Rod Serling's Nightmare at Ground Zero (1953).

Every major talent starts out small.  That's just the way things work around here.  Stories like The Iliad and Odyssey or an epic like Beowulf aren't the best demonstration of what the normal trajectory of artistic talent is like because while Homer managed at least two great works to his name, the story of Grendel and the Dragon all seem to have been complete one-offs.  We don't even have the original author's byline, or biographical details that might help tell us who the Beowulf Poet was, what his artistic temperament was like, what was his imaginative life of the mind as a creative talent, and what sort of early influences went into the shaping of how that creative gift would later be expressed for all time.  These are the questions that any half-way competent critic has to ask if they want a fuller portrait of the artist as a developing talent.  A careful and competent approach to digging up the facts of the artist and their art always tends to tell the same story: big things have small starts.  Even the mighty Charles Dickens began his career with just a handful of slice-of-life newspaper essays that showcased a series of snapshots of life on the streets of Victorian England as they happened to catch his fancy.  He'd hock these wares to whichever newspaper would take them just to find lodgings and food for the night, and his first book was a collection of these articles titled Sketches by Boz that he mostly had to help create out of his own pocket.  It was the success of this sketchbook that made other journals publish his first efforts at tackling the short story format, and these were later gathered into The Pickwick Papers, and things really took off from there.

The point is the kind of trajectory just described for Dickens is sort of the template for the way all genuine talent develops, or else fails to.  Part of the package deal that comes with this growth of the artist's mind is the occasional discovery that sometimes our favorite fantasists began not just in places, but also in the sort of modes or genres of storytelling that we might not have expected from.  It can be a surprise, for instance, to realize that someone like Gene Roddenberry really didn't emerge full grown as someone whose mind was already reaching for that fabled, Final Frontier.  Instead, when we first meet the future Great Bird of the Galaxy, he's just this retired airline pilot who's swapped his wings and flyer's license in for a badge with the LAPD, and whose speech writing for his chief get the attention of department liaisons for Jack Webb's Dragnet series, and so Gene gets his first start in TV Land with Police Procedurals, then Westerns, and even some Comedy Variety Shows, until at last he begins to construct an idea for his own Science Fiction oriented program, and at last NBC buys his pitch (web).

It's the same pattern of start out small, build up big.  The same thing happened to Rod Serling.  Just like Roddenberry, the inventor of the Fifth Dimension doesn't begin his creative life in the realm of the Fantastic, but rather the world of gritty social drama.  It's very much as Gordon Sander writes in the preface to his biography of the mind behind the Zone.  What Sander has to say here is very pertinent to the background context of Serling's early career, which is part of the focus of this review.  For that specific reason, it's worth quoting the biographer at some length here.  "A child of the 1930s, when social concerns and realist aesthetics dominated the arts, Ser- ling was an early devotee of Norman Corwin and the other angry young men who populated the airwaves during the Roosevelt era. Like Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Orson Welles, as well as Clifford Odets and the agitators of the legitimate stage of that era, Serling fervently believed that the theater of the air, like the other literary arts, in addition to being entertaining, should be both relevant and provocative. Serling saw the dramatist’s role in American society as that of an agent of change and a spark to controversy. Or, as he put it in a speech to the Library of Congress in 1968: “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time." With television, Serling was able to fulfill the writer’s role as he defined it.

"And menace the public’s conscience he did, during television’s golden age, with such powerful plays as ‘“‘The Strike” and ““The Rack,” his antiwar diptych; ‘‘Patterns,”’ his no-holds-barred look at the corporate jungle; ‘“‘Requiem for a Heavyweight,” his stomach- turning take on the fight game; in both ““A Town Has Turned to Dust” and ‘Noon on Doomsday,” his plays on prejudice; and ““The Velvet Alley,” his semi-autobiographical critique of the television industry itself. And just as Corwin’s ethereal masterworks helped to legitimize radio drama as an art form, so did Serling’s taut, powerful, and wonderfully visual works, along with those of such fellow video agent provocateurs as Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal, and Robert Alan Aurthur, help make TV one of the lively arts of the 1950s.

