There is a moment near the beginning of “Escape Clause” when a physician packs up his instruments and delivers the cruelest verdict available to him: there is nothing wrong with Walter Bedeker. The scene is played for comedy and it works as comedy, but it also contains the entire episode in compressed form, because news that would relieve any other patient in the history of television lands on this one as a personal affront. Walter has built a life around the imminence of catastrophe. To be told that catastrophe is not currently scheduled is to be told that the life has been a waste of effort. He responds accordingly. The doctor is a quack, the examination was a formality, the profession is a racket, and somebody is going to hear about it.
“Escape Clause” is the sixth episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone, first broadcast on November 6, 1959, written by Rod Serling and directed by Mitchell Leisen. Among the early episodes it has never enjoyed much prestige. It arrives between more solemn and more celebrated half hours, it is broadly comic where the series was busy establishing its gift for melancholy, and its premise can be summarized in a sentence that sounds exhausted before it finishes: a hypochondriac sells his soul for immortality and discovers that immortality is boring. The commentary has been repeating the same moral back to it for six decades. Be careful what you wish for. The devil always collects. Greed undoes the greedy. All of this is true of the episode in roughly the way that a description of a house’s plumbing is true of the house.
David Wayne plays Walter Bedeker as a small man with an enormous amount of energy and nowhere to put it. This is the first surprise of the performance and the key to the character. Wayne does not play the invalid as languid or drained; he plays him as the most physically animated person in the room, sitting up, gesturing, snapping, twisting under the blankets, his voice rising into a nasal complaint that has clearly been rehearsed for years. The bedroom itself is a fortress of precautions. The window must stay closed against drafts. The wife, Ethel, played by Virginia Christine with a competence so worn it has become invisible to her husband, moves through the room like a nurse on the third decade of a night shift. Serling’s opening narration reads out an inventory of the things Walter fears, beginning with death and disease and sliding, without any change of tone, into germs, drafts, other people, and the number thirteen. The drift from pathogens to numerology is doing more than making a joke about superstition. Walter’s fear does not respond to evidence; it converts evidence into itself, and it will take whatever raw material the day provides.
Then Thomas Gomez enters the apartment as Mr. Cadwallader, and the episode acquires its second and stranger center of gravity. There is no smoke, no thunder, no theatrical transformation. A large, heavy, immaculately courteous man is simply present in the bedroom, smiling, in no hurry, entirely at ease with the furniture. He knows what Walter wants because Walter has been announcing it at volume. He has a contract. He talks like a man who calls on customers who have already decided to buy and who therefore does not need to sell anything, only to complete the paperwork. What he offers is immortality and indestructibility, and what he asks in return is the customary consideration. He also offers, without being pressed into it, an escape clause: should the arrangement ever cease to suit, Walter has only to say so, and the thing he was so frightened of will be provided quickly and without pain. Walter signs. The Devil’s contract has entered American television not as a black mass but as a sales call.
What happens afterward is usually described as the education of Walter Bedeker, and it is not. He learns nothing. He is not corrupted, humbled, or transformed. He is exposed. The peculiar cruelty of Serling’s design is that it removes the one thing Walter had always identified as his enemy and reveals that the enemy had been holding him up. Consider what mortality was actually doing for a man like this. Every symptom was a message. Every draft was an attempt on his life. Every doctor was either an ally in a great campaign or an incompetent standing between him and the truth of his condition. To live inside that weather is exhausting, but it is also flattering beyond measure, because it means the universe has taken an interest. If something is trying to kill me, I must be worth killing. Hypochondria, in Walter’s hands, is not primarily a fear of dying. It is a theory of his own importance, and death is the evidence.
Remove the evidence and the theory collapses, which accounts both for the speed with which his boredom arrives and for the fact that the boredom carries more weight than the received reading of the episode has ever allowed it. Walter does not grow weary of eternity because eternity is long; he has barely sampled it. He grows weary because the moment nothing can harm him, nothing is paying attention to him. Immortality does not promote Walter to godhood. It demotes him to furniture. The rest of the half hour is the ...
