Where is everyone? The first episode of Twilight Zone addressed atomic anxieties

One of only two Twilight Zone episodes directed by Robert Stevens, a veteran television director (he directed 44 episodes of Gifts from Alfred Hitchcock)—the other being the fifth episode of the first season, the immortal “Walking Distance”—who should be considered one of the greatest directors of the series, as he would still define the graphic, well-framed and fluid camera style and the unique black and white look , with a full range of gray tones, from The Twilight Zonethis is the equivalent of film noir on television. He even chose the great film noir cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who won an Oscar for his work on one of the most famous film noirs, 1944. Laura, to the lens “Where is everyone?” (A long time ago Twilight Zone Cinematographer George T. Clemens participated in the second episode and would win an Emmy in 1961 for his work on the series.)

And the episode’s moody, multifaceted original score, by the esteemed Bernard Herrmann (whose film scoring career debuted in 1941 with Citizen Kane, and remained Hitchcock’s favorite composer for his biggest films, while continuing to compose Twilight Zone episodes throughout its five seasons), would also raise the bar for the stream of great soundtrack composers who would follow Herrmann in The Twilight Zoneincluding future Oscar winners Jerry Goldsmith and Leonard Rosenman.

The final scene of the first half of the episode combines all of the aforementioned elements into a stunning sequence that director Stevens orchestrates to perfection: Ferris staggers out of the deserted town’s police station after his unnerving experience inside his cells and begins running into toward the cameraman, who follows his zigzag path, echoed by Herrmann’s quirky score, until Ferris’s face is in full frame as he breaks the fourth wall by looking directly at the camera and shouting a meta: “Where’s all the stuff?” world?!?! ”

Preparing for the episode’s climax, Ferris runs down the stairs of a movie theater, and Stevens plays with our sense of perspective by making him run straight into his reflection in a mirrored wall, destroying it and breaking our balance as well. Leaving the theater into the neon-lit night, an exhausted Ferris runs distraught through the lamp-lit streets, and LaShelle’s moving camera appears to hover over him as he runs aimlessly, heightening his sense of dislocation from the reality of his living nightmare. .

Ending on a Dutch angle of Ferris desperately pressing the button on a traffic pole repeatedly while repeatedly begging for “someone” to help him, Ferris becomes the first of many Twilight Zone characters who would go so far as to pray to God to rescue them from their terrible Twilight Zone dilemmas. And then Stevens shocks us with a jarring jump into a dark screening room lit only by the film projector’s conical white beam (which rivals Orson Welles’ similarly startling cut to the “News on the March” newsreel footage in the first act of Kane), highlighting the faces of military personnel calmly monitoring astronaut Ferris’ delirious ordeal in the isolation tank on closed circuit television. Minds were blown in 1959 and ever since.

A true pilot episode, and perhaps the greatest in television history, as it included practically all the existential and surreal motifs that would be associated with The Twilight Zone to come – isolation, fear of the unknown, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem very real – “Where is everyone?” is ultimately a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from himself, which would prove to be the defining existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th century, a time when “the pit of fears of the man and the apex of his knowledge”–the atomic bomb – first coexisted.