"While Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee took Broadway on an absurdist, nonrealist track, Serling and his fellow video litterateurs made the television theater of the late 1950s the real spiritual successor of both radio and the legitimate stage of twenty years before. Unfortunately, Serling’s Ibsenesque bent did not sit well with the network tastemakers. At the start of the fifties, when TV had only just begun its explosive growth, and was still an accoutrement of the educated classes, there had been room for high populist art like “Marty” and “Patterns” on the airwaves. However, the medium proliferated, and sponsors and network officials began to worry about alienating and losing their audience. As a result, this small window of creative opportunity began to close, and TV playwrights were faced with increasing censorship from timorous ad agencies and broadcasting executives.

"Serling...complained loudest. In 1961, Television Age called him the industry’s leading critic. As Andrew Sarris has written: ‘‘Television was the biggest sociological game in town, and Serling wasn’t giving it up without a fight.’’ Unfortunately, it didn’t do TV or Serling much good. By the end of the decade, with the exception of Playhouse 90, Serling’s proscenium and bully pulpit, the dramatic anthology show, had entered extinction, giving way to filmed western and detective shows. Most of Serling’s comrades had long since left television for other less censorious and more “artistic” media, but Serling refused to abandon video: he believed in television. And—unquestionably— Serling liked the limelight. Television (contrary to what another biographer has written) was not only the medium best suited to Serling’s talents, it was also the one best suited to his intense, quirky personality.

"And so Serling continued to badger and probe and moralize— and entertain—as the guiding Aesop of The Twilight Zone. As media historian Peter Kaplan recently has written, "On The Twilight Zone...the nightmare side of American life was opened up. The national soul was the subject, and its real villains were the selfish, the shallow, the rapacious. If there was a real golden age of tele- vision, its single commercial offshoot, never to die, was The Twilight Zone. It loved wit and had wonderful actors and a patina of writing that is television’s answer to the short story (xvii-xix)".  What this helpful bit of background context means is that Serling's creativity can be divided into two differing yet allied aspects.  The first is the one we're all familiar with.  It's the artist as the Twilight Man, Televisions own precursor to what we now think of as the Urban Fantasy and/or contemporary Horror narrative, with an occasional bit of Science Fiction thrown in for good measure.  The other side of this same coin is the one Sander talks about.  This is the part where Serling gets to showcase his skills as a straightforward dramatist without the usual genre centric trappings.  Instead of a beleaguered protagonist haunted by ghosts or aliens, we're instead treated to the sight of a boxer struggling with his personal life and career.

Instead of ghosts on Mars, we see a fresh made and naive young corporate executive as he gets a brutal schooling in the fact that being promoted to the upper class means spending the rest of your swimming around in a shark cage, and hoping to God you're not next on the menu.  The point of such dramas is simple and declarative.  They all count as rages against a very old machine.  The same one that tries to manage a person's life by cementing their worth as a person to second class status, and that will then crawl across hot coals just to make sure things stay that way.  In these moments, Serling resembles nothing less than an early small screen version of Martin Scorsese.  Just like with the auteur of the Mean Streets, the other side of Serling's artistry is concerned with the various mindsets that cause chaos and suffering in modern American life.  What makes Rod's explorations of these same themes stand out from Marty's is that he'll choose to lighten things up with what's best described as a form of proto-Spielbergian humanism on occasion.  Like with Taxi Driver Serling doesn't flinch away when taking a good look at the dark side of the mind of man.  Unlike Scorsese, however, Serling always left room for enchantment into the mix.  He seems to have believed that even the darkest corners can have just a little worth and light to them.

The story under discussion here today is somewhat unique in that it almost acts as a snapshot of the artist at a crucial moment of transition in his career.  It's almost like seeing Rod's mind at work as it begins switching gears from the mode of Scorsese to that of Spielberg.  When Television's Angry Young Man starts to think in terms that will one day inspire one of his fans to become the director of films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.  Both of which films carry several degrees of resonance with the kind of narratives Serling once helped to tell.  Before all that came about, however, Rod had a simple writing assignment to fulfill.  He was commissioned to write a half hour script for a TV show known as Suspense.  It was a crime drama centric show, yet it's focus also allowed a certain amount of room for the Gothic macabre.  Such is the case with an obscure Serling tale called Nightmare at Ground Zero.

