the eye of the beholder

Any Twilight Zone fans out there?

I'm a lifelong fan.  I was bred into a love of Horror and all of its relative sub-genres.  Some kids have gods; we had ghouls.  Rod Serling's work was not as much about blood and guts, but rather, the horror of the mind.  Everyone of us harbors deep, dark fears and suspicions about ourselves and the world around us, and the Twilight Zone did a fantastic job of illustrating those very frights, in explicit detail...  In my humble (and biased) opinion.

Every New Year's Day and Fourth of July, the Sci-Fi channel runs a twenty-four hour marathon of all the old episodes.  No matter how many times I see each of them, the thrill is the same.  I mean, who isn't dying to see Shatner have a nervous breakdown because he's the only one who can see the weird monkey/monster on the wing of the plane?  Screw barbecues and bars, sign me up for that.

Anyhow, my all-time favorite episode is The Eye of The Beholder.  

Donna Douglas plays the part of Janet Tyler, a woman who has recently undergone surgery to correct her disfigured appearance. We are led to believe that her face is so outrageously abnormal that, should the procedure have failed, she will be forced to live in a protected community with others like herself.  Cast away from society.  Through a veil of bandages, she talks longingly about finally being normal, being able to rest easy in knowing that she is just like her peers, etc.  There is a painfully long unraveling of the gauze that covers her entire head, until finally... We see her: stunning.  The woman is gorgeous.  Yet, there is an air of disappointment and unrest about the grand reveal.  Oh yes.  

It's not gone well, you see.  This was how she looked all along, and the procedure was done in vain.
You think, "What the hell is going on right now?" 

And then, with a sense of perfectly dark timing, the doctors' faces are shown to you, for what you now realize is the first time....  And they look like pig people.  They're terrifying in every way.  But they are all like one another, and only she is different...  Making her the oddity. 

I've seen it no fewer than fifty times, and I shriek every time.  

Because guess what, boys and girls?  It's no tall tale.  This is how we measure what's Accepted and Tolerated right here in the Real World.  Who's to say which perspectives are sane and which are totally nuts?  The majority, that's who.  You could look up at the sky, claim that it's blue, and have no reason to believe otherwise.  But, I challenge you to spend a week with ten or so people who claim that it's actually green, and tell me how you feel by Day Seven.  You might still think that that it's blue, but you'll also think that there are no absolutes, and that some folks are fit to be tied... And that you may well be among them.  I've spent a good deal of my time on this planet feeling like a blue-sky-seer amid green-sky-proclaimers. It's both exhausting and maddening.  At the end of the day, you can fill yourself up with every last mighty conviction in the world, but if you're steadily told that you're the one who's wrong, it starts to break you down.  We can only defend so much, for so long.  Even soldiers have to sleep.

The part that I always hated about Janet, is that she truly believed that she was unimaginably grotesque, just because the world had gone a piggish way.  Didn't she ever secretly suspect that they'd flipped the script?  I have a list of questions about all of that, which I've often yelled at the TV (to no avail, I might add), not the least important of which is: "Hey Janet, are you even attracted to the pig guys, or WHAT?"  At the end of the episode, this smokin' hot guy comes to take her off to Misfit Island For Good-Looking People.  He's a freak like her, naturally, and is going to help her ease into the transition of the whole thing.  She begrudgingly goes along, and then shortly after that, Rod Serling is on the screen in that awesome suit, chain-smoking and telling us about the Dark Side of things.  As if we don't know. 

Some of us aren't sure how we ended up as the odd-men-out in Pigland.  Some of us ate the same cereal for breakfast as the other good little piggies, and can't trace our steps back to that pivotal moment where we might have left the pig pen and gone on to develop different features that would set us apart.  Some of us are sick of worrying about it altogether, tell you what.  The mirror shows what it does, and we are not one another's mirrors.

I'll say this: I may not know the correct color of the sky, or whether I'm Right or Wrong in my convictions...  But, when it comes time for me to be hauled off to The Island of Mortal Disappointments to wait it out, I ain't going.  Nope.  I'm staying on to fight for my rightful spot in whatever pig-faced reality I may be up against.  And I'm keeping the hot guy with me, too.  Take that.

~buick audra, anti-pig