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Author Nick Parisi will be in conversation with Schumer about his definitive biography, Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination, as well as Nick’s latest, America's Twilight Zone: How Rod Serling Foreshadowed the Age of Trump. We’ll screen “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which details aliens’ deceptive manipulations of earthmen’s fear and greed to further their conquest, and its sister episode, "The Shelter," in which Serling zeroed in on the greatest post-war fear, the threat of nuclear war, depicting suburban neighbors at a dinner party. We’ll cap off the night with a screening of a rare one-hour Twilight Zone episode of Serling's from 1963 that presciently forecasts the Age of Trump: “He’s Alive,” starring the legendary Dennis Hopper.
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" unravels once-friendly neighbors into an animalistic mob, following mysterious blackouts of electricity on their block. The sun falls and the episode becomes a kind of proto-Night of The Living Dead as they metaphorically eat each other alive — an equally scabrous indictment of paranoid McCarthyism, the epitome of the “we have met the enemy and they are us” approach: “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves,” said Serling. “All we need to do is sit back and watch.”
—The Twilight Zone, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (Season 1, Episode 22. Originally aired March 4, 1960)
In the sister episode of “Monsters," Serling’s third-season “The Shelter,” Serling zeroed in on the greatest post-war fear, the threat of nuclear war, depicting suburban neighbors at a dinner party who, after hearing a radio warning that bombing was imminent, degenerate, Lord of The Flies-like, into a raging mob clawing each other over access to the lone fallout shelter — the host’s (in an uncomfortable allusion to the January 6, 2021m insurrection). "Rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light,” observed Stephen King in his Danse Macabre.
—The Twilight Zone, "The Shelter" (Season 3, Episode 3. Originally aired September 29, 1961)
Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.
—The Twilight Zone, "He's Alive"(Season 4, Episode 4. Originally aired January 24, 1963)
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About Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination:
As Roy Lichtenstein brought comic book art into the fine art world, Arlen Schumer has brought it into the commercial art world. His unique comic book-style art appears in advertisements and other editorial and promotional instances.
Schumer's background in graphic design, art direction and copywriting in New York City advertising agencies, combined with his expertise and enthusiasm for the comic book medium and its rich history, produces captivating award-winning imagery recognized worldwide. He has been a long-standing member of the Society of Illustrators.
As a published author and pop culture historian, Schumer has been equally recognized. His book The Silver Age of Comic Book Art won the Independent Book Publishers Award for Best Popular Culture Book; ABC’s 20/20 named him “one of the country's preeminent authorities on comics and culture," and the BBC said his works on The Twilight Zone were “a cut above the rest, full of passion and erudition." Comic Book Artist Magazine called him “one of the more articulate and enthusiastic advocates of comic book art in America.” His other books are Visions from The Twilight Zone and The Neal Adams Sketchbook.
This event is free to attend. Arlen Schumer's new book, The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone, is available for preorder through registration for an additional fee.
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