ABSTRACT
Today we often take for granted the operation of what Henry Jenkins describes as “convergence media,” that is, the ready “flow of content across multiple media platforms” (2) such as film, television, the internet, and increasingly our cell phones, with an attendant blurring of distinctions between the media forms. It is, after all, part of our daily experience, something offered—and sold—to us at every turn in what Paul Virilio describes as the “media nebula” of postmodern society (Landscape 69). Yet in the early days of American television, particularly as the new medium sought to establish its own identity, “convergence” was hardly considered. Rather, the film industry for quite practical reasons repeatedly trumpeted its difference from the upstart television while offering various technological enhancements that television could not match, such as widescreen formats, stereophonic sound, Technicolor and other color systems, and 3-D imagery. At the same time, television seemed rather similarly intent on distinguishing itself from its older rival. As John Ellis has shown, it very quickly “developed distinctive aesthetic forms to suit the circumstances” (111) of broadcast presentation: an emphasis on short, discrete narrative segments; a greater reliance upon dialogue than in the cinema; a kind of dislocated viewer gaze (or what, by way of contrast, he terms a “glance”); 1 and an image that Ellis argues “is characteristically pared down” (112). It is this emphasis on—or rather, deemphasis of—the image, particularly in favor of a reliance on dialogue, that I want to address here in the context of one of television’s golden age shows and most important science fiction entries, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. By focusing on its often-overlooked image qualities, particularly what we might for convenience simply term its cinematic nature, we might better appreciate the contribution this sf series made to the eventual convergence of film and television and, in the process, more accurately sketch a significant part of early film and television dynamics.