The Story.

Submitted for your approval.  Portrait of a mid-life crisis in a town that's about to turn to dust.  That's the situation of one Mr. George Vance (O.Z. Whitehead), a mild mannered manufacturer of men, women, and children.  All of them designed with intricate care and skill down to the last detail.  For longest time now, Mr. Vance has felt a closer relationship to the dolls and mannequins he has devoted most of his professional life to, often at the expense of other people.  Case in point being his wife, Helen (Louise Larrabee), a normal, average woman who now finds herself in a marriage bound for nowhere.  This is something she's made very clear to her husband on numerous occasions, often straining his nerves to the breaking point.  Tonight, however, is when things are about to change.  For you see, the beleaguered Mr. Vance has just received the offer of a lifetime.  He's been contacted by the very military personnel in charge of the Yucca Flats Nuclear Testing Ground.  They've heard of his skill in making people from nothing but raw material, and would like him to assemble a series of dummies to help populate a town that doesn't exist.  An entire city block that's meant as a real world stand in for what might happen should the world decide to lose its mind for good and all, and drop an atomic device dead center into the middle of Main Street, USA.  This job offers Mr. Vance a double opportunity, of sorts.

After years of walling himself off from the rest of the world with friends and family of his own creation, Mr. George Vance suddenly realizes that his latest assignment might also offer up the chance to be rid of the one woman he once thought might understand him.  Tonight, Mr. Vance, the dollmaker, will put into motion a plan to take Helen out of his life altogether, the results might just creep into outer edges...of The Twilight Zone.  

Conclusion: A Forgotten and Pioneering Snapshot of Things to Come.

The trick with the career of Rod Serling is that he's someone who has won a top slot in the pop culture sweepstakes.  He's become one if those evergreen artists whose work manages to carve out the same revered shelf space for himself that's often reserved for our most cherished storytellers.  That's all well and good, in the strictest sense.  It means he's been able to prove that the true test of good writing isn't how old or new you are.  Instead it all rests on the quality of the words that end up on the page.  Serling's ongoing longevity in the memory of pop culture, then and now, is proof enough that even the old timers can have their works last forever if they're able to capture the public Imagination in any of the best possible ways.  This appears to have been Rod's accomplishment, and there's nothing much to complain about so far as his legacy goes.  The singular catch here is that pop culture tends to have a very one-dimensional mindset.  It's a way of thinking that's able to recall what The Twilight Zone is, and even the name of its creator.  It just has a hard time remembering who he was.  If the continuing presence of the Zone in the minds of audiences is a testament to Serling's quality as an artist, then the inability of most faces in the aisles to recall any details of the artist's life outside of just this one show says a great deal about the limitations of our curiosity as readers.  The problem with such a one-dimensional approach is that there's no way it can be anything like an accurate snapshot of the full creative picture.

Now granted, this is perhaps never going to be the sort of thing that matters to most audiences.  I guess this makes my problem, and those of other like minded individuals, more than anything.  I tend to belong to that one segment of the viewers who insists that a careful attention to an understanding of the full history of the life of the artist is the only way to have as complete a picture of the actual Art and its meaning.  That's very much a minority worldview, at least from what I can tell.  Even if that's the case, it's pretty much the only way to place a work like Nightmare at Ground Zero into its proper context.  It's only by doing this that the nature of this overlooked teleplay begins to make sense in terms of its place in the growth of Serling's art.  It was written in the year 1953, as a simple commission assignment for a now defunct Golden Age TV program known as Suspense.  If there are any Old Time Radio buffs out there, and that name sounds kind of familiar, then that's because the anthology show in question is in fact that spin-off, or outgrowth of a program that was originally syndicated on the radio, before it ever got picked up as part of the then nascent moving image industry.  For those who don't know what I'm talking about, entertain conjecture of a time when you had to listen to the Idiot Box, before you were ever able to watch televised images off it.  There was a time when podcasting was all we ever had.

