SPOILERS–plot description in spoiler boxes.
So I’m watching the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi channel, and the famous episode Eye of the Beholder comes on. This is one of those episodes that everyone knows the plot to, even those who’ve never seen it. A brief plot description would typically go something like this:
[spoiler]A young woman is in the hospital with bandages covering her face, talking to a doctor. She apparently has had a grotesque appearance that the doctors have been attempting to treat, and this is the final chance to make her normal.
A crowd gathers around as her bandages are removed. They recoil in revulsion. It didn’t work. The camera moves in to show the woman is a beautiful young woman with a flawless face, and the doctors and nurses are the ones with a grotesque appearance. They live in a society in which our standards of beauty are reversed.
[/spoiler]
This is how most people who haven’t seen it recently remember it, and is the standard interpretation. As far as it goes, it’s correct. But it completely misses the point. This episode uses the big twist to sneak in it’s moral message.
The Twilight Zone had two basic types of stories, twist ending stories and morality plays set up as allegories for some aspect of society. The ones that are best remembered are those with the twist endings. This one is remembered that way.
The thing is, it has a big twist at the climax, yes, but it’s not a twist ending. The story goes on for a good bit following the big revelation.
[spoiler]The dialog between the docter and the woman at the beginning is important. It sets up the ending. This is the eleventh and final opportunity for the woman to have her appearance corrected and live a normal life. If it doesn’t work, there’s another solution that the doctor leaves unspecified, but the woman indicates she knows what it is, and it terrifies her.
After she’s revealed as still disfigured by the community standards, she tries to run away, but is caught and taken to meet a (by our standards) attractive young man. She’s repulsed. She’s told she can go to live in a community up north with other people of her kind.
I have more than once read an interpretation of this that said roughly that we’re supposed to be struck by the irony that, if we were in her situation, this would be better than living in a community where everyone is a freak.
No, no, no. This is completely wrong. First of all, if we were in her situation, we’d be terrified because we’d have internalised her society’s standards of beauty. The irony of the reversed standards of beauty is a storytelling technique used to enhance and at the same time disguise the moral message. Make the standards of beauty the same as ours, and it’s easy to see what’s going on.
Second they stop trying after eleven tries to repair her, but then they must stop. This is saying that if we can’t “fix” you by making you just like us, we don’t want you with us.
The community up north where the woman will be “allowed” to be with others lke herself is nothing more than a euphemism for a prison camp for freaks. The powers that be don’t care about her well being at all, they just want her to be gone so that they don’t have to be uncomfortable around her. She’s likely going to be miserable all her life and will never come to see that she is attractive or see others like her that way, because she’s accepted the judgement of others that she is unfit.
The story is Serling’s way of saying that our society tends to ostracize those who are different from us merely because they are different. By reversing the standards of beauty, Serling makes what would have been a story about physical appearance more universal. It could be about anything that makes one different from society’s accepted norms–physical appearance, race, sexuality, religion, political beliefs, etc.
It’s an indictment of the personal predjudices we harbor over superficial things, and how that pushes us away from each other in the name of normalcy.[/spoiler]
This is what makes this episode one of the greats. It’s not the twist, which is indeed one of the best, or the message itself–some of the message shows could be heavy handed preaching–but how the twist is used in service of a bigger message. This message has some personal significance to me, which may make me a little less objective, but then again no interpretation of a work of art should be completely objective. I beleive that it works so well on both levels that that elevates it above most of the other fondly remembered episodes.
Room for One More has a great twist, as does To Serve Man, but that’s all they have going for them. Eye of the Beholder gets it all right.
