Second Person: On The Twilight Zone, “What You Need” (CBS, 25 December 1959)
A man in a bathrobe comes out onto the pavement to look at the accident. He has a woman with him, and the two
Where the Floor Is: Cary Grant and the Art of Falling
The Trick In the playroom at the top of the Seton house in Holiday (1938), Cary Grant turns a back somersault. He is playing
The Courtyard of the Visible: Seeing, Guilt, and the Architecture of Desire in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
The film begins by quoting the theater and then quietly falsifying the quotation.Three bamboo blinds ascend over the window. They do not rise together;
Whoever Is Left: On “And When the Sky Was Opened” (The Twilight Zone, season 1, episode 11; CBS, December 11, 1959)
The first thing the broadcast shows is a covering. Before any face, before a name spoken by someone who could later be asked
Isn’t That What the Registry Said? – The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 10 — “Judgment Night.” Written by Rod Serling. Directed by John Brahm. First broadcast on CBS, December 4, 1959.
The number is spoken twice, and the two men who speak it are not the same man, though they share a name and a
Five Facts and a Lifetime: Charles Beaumont’s “Perchance to Dream” (The Twilight Zone, 27 November 1959)
I. A Stranger Reads Him Correctly The first words spoken by a human being in “Perchance to Dream” are not Edward Hall’s, and they
JE REVIENS: Absence, Naming, and the Architecture of Guilt in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
JE REVIENS. The film begins with a trespass, and the trespasser is the camera.An iron gate, chained and padlocked. A drive beyond it, choked.
Enough – On “Time Enough at Last,” The Twilight Zone, Season One, Episode Eight — CBS, 20 November 1959
The episode opens on arithmetic. Before we have seen Henry Bemis’s face, before the narration has told us what to think of him, we
The Expedient Exaggeration: Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest
Nobody in North by Northwest ever thinks Roger Thornhill looks like George Kaplan.This is worth pausing over, because the film has spent sixty-odd years
The Man Who Built a Door – On Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial (1962)
I. Before the Title The film begins with a fact. Two labourers dig. A small party of gentlemen stands at a polite distance in
A Witness for James A. Corry – The Lonely, The Twilight Zone (1959)
The first sound the prisoner makes is a car horn. It arrives early, before we have been told anything worth knowing, and it lands
A Beautiful Voice, and Nowhere to Put It – Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Glass Eye (1957)
Two people are clearing out a dead woman’s room, and one of them admits, almost in passing, that nobody in the family ever knew
Nothing Wrong With You: The Twilight Zone, “Escape Clause,” and the man who required his own death
There is a moment near the beginning of “Escape Clause” when a physician packs up his instruments and delivers the cruelest verdict available to
Nineteen Minutes of Music for Nineteen Players – The Twilight Zone, “Walking Distance” (1959)
A mechanic tells Martin Sloan that the oil change and lube job will take about an hour. Nothing that follows contradicts him. Whatever happens
A Push, No Winner – “Mr. Denton on Doomsday, The Twilight Zone 1959”
The first drink Al Denton takes in this episode he takes off the ground. He has sung for it, in a voice that keeps
The Blood and the Song – Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the Mississippi Delta, and the Long History of the Vampire
Sinners did not need a vampire to depict the Delta’s dangers. The first hour proves it: an economy of scrip and debt, a legal
The Interested Party – “One for the Angels, The Twilight Zone 1959”
He opens a suitcase on the sidewalk and the street changes shape. People who were walking in a line arrange themselves into a curve;
Someone Was Here a Minute – “Where Is Everybody?, The Twilight Zone”
The coffee is still hot. Before anything larger has gone wrong in the roadside diner outside Oakwood, that small fact is already at work:
Farce: A Critical Study of Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
He is not looking for a corpse. He is looking for his notes.That detail is worth holding onto, because everything that follows depends on
White Cake: The Price of Ownership and Ignorance, and the Squandering of Freedom in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
American slavery was not ended by an individual’s revenge; it was ended by a war of unprecedented mass casualty, fought initially by people who