For the longest time, it was the technology of Radio that served as the ruling form of media in an pre-digital era.  Suspense was one of the shows from this time that (for a little while, anyway) was able to make the transition from Theater of the Mind to the analog visual production house.  What makes Serling's role in this story interesting is that it all took place at an early moment in his career.  His first few major breakout successes were still a year or two ahead of him, and even then it wasn't for the type of Fantastic narrative he's most famous for now.  Instead, it was with a pair of slice-of-life dramas, Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, which together form a pair of precursors to films like Oliver Stone's Wall Street, and Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.  It was as a writer of gritty, social realist dramas in the vein of Stone and Scorsese that Serling first gained prominence in the world of showbiz.  That was all further up the timeline, in 1955 and 56, respectively.  It's this earlier, overlooked effort, possibly churned out on the spur of the moment, that stands out as what many will now take as the most important signpost for what was up ahead on the road.  Out of all the writings from this point in Serling's career, is this simple half-hour psycho drama which contains a lot of the seeds that would later become a fixture of his most lasting creative endeavor.  All of this can be found in the episode's plot.

The story itself could almost be said to revolve around a collection of tropes that would later get not just one, but a rather an entire series of fuller examinations as part of the Zone's regular repertoire of tropes, themes, and character analysis.  In this case, the actual plot revolves around a lead who could be said to epitomize one of the show's mainstays.  The character of O.Z. Whitehead's George Vance is one of those Serling protagonists who finds himself walking a moral tightrope not just between the right and wrong sides of the law, but also between sanity and madness.  It's clear he thinks of himself as someone who has found his own personal oasis as the maker of both miniature and life-size dolls and mannequins, a niche that he's been able to carve out on his own, and realize his hopes and dreams on his own terms.  This all sounds fine on paper until the other aspects of his life are thrown in, such as the face he struggles to hold down a viable living, which is strange because as someone good at designing mannequins, you'd expect he would be enough demand so that his hobby would provide a comfortable living for himself and his wife.  For some reason, however, George won't accept this most reasonable of options.  Instead, the script makes clear the main character has the sort of personality that likes to disappear into his skill set to the point where it soon becomes clear this isn't just a natural hobby.

Instead of treating his talents as a normal source of profitable Inspiration, George tells us with just his gestures and expressions that his most secret wish is to create an entire world all of his own.  He would make it in his own image, one that's made entirely of dolls, mannequins, and puppets on strings.  His fondest, unspoken wish is that he could then simply disappear into such a world, and then everything would, presumably, make sense.  It's clear George is meant to be Serling's way of exploring the nature of unhealthy artistic obsession.  He's someone for whom the natural modes of craftsmanship somehow come out all wrong, even if he's good at his job.  The reason things refuse to work out right for George is because of the unspoken yet implicit reason that he doesn't want to do anything that would make a contribution to the real world.  Instead, he wants to vanish into his own private obsessions.  This in turn offers a macabre explanation for his skills at making dolls and puppets.  It's a reflection of what he wishes the people around him were like.  It's a manifestation of his secret wish to be able to control others, because that appears to be the only way that life can even start making any kind of sense to him.  In basic terms, then, Serling has given us an Eisenhower Era version of Clarke from The Backrooms.

This time, however, even with a high budget in place, there's just no way for Rod to create that level of high tech artistry, because that level of special effects hasn't been invented yet.  Besides which, his exploration of this same material is also tied up with another of the author's fears.  This would be the threat of nuclear annihilation.  One of the major plot points for Nightmare at Ground Zero is contained in its very title.  A vital crux of the story revolves around an upcoming A-Bomb test being made at Yucca Flats, which was an actual real life location where the military carried out demonstrations of America's nuclear arsenal.  To give you an idea of just how insane things could get on that front, some of these tests were held within eye and ear shot of casinos in Vegas, and sometimes whenever an actual atomic bomb was about exploded in the desert nearby, word of this would be shared with the local area gambling resorts, so that visiting patriots could bear witness to America's military might in action.  I have seen photos and footage of casino patrons as they gather to watch the atomic blast take place.  Some of them are even going around in bathing and beach gear because the event is viewable from the casino's swimming pool, and the management was obliging enough to haul an actual craps table into the middle of the pool itself, and so you've got all these gamblers in bathing gear giving into their own addictions while in the background a countdown is going off and a mushroom cloud explodes nearby.

