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The Twilight Zone Review: A World of Difference




By William Kozy

“A World of Difference” fits very efficiently into that genre of “Twilight Zone” episodes in which our lead character finds him or herself in a world in which everything and everybody might appear as usual but then a twist emerges that renders our hero’s identity in question. Episodes such as “Walking Distance”, “Shadow Play”, “Person or Persons Unknown” etc. come to mind. One of the tricks to make these episodes work well is for the writers to plot out a logical series of steps for the character to take–a series of actions that we would nod in accordance with as we watched, thinking to ourselves, “Uh huh, okay that’s good, that’s what I’d do to try and figure out what’s happening. Yep. Hmm. Okay so that didn’t solve it, but what if he tried to…” etc.

etc.

The other goal of such an episode is to have the lead character’s actor give a good strong believable performance, and here Howard Duff delivers the goods. With his upturned sad sack eyebrows resembling a bloodhound, he presents a sympathetic portrayal, cowed by the opposing forces such as a shrewish wife (played by Eileen Ryan), and a pressuring agent and TV director.

What happens you see, is that Duff, as Arthur Curtis, is sitting in his corporate office and after chatting with his secretary for a bit, he sits and attempts to make a phone call. Something’s wrong with the phone so he gets up in a huff to take care of whatever it was in person, and as he takes a few steps someone yells out “Cut!”. Curtis stops in his tracks and turns slowly as a film crew is revealed to both him and us, the viewers. It’s a skillfully executed shot achieved without a cut. In examining it you realize, “Oh wow they had to have removed that whole wall during his sitting and dialing the phone.”

The sound of doing that would most likely have been too noticeable no matter how daintily the skilled grips might have been in moving the whole wall, but remember, there was no dialogue going on during those moments, which would have been more difficult to dub in after removing the noisy sound of a wall being moved. Nope, the only sound being interfered with were Howard Duff’s dialing of the phone and clicking impatiently on the button. Those are very simple sound effects to add in, so the task was made very doable from a soundman’s perspective. Anyway, Arthur Curtis is absolutely befuddled upon seeing the TV crew. He is apparently, much to his surprise, an actor named Gerry Raigan “playing” Arthur Curtis. But he insists that he is actually Arthur Curtis, and he spends the rest of the episode trying to prove it to everyone but is confounded every step of the way.

It’s smoothly executed by director Ted Post, but the episode somehow received only 6 votes in my survey asking fans of the show and writers, “What is your favorite episode of the original ‘Twilight Zone’ series?” Six votes ties it with 11 other episodes for 106th through 116th place out of the 156 episodes. So what held it back? I wonder if it could be the seeming appearance of unoriginality? Did people feel, “Oh yeah yeah, seen this story before…guy wakes up and no one knows him or he doesn’t know anyone…whatever.” But while it’s true that this episode does fall into that sort of genre if I may call it that, the twist here is quite different from those scenarios.

He does indeed recognize most of the people around him as long as they are people in his Arthur Curtis world where his reality is that businessman, not the actor. So he does recognize people like his secretary for instance, even though her perspective has shifted once the worlds have collided, and she knows him now as the actor Gerry who has been portraying Arthur. And the converse scenario isn’t the same either–everyone else does recognize Arthur, only they know him as Gerry, an actor. So the scenario here remains somewhat original. I’ve been searching for something that it copies but haven’t found one yet. As similar as it also may sound to “The Truman Show” the two plots are very very different. In fact, “The Truman Show” has no supernatural element to it at all when you think about it; that storyline was a sort of con game, with a world that was based solidly in reality. Still though, you can understand why people might have felt they’d seen something like this before.

The two most truly similar plot ideas both come from shows that were on TV several decades after this one: the 1992 TV series “Eerie, Indiana” in the episode “Reality Takes a Holiday” and also a 2011 episode of the show “Supernatural”. In trying to imagine what a viewer back in 1960 felt, I bet “A World of Difference” was a real mind blower.

The conclusion poses an interesting parallel universe conundrum. When Arthur/Gerry is told by his friend Brinkley (played nicely by David White, Darrin Stevens’ boss on “Bewitched”) that the studio is dismantling the set of his office at the studio, Arthur races back there. They’ve taken away most of the furnishings, and Arthur bows his head in despair while sitting at a desk. But just then a light shines on him and he awakens to find that his “real” wife as he knows her (this time played by a docile and kindly Susan Dorn) has arrived at his office. Suddenly his secretary is back in the role he knows her as fulfilling (his actual secretary, not an actress playing his secretary) and she perks up telling him she has his tickets. Arthur thanks her and takes the tickets quickly as his wife Marion Curtis wonders what has him so jittery. With no time to explain he rushes out with her just as we hear a director’s voice calling out for the crew to get a shot ready. Arthur makes the escape with Marion before he can get sucked back into the world of the TV show.

We then cut back to that world and we see his friend Brinkley on the set asking if anyone has seen Gerry, but no one has. And as we listen to Rod Serling’s closing intonation, “The modus operandi for the departure from life is usually a pine box of such and such dimensions, and this is the ultimate in reality. But there are other ways for a man to exit from life…” the show overlays a shot of an airplane taking off down the runway and lifting up into the air, presumably carrying Arthur and Marion. But let us imagine that whole situation…Arthur and Marion appear at the airport with tickets in hand and deal with real life people like desk agents and then ticket takers and then stewardesses and fellow passengers, etc. etc. So now all those people and everyone else they encounter will be part of that ever-growing universe of his. Now then, can all those people go visit the film studio of Gerry’s? Can all the people from Arthur’s universe have dealings with people from that studio’s universe? Or did both those universes become completely devoid of each other once Arthur and his wife stepped outside those studio doors? It seems like that would have to be the case or else, let’s say Arthur came back from his trip arm in arm with his wife and stepped inside the studio, would everyone there say, “Hey there’s Gerry! Where ya been?” But the problem with that is he’s got his wife Marion by his side and would she then suffer the same predicament and ask “What are all these people talking about?” I mean I suppose that could happen. It’s the “Twilight Zone” after all. Or even creepier still would be if Arthur turned to Marion upon facing the studio crew and said, “Go ahead Marion, tell them who I am” and she just slowly looks at him and says, “Who are you?! Why have you taken me here? What’s going on?!”

Oh boy, there’s a lot of different worlds out there.

I rated this episode a 6.7

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