WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15 @ 5:30pm EST:
DECONSTRUCTING THE TWILIGHT ZONE #4: “A World of Difference” webinar via NY Adventure Club!
The Twilight Zone, the 1959-64 CBS science fiction/fantasy television series, created by one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century, Rod Serling (1924-75), is considered by generations of TV critics and viewers alike to be one of—if not the—greatest television series of all time.
Utilizing the benefits of the varied subject matter and settings afforded by its anthology format, Serling’s Twilight Zone used the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres to tell incisive stories that dealt with the social and societal issues of its time. In doing so, Serling and Co. created some of the most indelible half-hours of filmed television drama ever made.
One of those half-hours was the Twilight Zone season one episode “A World of Difference,” written by science fiction and fantasy luminary Richard Matheson, one of the triad of main writers of the series that included creator Serling and horror/fantasy author Charles Beaumont. The idea of an actor believing he is the character he’s playing, as played out in “A World of Difference,” is both surreal and Brechtian in its fourth-wall breaking, self-referentially meta mise-en-scene. It’s ur-Twilight Zone, because writer Matheson asks the metaphysical query central to the very concept of the series itself, in Serling’s voiceover intro: “How thin a line separates that which we assume to be real with that manufactured inside of a mind?” And the episode’s existential ending is one of the most difficult Twilight Zone endings to parse, to intellectually untangle—thereby making it, by default, one of the series’ greatest episodes.
So join New York Adventure Club and pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, Visions from The Twilight Zone and The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone) as he deconstructs “A World of Difference” via discussion and dissemination of clips from the episode, along with stills, behind-the-scenes material, and collateral images and ideas culled from both the episode’s time, and our time, so that even the most ardent aficionados of The Twilight Zone will feel as if they’ve seen “A World of Difference” for the first time!
TIX: bit.ly/4lwNJ4k
CAN’T make it LIVE? Buy a ticket so you can watch a video recording of the webinar for 1 week!