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krpalmerAs Rod Serling’s preview began to attach a bit of meaning to the impending title “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” a week ago, I did wonder just what I’d make of the episode once I’d seen it. While I make a certain show of seldom managing to broaden my scope by watching old movies, I once found the time to see Sunset Boulevard. The episode coming up did appear to have a similar plot.
It was possible to suppose “this is The Twilight Zone; there’ll be some element of the fantastic.” That element took a while to show up. While it was easy enough to anticipate how things would turn out, thinking back I did wonder about “treating it as a metaphor,” and in that case I could imagine Serling and company having got a pretty dark story on television.
Before that I was at least contemplating whether the lead character having even a sixteen-millimeter projector in her home would have seemed extravagant at the time, but also contrasting that to modern Blu-Ray players. That, though, could spark certain half-troubled thoughts about “dwelling in the past.” The Twilight Zone is now decades older than the movies the lead character was watching, but that didn’t distract from my recurring uncertainties how many “established properties” all of us are sold these days.
Anyway, I did wonder about the glimpses of “old movies” in the episode, and if the lead actress just happened to have been made up to look older most of the time. Without quite looking up the Wikipedia article on this episode, though, I did manage to discover she was indeed an industry veteran, so maybe the glimpses were indeed of actual productions she’d been in years before. That did, though, get in the way of certain amused thoughts of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that had featured a movie of almost the same vintage of this episode...
It was possible to suppose “this is The Twilight Zone; there’ll be some element of the fantastic.” That element took a while to show up. While it was easy enough to anticipate how things would turn out, thinking back I did wonder about “treating it as a metaphor,” and in that case I could imagine Serling and company having got a pretty dark story on television.
Before that I was at least contemplating whether the lead character having even a sixteen-millimeter projector in her home would have seemed extravagant at the time, but also contrasting that to modern Blu-Ray players. That, though, could spark certain half-troubled thoughts about “dwelling in the past.” The Twilight Zone is now decades older than the movies the lead character was watching, but that didn’t distract from my recurring uncertainties how many “established properties” all of us are sold these days.
Anyway, I did wonder about the glimpses of “old movies” in the episode, and if the lead actress just happened to have been made up to look older most of the time. Without quite looking up the Wikipedia article on this episode, though, I did manage to discover she was indeed an industry veteran, so maybe the glimpses were indeed of actual productions she’d been in years before. That did, though, get in the way of certain amused thoughts of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that had featured a movie of almost the same vintage of this episode...