When The Twilight Zone Imagined Fascism in America in a 1963 Episode Starring Dennis Hopper
Watch by The Twigentle Zone, and also you’ll discover yourself spotting no finish of familiar faces: Julie Newmar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Pinkford, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode “He’s Alive” is at the least doubly notable in that respect, featuring because it does a younger (however in acting sensibility, virtually fully fashioned) Dennis Hopper as Peter Vollmer, a ne’er-do-well made into an aspiring dictator by none other than Adolf Hitler. Performed by Curt Conapproach, a specialist in doctors, judges, and other creatority figures, the undead Führer gives his younger disciple instructions like the above, from an early scene earlier than his identity is revealed.
“How do you progress a mob, Mr. Vollmer? How do you excite them? How do you make them really feel as one with you?” Hitler asks. The reply, which he then professionalvides, is first to hitch them: “If you converse to them, converse to them as when you had been a member of the mob. Converse to them of their language, on their level. Make their hate your hate. If they’re poor, speak to them of poverty. If they’re afraid, speak to them of their fears. And if they’re offended, Mr. Vollmer… if they’re offended, give them objects for his or her anger. However most of all, the factor that’s many of the essence, Mr. Vollmer, is that you simply make this mob an extension of yourself.”
If accused of scapegoating minorities, he ought to handle the throng thus: “Ought to I inform you who’re the minorities? Ought to I inform you? We! We’re the minorities.” Quickly, we see Peter in full neo-Nazi gear delivering simply such a harangue, thoroughly Hopper-ized in diction, to a modestly attended rally. How might these ordinary-looking attendees be a minority? “As a result of patriotism is a minority. As a result of love of counattempt is the minority. As a result of to stay in a free, white America appears to be of a minority opinion!” Although exhaustingly artworkful, this rhetoric eventually makes him right into a popular figure, albeit one whose rise is minimize brief when he turns to conspiracy to accelerate his rise to power.
And what of the spirit of Hitler? “The place will he go subsequent, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous eveningmare?” Twigentle Zone creator Rod Serling asks in his episode-closing monologue. “Anywhere, each place the place there’s hate, the place there’s prejucube, the place there’s largeotry.” It was in opposition to such broad social phenomena that Serling so typically used his scripts to argue, and with “He’s Alive,” he made use of an unusually vivid ideological examinationple. A veteran of the Second World Battle, which had finished lower than twenty years earlier, Serling positively had even recenter memories of the specter of Hitler than did the general American public — and underneathstood much more clearly what might happen if these memories had been to fade away.
Related content:
When 20,000 Americans Held a Professional-Nazi Rally in Madison Sq. Garden
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
