scioscribe

Nightmare as a Child (Season 1, Episode 29)
Directed by: Alvin Ganzer
Written by: Rod Serling
Based on: N/A

Opening: Month of November, hot chocolate, and a small cameo of a child's face, imperfect only in its solemnity. And these are the improbable ingredients to a human emotion, an emotion, say, like—fear. But in a moment this woman, Helen Foley, will realize fear. She will understand what are the properties of terror. A little girl will lead her by the hand and walk with her into a nightmare.

Note: this review contains discussion of subtext related to child sexual abuse.



Spoilers abound. There's an episode summary available here.

There are only a handful of Twilight Zone episodes that don’t veer towards the fantastic, supernatural, or science fictional, but at least two of them—“The Shelter” and “The Silence” are among my favorites. “Nightmare as a Child” isn’t in the same league, unfortunately. It’s obvious, oddly structured, lacking in emotional resonance, and far too talky.

I suspect that part of the problem stems from what “Nightmare as a Child” is likely talking around: the subtext is far more memorable than the actual text, much as Markie (Terry Burnham) is more pugnacious, vivid, and knowing than the older Helen (Janice Rule). It’s hard for me to watch this episode and not come away with the sense that what Serling’s really writing about is Helen’s buried memory of sexual abuse … only it was 1960, so the Official Explanation is the ludicrously overcomplicated, overchoreographed murder of Helen’s mother.

But the total estrangement between Helen and Markie, her child self, hints at trauma that went on over a much longer period, trauma that couldn’t be avoided unless Helen buried entire years. She didn’t just block out the experience of witnessing her mother’s murder; she forgets Markie entirely, to the point where she addresses her child self as a complete stranger.

The most damning implications of abuse, however, all come from Peter Selden (Shepperd Strudwick). It’s been eighteen or nineteen years since they last met, Selden explains; Helen was just a little girl back then, he was already a grown man, old enough to be working for her mother and, as it turns out, cooking the books.

“I had quite a crush on you,” Selden says, and the episode stops dead in its tracks. Run that one by us again, Selden? There’s no quasi-innocent, plausibly platonic explanation for that phrasing—and then Selden makes it worse by noting that he lived in their building back then. He continues to drive the implications home in a variety of ways, showing her a photo of her as an “extraordinarily beautiful” (his words) little girl—one he’s apparently held onto for years and habitually carries around, despite the fact that he’s tracked Helen’s life relentlessly and so has no need to, say, keep the photo to try to guess if he’s targeting the grown-up version or not. It’s more than enough to make your skin crawl.

It also feels like the only explanation for the bizarrely clumsy exposition-drop about Helen’s mother. Rod Serling was an effective dramatic writer, and I have a hard time believing he thought the most natural choreography for this murder went like this:

Selden tries to persuade Helen’s mother to push his embezzlement under the rug --> Helen’s mother runs into her daughter’s room --> Selden bludgeons and strangles the mother there, waking young Helen/Markie --> Selden goes to eliminate the only witness --> Markie screams bloody murder --> Selden flees.

You could just as easily have it be:

Selden tries to persuade Helen’s mother to push his embezzlement under the rug --> the argument wakes Helen, who comes out of her bedroom right as the argument escalates to murder --> Selden moves to kill her --> she screams --> he flees.

What makes the choreography awkward is the introduction of Markie’s bedroom, and that location is extremely, creepily important: “That night it was me in your bedroom,” Selden says. Again, you could just as easily say, “That night it was me in your apartment” or “That night I was the one arguing with your mother,” but presumably Serling places the emphasis exactly where he wants it.

The unnecessarily elaborate murder scenario goes hand-in-hand with the unnecessarily specific “I was cooking the books” explanation. It feels like it’s just there to obscure a simpler, darker sequence of events—one, perhaps, that started with Helen’s mother catching Selden in her daughter’s bedroom.

As a final note, this subtext also makes the ending have more resonance. Helen once again hears Markie singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and she goes out to the stairwell to see if her helpful hallucination of her childhood self has persisted. It hasn’t: it’s just a different little girl singing to her doll, and Helen tells her that she has a lovely smile and not to ever lose it. Her attempt to protect this other child’s innocence has more weight if the threat to it is broad and horrifyingly widespread, not “I hope your smile is never collateral damage in an attempt to cover up white-collar crime.”

On some level, I appreciate the earnest attempt to address this kind of trauma at all in a 1960 prestige show. But I still don’t actually like it. Adult Helen isn’t much of a character—her role mostly boils down to confusion and denial, so her main job in the episode is to—sometimes accidentally, sometimes with unconscious intent—not know what’s going on. It’s a fundamentally passive part, with the lion’s share of her character’s agency manifested in Markie.

I do like Markie, whose wise-beyond-her-years knowingness is enjoyably unsettling (a nice palate cleanser, given the grimmer aspects of the episode). Early on, she feels like a menace in her own right—and of course she does. Helen doesn’t want to remember, and Markie is frustrated with it. The complex antagonism between them gives her a reason to sometimes be gleeful and mocking of her older self, almost contemptuous of Helen’s denial, and I think all that works nicely.

Selden works less well. He’s creepy enough, but almost overbearingly so. He so obviously means Helen ill that it’s actively annoying that she takes so long to realize it—it’s more or less clear to us from the start that Markie is young Helen, but we can forgive Helen for not guessing that she’s been talking to her own repressed memories. But this guy! This guy who keeps asking you all these questions about whether or not you remember anything about your mother’s death! Something is clearly wrong here, Helen!

Plus, present-day Selden is hurt by a lack of realism. In a way, he’s as much of a specter of the past as Markie is, and I think the episode would be more interesting if he, too, wasn’t literally there but was instead a visual representation of Helen thinking through what happened. A chance glimpse of someone who looked like her mother’s killer awakening dueling manifestations of her past self and past trauma would be kind of cool, and it would—in a TZ-ish sort of way—make more sense than the more “grounded” answer. Selden claims that when he found out that Markie couldn’t remember that night, he knew that someday she would, so he kept tabs on her for years so that he could pop up and kill her if she ever figured it out. Selden, it strikes me that this is not an effective use of your time. For one thing, she only remembered because you were lurking around in the background, and for another … you’re an unrepentant murderer who was already going to kill the child witness of your crime. Why do you decide to wait around for years, risking everything, because it would be a little unfair to kill her before she inevitably remembered?

I can make that make sense, either by fleshing out Selden’s ongoing obsession with her—as implied by him carrying the picture around—or by just consigning the whole thing to metaphor and ignoring the literal explanations completely. Twilight Zone episodes often opt for storytelling that works metaphorically even if it’s a little weak literally, after all. But it normally does it better than this, with enough weirdness to make the story feel like a kind of parable and without explaining the supposed logic to us at length. Here, it doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t even feel like buying into it would increase the story’s emotional weight.

In conclusion, I can only turn to the hilarious reaction of the cop who listens to the doctor explain the episode, i.e., that Markie was just in Helen’s head the whole time: “Weird. Really weird.”

Closing: Miss Helen Foley, who has lived in night and who will wake up to morning. Miss Helen Foley, who took a dark spot from the tapestry of her life and rubbed it clean—then stepped back a few paces and got a good look at the Twilight Zone.

MVP(s): Terry Burnham as Markie. What can I say? I love a good unnerving child, and Burnham’s performance is fun.

Personal Tier: Weak to Average.

Up Next: A Stop at Willoughby.