AT: In a classic Twilight Zone episode called “Midnight Sun,” a female artist faces the dreadful fate of being burnt alive in an abandoned New York City. She and her landlord remain in an apartment building after everyone else has escaped.
The Earth’s orbit has wobbled off course, and the planet is inching closer to the Sun each day. Night disappears. All waters dry up. The neighbors flee Manhattan in droves. The temperature rises steadily until they face certain death. The female painter loses all modesty, casting off all clothes but a slip as she waits to shrivel up and perish.
But then she wakes up to find that the doomsday amounted to nothing but a ruse. In fact, her dark world will freeze. Her landlady stands over her bundled in winter coats, while she lies swaddled in blankets. Snow pelts the window of her building. In reality, the Earth is drifting away from the sun, and all face death by hypothermia.
My forty-something generation remembers the fifties and sixties so condescendingly as a Stone Age of sexism, prejudice, and Eisenhowerian conformity. But The Twilight Zone remains as a testament to the artistic genius of those decades.
“Midnight Sun,” like the vast majority of the series’s episodes, pointed to a deeper truth with a timeless relevance. The human mind faces danger by managing nightmares with counter-nightmares. Cold is easier to suffer if one has plunged into a nightmare of insufferable heat.
Today’s “Midnight Sun” hangs over sexuality. This truth has become evident with the strange events of the last three years. With the Obergefell v. Hodges decision nationalizing the compulsory recognition of same-sex relationships as marriages, not only the LGBT movement, but also feminism could claim “mission accomplished.” The stodgiest and crustiest institution of America – that Supreme Court of Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson – had gazed over the heads of America’s unwashed homophobic masses and winked to the professors of Women’s Studies at Harvard and Yale.
“We’re on the same page,” Anthony Kennedy – white and male enough for Reagan – said to the purveyors of sexual utopianism. By deciding that sexual tolerance and love came as basic entitlements, Anthony Kennedy gave feminists and sexual radicals everything they wanted. They could do as they pleased and receive moral credit, social affirmation, and tax breaks for it. The power of the state served at their beck and call, available as a form of coercion to fine, enjoin, censure, and (one day soon) imprison any who could impede them.
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Why are people having all these problems with sex lately. I don’t get it. The only problems I’ve ever had with sex is getting enough of it and the screaming. I try and be quite but jeez.
I work in an industry rife with homosexual people. I work with one. I have one in my family. In EVERY case, there is more drama, selfishness, and genuine unhappiness than you can shake a stick at. Sad, really.
I can’t keep up. Still thinking about how in the hell you screw a dolphin and what letter in the LGBTXYZ salad represents that.
I think I’m AAAABALD
Adopted African Albanian albino bilateral amputee lesbian dwarf
I love those old ones! I recall KAAY little-rock Beaker street theater radio show did some stories like that too!
Bad_Brad:
“The only problems I’ve ever had with sex is getting enough of it and the screaming. I try and be quite but jeez.”
_____________________________________________
Quit dropping the soap and your screams will begin to dissipate.
😉
@TSUNAMI
A little prison humor.
Now that right there was funny !
Wow! All this time I thought she had a fever.
Oh, well … I was 7 or 8 when it came out … and dumber than dogshit (still am).
izlamo delenda est …
@Tim: She did have a high fever. That’s why she was dreaming that everything was burning up. When the fever breaks and she finally wakes up, she’s overjoyed to discover that it was all a dream. The episode ends before she finds out the awful truth.
Here it is, if you want to watch it again:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ee3q9
Vv,
Thanks. I’ll try to download it.
My lsd is like dial-up (heh heh).
izlamo delenda est …
“…The place is New York City and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it’s high noon, the hottest day in history, and you’re about to spend it in the Twilight Zone.”
STILL GIVES ME CHILLS! 🙂
Epilogue:
“The poles of fear, the extremes of how the Earth might conceivably be doomed. Minor exercise in the care and feeding of a nightmare, respectfully submitted by all the thermometer-watchers in the Twilight Zone.”