It’s a Good Life
By Marc Sidwell
October 2021
Series: The Twilight Zone, season 3, episode 8
Airdate: November 3, 1961
They tell us we’re living in a golden age of TV, but how many of today’s shows get you rooting for a child’s head to be smashed in with a poker? Back in 1961 “family entertainment” really meant something.
This Rod Serling classic, adapted from Jerome Bixby’s short story, has been inspiring audiences and artists for more than half a century. It’s been referenced in pop songs, sampled by Michael Jackson, spoofed by The Simpsons, and as recently as 2017 it helped inspire the much-praised opening episode of Black Mirror’s fourth season: “USS Callister”. The original is still better, richer and darker than any of its offspring.
The premise is straightforward. Peaksville, a small town in Ohio, has been cut off from the rest of the world. Peaksville has no electricity, no automobiles, no machines, no trade. All have been taken away by a monster who now keeps the tiny community in terror. He can read their every thought and emotion. So everyone continually smiles and says all is well, even as they live in fear. The monster will do terrible things to them if they aren’t happy. His powers are close to godlike, except that they are exclusively destructive. He is a six-year-old boy, called Anthony Fremont.
It sounds preposterous, but to watch it play out is bone-chilling. Anyone who has spent time in a modern office and watched the senior management tiptoe around a woke new hire who could have them fired for misgendering a pronoun will recognize Peaksville immediately.
Serling’s adaptation is a touch more optimistic than the original story, in that his Fremont does not have the power to raise the dead, only to send his enemies on a one-way trip “to the cornfield”. This suggests a way out: at some point Anthony will have killed them all. But both short story and teleplay are careful to show us Peaksville not just as a place of terror, but of decline. Anthony cannot make anything new or mend anything broken. He can only cripple and mutilate and kill. If he raised the dead, they would still be rotten. And here is the point where the episode achieves genius, and transcends its own bleakness.
Black Mirror is often brilliant, but its techno-cynicism is corrupting if taken too seriously. By contrast, “It’s A Good Life” dares to acknowledge that technology and trade help renew the world and make it better – by showing us what happens when they are taken away.
The historian Bryan Ward-Perkins notes that before the fall of the western Roman Empire, it wasn’t unusual for an Italian peasant to eat off a fine pottery bowl made in northern Africa. After the empire collapsed, communities across the west were reduced to using coarse, local substitutes. This is Peaksville’s situation. There is no sentimentality here about handmade, artisanal goods. They have to grow their own food, or starve. The only television is a mockery created by Anthony which everyone has to pretend to enjoy. There are just five bottles of real whiskey left in the whole village.
When Anthony’s victims are sent out to the cornfield, it is an image of anti-fertility. The soil gets fouler even as the existing stores of goodness dwindle. Peaksville is a trap for its tyrant as well as his slaves.
As a result, “It’s A Good Life” hides a perversely hopeful message. Autarchic tyranny can kill, but it cannot survive. Anthony is a kind of king, of a court that gets smaller and more ramshackle every day. They bow and scrape to him, to avoid being burned alive, but there is nothing new being invented or exchanged. One day he will be alone and his cornfield will be full of skulls. He cannot use terror and isolation to make his people happy.
But “It’s A Good Life” is always an episode, rather than an essay. The performances draw you into the town’s desperate effort to stay human in a totalitarian environment. Meanwhile Bill Mumy, as Anthony, reminds you just how horrible you could be when you were six, and how awful you might have been with no one to keep you in check.
“It’s A Good Life” stands at the beginning of the Sixties and the end of the Fifties. It is still in touch with the post-war commitment to preserve a civilized inheritance through self-discipline. And it is happy to acknowledge that the benefits of free enterprise and commercial civilization reach across society, lighting up rural towns as much as cities. But it senses too that something else is on its way. In a few short years, Herbert Marcuse will write his essay “Repressive Tolerance”, and Bob Dylan will sing, “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command”. Before the decade is out, American students will be campaigning to burn libraries to the ground, and chanting for the end of western civilization.
Far more horrible, on the other side of the world a man called Pol Pot will shortly start to formulate his dream of a self-sufficient agrarian society free from all foreign influences. Before it fails, his doomed dream of Peaksville will send two million people to the cornfield.
The Cambodian bloodbath is over, but Anthony Fremont’s power to horrify remains fresh.