I'll swear I'm making none of this up.  Some idiots thought this kind of thing was a good idea.  Meanwhile, here I am in the present day, staring at all this in quiet horror and there's just one simple question on my mind.  Which direction is the air traveling in on that day?  Like, was it moving away from or toward you?  Because that's the difference between life and death in a scenario like this.  I don't even want to guess or know about how many civilians put their literal lives in danger just for the sake of the American thirst for spectacle, because that's nothing less than what was going on back then.  And if you're wondering how on any possible green Earth people could be so stupid?  Well, the answer seems to be that this was all a sign of just how little we knew about the hazards of nuclear radiation back then.  Since it was such a new scientific frontier, it seems as if even the scientists involved were still on a learning curve with what they had on their hands, sometimes literally.  As a result a lot of the necessary precautions that we now take for granted still had yet to be put in place because they still didn't understand the full extent of the hazards of radioactive fallout!  Time and a lot of cruel subtractions taught everyone different soon after, yet at the time of this Suspense episode, only a handful of people were smart enough to sound the alarm, Serling included.  As far as the Zone Man was concerned, there was also the added threat of mutually assured destruction in the air, to which he was dead set against.

Rod was one of those concerned citizens who did his homework, and came away horrified at the destructive potential of nuclear weapons.  This was a fear he shared soon enough with the wider world at large, as growing fears of nuclear winter helped to spawn a much needed backlash against the testing of such weaponization.  It got to the point where these same Cold War anxieties found their ultimate expressions in genre defining films such as Dr. Strangelove, Planet of the Apes, and A Boy and His Dog.  It also doesn't hurt to point out that Serling had a hand in crafting the script of at least one of the films just mentioned, meaning that this was a thematic concern that stayed with the artist for most of his career.  So this forms the second aspect of the plot for Nightmare, and the curious thing about the episode is that (for me at least) all of these ingredients manage to come together well enough to work.  On further re-watching, what becomes clear is the way Serling means for us to understand his unstable protagonist in relation to the scientists responsible for the construction of the Bomb.  One portrait is meant to symbolize another.  As far as Rod's concerned, what people like Robert J. Oppenheimer have in common with his make believe puppeteer is not just that they are too emotionally detached from the concerns of real life.  It's that they seem to have made a very specific and deliberate judgement call.

What unites the fictional George Vance with men like the real life Oppenheimer is that they use their hobbies as a means to hide away from the world, and then come to view it as a more preferable alternative to actual human social interests.  He sees them as these often pathetic, more or less hyper-fixated man-children who either won't or don't understand how the world really works, and so they seek shelter for themselves in a limited sphere of existence and influence.  The problem with these life choices for Serling rests in their results.  The trouble with men like Vance and Oppenheimer is that their actions seem to have this inevitable backlash effect.  It seems as if the problem with such a small sphere of influence is that its always capable of causing harm to others, sooner or later.  It's the sort of thing that can happen in either big or small ways.  The extent of the damage done can range to no more than the confined and deteriorating mental spaces of an abusive marriage, to a far as the nuclear devastation of an entire people with the flick of a switch or the push of a button.  It reminds me of something Stephen King once observed in the pages of his non-fiction study Danse Macabre.  He claimed that it was the Myth of Narcissus, along with that of Apollo and Dionysius, that frames the Horror story.

This is a concept King has picked up from the work of literary critic Irving Malin.  It was in the pages of his New American Gothic study where Malin claimed that "The true Gothic...is essentially and continuously subjective, presenting reality as a distorting mirror (viii)".  In other words, the keynote of the major characters in Gothic fiction is that they are all malignant narcissists at heart.  Malin shows how the narcissism of these characters drives them so deeply into their private worlds that, much like the troubled toymaker at the heart of Serling's script, "they become totally isolated (ibid)".  Also according to Malin, it is these same Gothic figures who "use their narcissism in their attempts to destroy" what might be summarized as any and all necessary units "of human organization (ix)".  This is a crucial choice that George Vance makes in the course of Serling's half-hour Gothic drama.  In King's own terminology, while he likes to see and portray himself as a misunderstood Apollonian artist, a tender-hearted soul in an uncaring world, the real truth of the matter is that this is all just a mask.  Something the protagonist uses to hide a very bitter, and even dangerous Dionysian heart.  This can be seen in the way he more or less prostitutes his gift, not in the service of life oriented interests, but rather in the urge to war and destruction symbolized by his willing collaboration with the military complex.

