"Ring-a-Ding Girl" (1963), written by Earl Hamner, Jr. Directed by Alan Crosland, Jr.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE was always inconsistent. Its great episodes remain powerful and beautifully-crafted to this day, but the quality of the rest veered from mediocre to downright painful.
A primary strength and weakness of the series is Rod Serling. Many of his episodes become sermons on the hatefulness of human beings; others depend on a final moment twist that undermines any point the story might have made. This is why, for me, his best episodes avoid any twist. "And When The Sky Was Opened," for example, relies on nothing more, and nothing less, than a relentless march towards doom.
Elsewhere, in stories by Serling and his other TWILIGHT ZONE writers, the twist does no damage because it changes nothing about the fate of its people ("The Midnight Sun"), or because the twist appears halfway through the story, which then explores the implications of that twist ("In His Image"). But one story that seems at first to rely on a twist, employs, instead, a delayed revelation of context -- a context that cannot be explained.
This episode, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" by Earl Hamner, Jr, caught me off guard when I first watched it decades ago, and works even more for me today.
Many commenters online have complained that the story makes no sense. I disagree; I would argue that if the supernatural existed, we should not expect it to follow our expectations of causality, nor should we expect the supernatural to conform to our notions of time. What makes "Ring-A-Ding Girl" so haunting for me is that it relies not on causality, not on the consistent passage of time, but on consistency of character.
The protagonist of the story is an actress who, like so many people who perform to crowds, has a public and a private face. Here we see both: the false bravado of the public face, the confusion, the anxiety of the private face. Apparently baffled by what is going on, this actress begins to improvise, and the results of her decision become clear only at the story's end.
In the wrong hands, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" could have become a sentimental, consolatory script. Instead, I find the story honest and sad, and its final shot of the protagonist both eerie and heart-breaking.
Even if we could never understand the supernatural, we might still have the freedom to respond to it in our own fashion, for evil, for good, as ourselves. This would seem to be the point of "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and for me, it makes perfect sense.
"Nightmare As A Child" (1960), written by Rod Serling. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.
Very few TWILIGHT ZONE episodes actually scare me. "And When The Sky Was Opened" never fails to scrape a nerve, but another episode that unsettles me is "Nightmare As A Child." As a ghost story that deals less with the supernatural than with the psychological, it uncovers a sense of dread in its down-to-Earth aspects of lost memory and life-long stalking.
It also veers away from the disappointment of a final twist. Most viewers will understand what is going on within five minutes; I suspect that Serling knew this, and so he relied not on a twist, but on a mid-story confirmation of what the viewer has already grasped. This confirmation allows the story to move beyond its ghost elements into a more disturbing tale of psychopathology, with no lapse of tension.
One of the biggest challenges of this approach is to find an effective ending. While I do feel that Serling could have dreamed up a stronger finale, I can accept the one offered here as appropriate to the story and to its implications. Elsewhere, the episode benefits from its acting, its blocking of action, its direction, and especially from a quiet score by Jerry Goldsmith, whose music oscillates between deceptive gentleness and sinister evocation of a threat that lurks in the background while waiting to strike: a description that applies well to the whole episode.
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