Twilight Zone Episode: Number 12 Looks Just Like You

This is one of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes and I thought for a change of pace I would share it with my readers.

The Plot (from Wikipedia)

In a future society, all young adults go through a process known as "the Transformation," in which each person's body and face are changed to mimic a physically attractive design chosen from a small selection of numbered models. The process gives everyone a beautiful appearance, slows deterioration due to age and extends a person's lifespan, and makes the recipient immune to any kind of disease.

The motive of the Transformation is social harmony. According to Professor Sig, a psychologist with the Transformation service, "Years before, wiser men than I…saw that physical unattractiveness was one of the factors that made men hate, so they charged the finest scientific minds with the task of eliminating ugliness in mankind."

18-year-old Marilyn Cuberle decides not to undergo the Transformation, seeing nothing wrong with her unaltered appearance. Nobody else can understand Marilyn's decision, and those around her are confused by her displeasure with the conformity and shallowness of contemporary life. Her "radical" beliefs were fostered by her now-deceased father, who gave Marilyn banned books and came to regret his own Transformation years earlier and committed suicide upon the loss of his identity.

Despite continued urging from family, doctors, and her best friend, Marilyn is still adamant about refusing the operation. She insists that the leaders of society don't care whether people are beautiful or not, they just want everyone to be the same. Her pleas about the "dignity of the individual human spirit" and how "when everyone is beautiful, no one will be" have no impact. After being driven to tears by the inability of anyone to understand how she feels, she is put through the procedure and (like all the others) is enchanted with the beautiful result.

Dr. Rex, who operated on Marilyn, comments about how some people have problems with the idea of the Transformation but that "improvements" to the procedure now guarantee a positive result, thus indicating that there may be modifications made to the mind as well. Marilyn reappears, looking and thinking exactly like her best friend Valerie. "And the nicest part of all, Val," she gushes, "I look just like you!" The last shots are of her, admiring herself in the mirror and smiling.

A clip

 

Thoughts

The whole point of science fiction in general and the Twilight Zone in particular is to get you to see the world from a different perspective with all sorts of possibilities either wonderful or terrible.   From when the episode first aired in 1964 to the present we can see how our society is moving ever closer to the society depicted in the story.  It is a question of degrees and with each passing year our world increasingly resembles Marilyn’s. 

The author of the Wikipedia article noted, “It is believed that dating, looking sexy, sex, and marrying or mating is done often, (Val comments on how everyone marries 10 or 12 times). The society is probably sex-centered, since Lana, Val and Marilyn (after being made sexy) are only wearing some leggings and tank swimsuits.”  Since the dawn of humankind women have always used sex and beauty to their advantage.  Here we have a sort of hyper-feminised culture where this natural tendency is elevated to an extreme at the expense of everything else.  Likewise, many of the men portrayed are also feminized.

Notice in the clip the authors that Marilyn had been reading and Dr. Friend denounced as illegal smut.  Most were Romantic poets.  Now what if, just what if, there really are secret masters.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw reading great writers, or certain philosophies, or understanding history and politics.  What if they discovered that if you give people enough bread and circuses that such knowledge becomes deemed unnecessary in fulfilling their desires --  to be beautiful, sexy, popular, and to have fun.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw or burn such ideas, but just make them irrelevant so that people chose not to read them.  Sure, you could have the intellectuals, but they would be weirdoes tolerated by society. 

The thing is, during the Nineteenth Century, Charles Dickens went on a sold-out international lecturing tour and Lord Byron was a rock star.  Sure, Charles Dickens did not sell as well as the authors of the penny-dreadfuls, but he was popular nonetheless.  He was not quarantined as an “intellectual” as if he was different from everyone else.  Going to a Dickens lecture was mainstream entertainment.

In Celtic faerie tales, the sidh or faeries would cast a spell, usually over themselves, so that they appeared radiantly beautiful to humans.  This deception was called a glamour.  This Scots Gaelic word has moved into common modern usage to mean beautiful, alluring, or having sex appeal, but the word still retains its meaning of illusion and deception.

What motivates a teenager?  All humans need food, shelter, clothing, and property and humans often judge each other according to how well they can acquire these necessities of life.  It is not just about having these things but also having the knowledge and character traits that facilitate such success.  In the real world knowledge is power and a benefit.  But teenagers do not live in the real world.  Their needs are provided for them.  They are judged by the adults by their grades and by their peers by their popularity.  These involve two entirely different skill sets.  Among the teenagers, the geek is the outcast and the beauty gets the crown, but as adults traditionally the geek gets the high paying job and the beauty usually has to marry well to survive.  The value of glamour is a glamour, a passing illusion.

But what if adult life was more like high school?  What if the State took care of you in your adult life as your parents had when you were a teenager.  Wouldn’t the adult world become more like high school where the air-headed bimbo had a high social value because she was hot and the intellectual was an outcast?  I’m not suggesting that society has reached that point, however there is a very large segment of the population conditioned to that way of thinking and it is portrayed often in the mass media as desirable. 

I have read arguments among the feminists regarding a split in their ranks.  One group sees sexuality as female empowerment and another as female denigration, but lets face it, women get more status in society, even among other women, by being sexy than by being a stodgy feminist intellectual.  In his book, Letters From the Earth, Mark Twain supposes that if by magic the old men denouncing sexuality were made young for the day that they would spend that day trying to get some.  I suspect the same could be said of stodgy feminists.

In this episode we discover that Marilyn’s father had committed suicide after the having the procedure.  This was before changes were made to the mind as well as the body.  You can imagine why this might be necessary as the mind is essentially rejecting the new body, just as the body might reject a transplanted organ.  The mind has to accept the notion that being beautiful and sexy is the highest of values in order to fully appreciate the new flesh, but in the end it is only an illusion.

I can see how the benefits offered by the transformation can free mankind from the tyranny of the flesh.  I’ve discovered as I have grown older that my mind has not changed.  As a single man with no offspring my lifestyle has not really changed since my youth.  What has changed is my body.  Like gender dysphoria  where a person believes themselves to be inhabiting the body of the wrong gender, we find our minds trapped in a body of the wrong age.  The mind is young and nimble but the body is old and with that outward appearance comes the social reactions and judgements.  The actions of a young man that society my deem cool and sexy are viewed as creepy when done by an older man.  So age forces you to grow-up and to adopt other values more in keeping with reality.  Would eternal youth produce a society of teenagers where sexuality, status, and fun become the most important things in life?  Perhaps.

Rod Serling closes the episode with these words:

Portrait of a young lady in love - with herself. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which after all, is the Twilight Zone.