His attempts at normalcy can't hide the unspoken eagerness the main character has for allowing  his creations to be wiped off the face of the Earth.  The hidden subtext here being that leaving his mannequins in the path of the Atomic Bomb is his way of expressing what he might very well like to do to actual human beings in general.  This air of passive-aggressive menace that lingers about the character soon switches into very active gear as George soon hits upon the idea of leaving his own wife stranded and unconscious on the same bomb site where the bomb will be tested.  If she should come to just in time, her last few minutes will be one of terror as she's surrounded on all sides by the lifeless faces of the dolls and puppets that act as a reflection of her husband's insanity.  One man's warped and twisted view of what the world and people are, right before everything goes white and then black.  It's a scheme that George quickly decides to put into action, in a sequence of events with all the air of a macabre EC Comics narrative.  We see the dangerous light bulb go on in his diseased head as his wife insists on accompanying him to the bomb site because her nerves can't stand to be alone.  She decides to take some pills for her nerves, and its implied George upped the dosage in some ways to knock her out, yet not kill her.  He wants the brainchild of the troubled Mr. Oppenheimer to do that job for him.

The combination of all these ingredients together makes for one of the most gripping of Serling's early efforts.  On a surface level, it's possible to claim that Rod is working with a familiar setup here.  The idea of a solitary lone nut, or Gothic protagonist, who plots to rid himself of a loved one in order to further his own selfish, narcissistic schemes was already something of a cliche by this point.  If I had to take a guess where it all started, then it might be in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.  It's just possible that particular works like "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "The Black Cat" are the literary great grandfathers of the format Serling has to work with here.  Both scenarios revolve around villain protagonists who conspire to rid themselves of an opponent over what they perceive as a sense of injured merit.  In each case the plain truth is that we're dealing with a narrative told through the eyes of madness.  It's one of the major achievements that Poe was able to give to pop culture as a whole.  He showed how it was possible to portray clinical and dangerous insanity from an engaging first-person perspective.  It's a technique that future artists like Hitchcock took to heart, and from there it went on to become something a defining trope for the glory years of the EC Comics Tales from the Crypt series.

In fact, one could almost make the case that what Serling gives us here amounts to little more than a typical EC setup, complete with the usual cast of characters.  You've got the Gothic Narcissist main lead, an innocent woman in the hands of madness, and a convenient situation which supplies both the murder weapon of choice, and all the cover-up the murderer will ever need.  The one interesting wrinkle that Serling delivers into this otherwise familiar mix is the way he handles the ending.  Most readers of Poe, or longtime Crypt-Keeper fans might be a few steps ahead of everybody else here.  You've probably already sketched out a handful of ways in which a scenario like this can go, and it all amounts to a series of variations on the same idea, and it all revolves around the question of what's the best sort of Gothic payoff here?  Well, for what it's worth, Rod has his own ideas on that score.  He takes things in his own particular direction with this Suspense episode, and to his credit, it counts as one I didn't expect or see coming.  So here's the deal.  I can imagine some watching this early pre-Zone effort, and just maybe coming away disappointed with the final results.  It's just possible to see where they're coming from, as well.  It's possible to theorize how a more Tales from the Crypt style ending can go.

The way this could happen is that you have George carry out his crime to the letter, and for a time it seems like he's gotten away with it.  Then it ends with a Gothic, gut-punch twist.  The way it could work is to have all the mannequins he's made come to life and begins to first stalk and then attack their creator, and the final ghoulish panel will reveal they're being led by the vengeful spirit of the murdered wife, who is now a charred and smoking, eyeless corpse.  A classic EC approach ending with a shot of the twisted doll maker backed into a corner as the puppets, mannequins, and the corpse of his wife all advance on him, and you can just tell that a classic George Romero style gory takedown is about to happen.  As I've said, it's possible to imagine why so many other fans out there would want to see something like that, especially in light of Serling's own use of these same tropes later on in his own work.  What I think needs to be kept in mind here is that what we've got on our hands is a snapshot of the author in a moment of transition.  Two things begin to jump out at a viewer today when looking at this TV episode with the benefit of hindsight.  The first is that it's clear we're looking at a story written by someone who fits the description of a genuine fanboy.  Already a lot of that trademark Zone weirdness is on display in all its glory.  The key is that it exists in a very primitive form here.

