Limbo by Fox Dan;

Author:Fox, Dan; [Dan Fox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5529651
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2018-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

¶ The ocean. ‘A dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.’ Also Rod Serling’s introduction to the first episode of The Twilight Zone, broadcast in 1959. Here, ordinary, unsuspecting people find themselves caught between existence and death, past and present, society and isolation.

The Twilight Zone was preoccupied with what Serling called ‘the barrier of loneliness’. In the series pilot, ‘Where is Everybody?’, a man arrives in a deserted small town only later to discover he is being observed for an experiment in solitary confinement. ‘Up there is an enemy, known as isolation,’ intones Serling at the end of the show. ‘The Hitch Hiker’ tells of Nan Adams, a young woman driving cross-country across the USA. She is unable to shake a menacing-looking hitcher who repeatedly appears ahead of her on the road no matter how far she travels. Eventually Adams learns she was killed in a car accident days earlier. The vagrant was Death. Henry Bemis is the subject of ‘Time Enough at Last’. He is a bookworm with bad eyesight, who longs for nothing else than time alone to read. Bemis becomes the only survivor of a nuclear attack – the perfect conditions for catching up on his reading – but accidentally breaks his glasses in the ruins of the town library, leaving him blind and alone.

An apple pie Everytown was the most common gateway into The Twilight Zone. Picket-fenced, lawn-sprinkled suburbs, populated with neighbours who know each other’s names. Occasionally, a big city stand-in for Los Angeles, Chicago, New York or all three at the same time. The men wore wide-brim hats and worked as business executives or scientists. The women stayed at home to raise tousle-haired kids dressed in plaid and gingham. This world was white, gee-whizz, Eisenhower-Republican. The kind of Twilight Zone that generations of artists and misfits have run away from to avoid suffocation.

In the mid-1960s, Mum, Karl and Mark lived in a small city in the west of Canada called Salmon Arm. I would hear stories of their time in British Columbia as a child, and spores of North American culture travelled with them when Mum decided to return to Britain at the end of the decade. I was too young to understand the differences between the US and Canadian culture; America was everywhere and nowhere. Far-away places in a picture book on the shelf, a hand-me-down toy car that looked like nothing on British roads. Syndicated US comedies and science fiction shows were broadcast on British television during my childhood. As Karl was away, I discovered some of these TV shows through Mark. I patched an aesthetic link between these artefacts of 1960s Americana and my family’s own experiences across the Atlantic. Mark’s refined, artist’s sense of camp irony took pleasure in re-runs of Batman, The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Invaders, and The Twilight Zone.

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