The Twilight Zone Diaries, episode 21

Mirror Image

originally aired: February 26, 1960
written by: Rod Serling
starring: Vera Miles, Martin Milner

"Millicent Barnes, age 25. A young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes, not given to undeu anxiety, or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fancy. Like most young career women she has a generic classification as a 'girl with a head on her shoulders.' All of which is mentioned now because in just a moment the head on Miss Barnes' shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her sense of reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes, who in one moment, will wonder if she's going mad."

classification: drama

story: A young woman believes she has gone mad when seh sees her doppelganger in a bus station. Later, a man who tried to help her sees his own double.

my summary: YES!!! Very, very creepy. I love it. This is definitely one of my favorites. Music and filmwork made this quite a scary display. So what, do all the creepy twins just happen to hang out at this bus station? Evil grins when the CTs are discovered are horrifying (and priceless). A definite trend is developing here in all the episodes: SCARY= GOOD. Can't go wrong freaking the audience out, can you, Rod? WELL DONE.

"Obscure metaphysical explanation to cover a phonomenon. Reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it parallel plaines or just insanity. Whatever it is, you'll find it in The Twilight Zone."

Billy, we're good, but this is getting ridiculous......

I realize now the reason I never saw this when it came out or years later on tape: not one of my friends would have had any interest in this movie. None of them watched "Dirty Harry" with their fathers, either, I suppose. I thought it was very entertaining. Yes, I realize it is cheesy. Yes, I realized approximately 3 minutes in (with the help of the score and those ridiculous drums) that this was indeed, St. Elmo's Fire with cowboys. I popped onto IMDB and started looking up reviews, of which there were few. I read a few of the sequal's and then went back to forming my own opinion. My opinion is basically this: SOMETIMES CHEESEY MAINSTREAM POP CULTURE IS GOOD FOR US. I mean, it was released in 1988. What really was going on then? Regan to Bush? uh, Iran Contra? The war on drugs? One might argue that a film like this is bubble-gum garbage, but I kind of think in a way, that was the point. The script was blunt and bad. The lines were shouted and mostly yee ha-ed throughout (all I could think of when they yelled, "REGULATORS!!!" was the unfortunate, "A-booga booga booga, ah-ah-ah...") But what else was the youth culture going to watch? Had there even been a "western" marketed to us before this? It would be a few more years before I actually sat myself down and hung in through the bad dubbings of Sergio Leone and even longer before I could stomach John Wayne, but those films weren't meant for me then anyway. At least this would have created an interest in a wider scope of cinema, perhaps paving the way for me to appreciate other, more well-done westerns as I gained a bit more maturity?

When we watched John Wayne in Silberman's class, many of the people just absolutely FREAKED when we had to discuss it the next day. WHY DID YOU MAKE US WATCH THAT? IT WAS SO BAD!!! IT WAS SO CHEESEY! IT WAS SO BORING!!! THAT GUY IS A TOOL!!!! on and on and on. I kind of liked it all. I got my introduction to westerns from The Twilight Zone (which I also watched with my dad), and John Wayne, Vera Miles, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Van Cleef really took me back to all of that.

My main point in ranting about this film is that it was relatively harmless, cheesy, minimally violent, and GOOD! It did not need to be deeply philosophical or woo us with a bunch of distinctive edits (save for a few slow motion death-falls at the end, Pekinpah would be appropriately dismayed) because it was doing what all action movies aspire to do: give us a hero. Sometimes this is what the public needs, something simple, something cheesy. A fairy tale! Isn't that why 24 has such a wonderfully broad and obsessive following? We don't want reality. We want someone who is going to save us, no matter how ridiculous the scenario. EVERYONE NEEDS A BAUER.