We're seeing nothing less than the creator taking his first, tentative step into the 5th Dimension with this episode, and it's clear he's already started to master a great deal of the material that he would one day handle like a seasoned master of the genre.  All of that is still in the future at the time this forgotten Suspense offering aired back in 1953.  So of course this means everything is going to be a little rough around the edges, here and there.  We're seeing the author's talent in its most embryonic form.  The flower has begun to sprout out of the ground, yet it's still waiting for full bloom.  In addition to this, it's also possible to tease out some of the logic of where Rod's mind was at while composing what amounts to an overlooked series test pilot.  The biggest factor for the writer going into this episode was the threat of nuclear testing, coupled with the dangers of how this weaponry can be used by unhinged minds.  The themes of "Nightmare" are pretty obvious on that score.  At the same time, the thing that separates Serling's artistry from that of the William Gaines and the EC Comics stable of writers and illustrators is that he always seemed more willing to leave the door open for a sense of hope.  The same thread of humanism runs through both the Zone and the Crypt, despite how weird or ghastly the proceedings may get.  It's just that Serling places a greater emphasis on the lighter side of things with his fiction, whereas the EC Comics gang sort of had to remain true to the general thrust of the Crypt-Keeper's anthology.

I'm not saying this to make a value judgement on who is better here.  That can't be done.  In the end, both the Zone and the Crypt have to stand as equal talents in my estimation, with no particular favor granted to either side.  They represent more like two halves of a coin or equation, in that respect.  The final sum is incomplete without either of them.  It means that Serling's gentler brand of macabre humanism has as much of a right to sit at the table of pop culture as the Crypt-Keeper's over-the-top style of gory antics.  Besides, there may also be times when even die-hard EC fans wish for the volume to tune down a bit on occasion.  When that happens, Serling's more measured pacing and approach can come off like a welcome breath of fresh air.  All of which is to say that while some come away wishing for more from the denouement of Nightmare at Ground Zero, I myself am forced to give it a passing grade.  That's because while it might not be to everyone's taste, it's not the same thing as making a fatal mistake.  Instead, it's possible for me to say that Serling plays fair in the end.  He doesn't confuse poor and muddled writing with being "edgy" and "subverting expectations", nor does he create an ending that clashes with the tone of all that's gone before.  Instead, he's taken the modern Gothic protagonist, and uses him to explore the dichotomy and skewed priorities of his own modern American society.

In the end, the character of George Vance proves himself to be one of Serling's tightrope walker characters.  He represents one of the three categories that Rod tended to view and sort his cast list into.  The bad ones are the types who always have the best ironic twist endings reserved for them.  It's those moments where Rod comes closest to the shared formula with EC Comics.  His good characters, on the other hand, tend to be more poignant and sympathetic.  In these moments we find Serling ploughing the field which will one day be taken over by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, and Don Bluth.  Stories where the focus is on underdog characters who, while they may have their flaws, it's still more than possible to route for them, and hope that they succeed.  These characters tend to be Serling's dreamers and idealists, and its clear they embody a lot of the values he held for all his life.  It's the third category where things get interesting, because these types of stories always tend to revolve around protagonists for whom the moral calculus can go either way.  The outcomes for these types of stories always hinge on matters of choice, where the main lead can either make or break their chances.  They can let their own worst impulses get the better of them, and become villains.  Or else they decide to let the angels of their better natures do the talking, and give themselves a second chance.

