just sort of … there. If it has a central fault, it’s that the only character in it who makes a meaningful choice with consequences is a character we don’t get to focus on. If this were Laurette’s story, it would gain a lot more energy and effectiveness.

It would also help if the story weren’t introduced as a nightmare, since that sets up a sense of menace that the episode never pays off. It suggests a far more sinister Jameson than we ultimately wind up getting. Walter Jameson (Kevin McCarthy²) is weak, selfish, and—because the plot demands it—wildly foolish, but that’s about it. He’s far from the stuff of nightmares.

The episode is a love quadrangle of sorts. There’s Jameson, the crisp, square-jawed, deep-voiced history professor³; Samuel Kittridge (Edgar Stehli⁴), his colleague who has watched Jameson go from a man slightly his junior to a man who looks like he’s from a younger generation; Susanna Kittridge (Dodie Heath⁵), Samuel’s daughter and Jameson’s fiancée, who exists and behaves exactly as the plot demands, an object to be condescended to, micromanaged, traded back and forth, and excused from the room so the men can talk; and Laurette Bowen (Estelle Winwood⁶), the vindictive and now-elderly wife Jameson left behind as she aged and he didn’t.

There could be promising emotions here, but I find that the storytelling choices kneecap the emotional momentum at every turn. For example, Kittridge has the most narrative force when he’s Jameson’s antagonist, the man standing between him and the ongoing cozy pattern of his immortality, when he’s the archetypal father saying he’s not going to let Jameson ruin his daughter’s life … but then the episode detours for a while into him trying to get Jameson to give him the secret to immortality instead. (Jameson can’t, because he doesn’t actually know it.) “I’m concerned about you marrying my daughter, but also, while you’re here, mind sharing the secret of your success?” is understandable from a human perspective but not great fuel for drama.

Susanna’s lack of agency also hurts things, because the suspense of the episode, such as it is, is about her heart and happiness: should Jameson end things with her now? Should he tell her the truth and let her choose? (Yes.) Will he marry her and then inevitably leave her, as he has the others? But it’s all about the choices the men around her make: whether Jameson will tell her the truth, whether her father will tell her. She just goes along. Her father tells her to go upstairs and study, and she does, only coming back down when she has to dramatically overhear something. Her fiancé tells her to pack her things so they can get married tonight, and she does that. There’s no sense of anything human inside pushing back, no sense of what will be lost if Jameson takes advantage of her.

There are good bits, however. I genuinely like the scene of Kittridge slowly drawing the truth out of Jameson, and I like the symbolism of it happening over the board in their ongoing chess game. Stehli is good at wringing some pathos out of the sad inevitability of aging: him comparing his hands to Jameson’s and noting that twelve years ago they looked much the same is a good and very human beat. I like the specificity of using real-life Civil War photographer Matthew Brady as a plot point. There’s some good dialogue here, inevitable and knowing:

“Time marches on.”

“For some of us.”

“I thought if a man lived forever, he’d grow wiser. But that isn’t true, is it?”

“You just go on living. That’s all.”

(Unfortunately, Stehli is also asked to pull off crying out, “I’m not a rose, I’m not a stone, I’m a man!” which is less good.)

We even get our most interesting bit of Jameson-waffling in this scene, when he has the chance to give himself a kind of alibi—Kittridge specifically asks him if he had a grandfather who served in the Civil War!—and he passes it up. On some level, he must want to be found out … but once he is, it doesn’t actually change anything. It doesn’t spur him to leave. He doesn’t provoke Kittridge into killing him, and he doesn’t decide to finally kill himself. He springs the trap just … for the relief of talking about it, maybe? Again, it’s very human, but it’s not very satisfying in the context of a half-hour series where you need a certain snappy dramatic purity.

Since the characterization and decisions aren’t usefully distilled for the plot, I find it harder to forgive the fact that other things are, especially when they lead to mind-boggling decisions. Why on earth would Jameson change identities without moving away from the area where he’d lived as married man Tom Bowen? Why would he ever chance exactly what happens here, with one abandoned wife seeing her successor in the newspaper’s engagement announcement? Go to a different town, Walter!

Like Kittridge, Laurette unhelpfully has her motivations split in a way that lessens the power of both. Again, complexity is great, but when it’s poorly, choppily managed and when the scope of the story doesn’t allow for it to be more developed, sometimes it’s better to go with simplicity: I think it would have more of an impact if Laurette’s focus were revenge/jealous or “you can’t go on hurting people,” not both, and certainly not both back-to-back, as if they were interchangeable. I would personally prefer “you can’t go on hurting people,” since Jameson such a milquetoast presence that I find it hard to believe he would engender years and years of passion.

In any case, Laurette shoots Jameson, and Kittridge discovers him as he’s dying and all the accumulated shows are beginning to show on his body. His rapid aging is a very well-done effect, a combination of both good makeup⁷, good camerawork, and good acting (especially via Stehli’s reactions). I even like his body collapsing into dust, in theory, but unfortunately, Kittridge and Susanna finding his empty suit on the floor with piles of dust where his head and hands should have been is an awkwardly comedic visual. At least it leads into the outro, which is much more thematically appropriate than the opening.

On “A World of Difference,” I said that it was a perfectly fine episode that suffered in comparison to other, better TZ episodes on the same subject; to some extent, that’s also true of “Long Live Walter Jameson.” This episode trades in themes that will be handled more poignantly and potently elsewhere. But I do think this is weaker in its own right. “A World of Difference” simply had more heart. (Maybe I just respond to Matheson more than I do Beaumont.) We do have a little bit of a slump in this part of the season—but we’ll still hit some of my series favorites before we get to season two.

Closing: Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.

Directed by: Anton Leader

Written by: Charles Beaumont

Up Next: “People Are Alike All Over”

1. It’s lasting cultural legacy is probably being one of the influences on Sinners, and to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what Sinners takes from it, beyond eventually bringing an immortal figure face-to-face with a now-aged figure who knew them at a much younger age, and that’s a staple of these kinds of stories. ↩︎
2. McCarthy always strikes me as being firmly in major actor territory, thanks to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a handful of lesser-known films like Nightmare. He’s left a footprint on the culture, but I don’t think you could call him a full-blown movie star or even a more indelible character actor. Sadly, I think he was just a little too square for either role. His lower levels of charisma work great for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where he needs to be as normal as possible, but they don’t get the job done here. ↩︎
3. The personal diary of an Ancient Greek immortal entangled in the American Civil War is not necessarily a reliable guide to the feelings of the ordinary residents of that time and place! That doesn’t come into play too much with the bit Jameson reads aloud to his class, of course, but there’s a narrowness and a lack of curiosity to Jameson’s approach. (To be fair, 99% of his teaching practices are governed by what’s helpful for the plot.) Rely on testaments other than your own, Jameson! Engage with the people who actually belonged to that era!
   There’s something a little bittersweet about the fact that Jameson originally seeks immortality because there’s so much to know, but by the time we meet him, he’s not seeking out new ideas at all, just going through established patterns of marriage-and-abandonment and spending his professional life studying his own historical footprints. ↩︎
4. Stehli had a small-scale but worthy career. He seems to have done more on the stage than on screen, but I’ve been meaning to see The Cobweb. ↩︎
5. She split her time between TV, live theater, and the movies, with small parts in films like Brigadoon and The Diary of Anne Frank. ↩︎
6. We last saw her in the AHP episode “There Was an Old Woman.” ↩︎
7. The same techniques from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! ↩︎