What makes the character of George Vance so interesting is that he starts out sounding like one of Serling's villains, and yet he makes a final choice in the end that places him in the third category of the Tightrope Walker, and it's this moment of decision that leads to a fittingly ambiguous ending, which leaves the door open to the possibility that he might be able to turn his life around, yet that's a question that remains deliberately unanswered.  Choosing instead to linger on the appropriately apocalyptic imagery of that now archetypal image of the 1950s, the nuclear mushroom cloud.  It's the final scene in the entire script, and it ends things on an appropriately ominous note that leaves the audience asking itself what will we, ourselves, choose to make of our own future.  It might not be the ending some would choose, yet there are enough familiar hallmarks to it that allows us to recognize it as vintage Serling.  Besides, even if the protagonist was able to get away from the direct impact of the Bomb, there's still the question of which direction the air is moving when the fallout occurred, heh-heh-heh.  Or at least that's one final question to consider for those who still want the possibility of a more traditional Gothic ending kept open.  In the end, the most important question is whether you had fun.

The good news here is that I'm able to say I came away with two responses.  Finding out that Rod Serling had constructed a TV script that acts as a kind of proto-pilot for what would come later was a fascinating discovery that left me intrigued to learn more about where the author's mindset was at when he wrote Nightmare at Ground Zero.  The best news about all of this, however, is the second result I got out of an installment from a forgotten Horror anthology.  It turns out this story has the sort of quality to it that forces me to give the whole thing a final grade of Vintage Classic Serling.  It's a case of the Zone Man in full form, where you can tell the story's snapping and sparking on all cylinders.  The cast is just the right mixture of Gothic oddballs with enough weirdness to their personalities and surroundings to keep you glued to your seat.  The writing makes you want to know what's going to happen to them.  The pacing, meanwhile, is a welcome mixture of the slow-burn approach, where each scene begins to ratchet up the tension as it builds toward the climax.  Yet what makes Serling's efforts on this score so neat is that he's able to make the slow build-up somehow manage to race by in a brisk yet steady fashion.  It's one that never lags or has any dead spots to it.  Everything in this story is going where it needs to be.  It's a charming little crime thriller tinged with elements of Serling's familiar Surrealist Gothic ethos.

Taken as a whole, the final product amounts to nothing less than both a snapshot and prophecy of the greater achievements the artist still had ahead of him.  So far as I'm able to tell, Nightmare at Ground Zero has to amount to the first time (so far as any of us know) where Serling was able to locate and utilize that final missing component which allowed to reach his full voice as a future Fantasist.  It's the point at which the straightforward dramatist (which Serling had been up to this point) was able to tap into that other part of his psyche, the one that still had room left over for enchantment, in both its light and dark varieties.  The writer's wife, Carol Serling, seems to be the one to give us our best possible glimpse at where this side of the artist's mind sprang from.  It comes in the form of a hint she drops in the pages of Arlen Schumer's Visions from The Twilight Zone.  In terms of where her husband's most famous ideas came from, Carol notes that "Rod was,  in his own words, "unabashedly and admittedly an admirer or fantasy and horror tales. He often described himself as being in a state of "willing suspension of disbelief." His library was full of books by roe and Lovecraft, Shelley and James, and work by their "great grandchildren" published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and If (162)".  What Carol has given us here is nothing more than a snapshot of her husband the artist as a young fan boy.  It's easy to imagine Serling as part of the initial cohort of pop culture genre fans, alongside Bradbury and others.

He seems to have bred and imbibed his taste for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror from an early age, and its to his credit that he never lost any of these tastes as an adult, not even in the face of the horrors of World War II.  Thus with this overlooked TV episode, it's just possible to claim that here we see the artist trying to reach back for the first time in a long while to those old, faded memories of the kind of stories he loved to read in childhood, and seeing if he could take a swing at making them work in the then new medium of Television.  The fact that I'd have to call his efforts here a smashing success means that we're not just dealing with a well written story, but also perhaps something in the way of a forgotten pioneering effort on the writer's part.  It's not anything original in the strictest sense.  Plenty of thrillers with a Science Fictional overlay had been dramatized before in the past, and a lot of its was done on the original OTR incarnation of Suspense.  What makes Serling's big breakthrough here so notable is that it perhaps marks the first time a practitioner of the genre found out how to prove that these kinds of stories could be done in an intelligent yet gripping way.  One that would get the audience's attention, yet also be abe create a space for all of the popular genres in the new broadcast medium going forward.  It's because of all these factors that I sort of have to give Nightmare at Ground Zero a hearty recommendation.  It might just be a good way to introduce newcomers to Rod Serling and his works.