Customer Reviews

The Twilight Zone: Obsolete Man/ Death's Head Revisited [VHS]

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The Obsolete Man stand up with the best of Sterling's work on the Twilight zone. Just Look at all the jails being built and the people they put in them and you may begain to realize how current this one twilight zone show is. Goverments still decides who's obsolete. Not to be missed!

Two masterful episodes, both originated by Serling. In "Death's Head Revisited," a Nazi gets a dose of his own medicine. In "The Obsolete Man," Burgess Meredith gives a riveting performance as a librarian in the desolate future where books have been banned. It has everything: a moral, suspense, wit, and irony. A must.

The Obsolete Man" and "Deaths-Head Revisited" both deal - one in a veiled and the other in an explicit way - with oppression, Nazism, and the Holocaust. In the first episode, Burgess Meredith plays a librarian who is ruled "obsolete" and condemned to die by a State that has outlawed books, free thought, and God. This chilling episode truly makes one imagine and fear a society in which the creative individual has no place.
In "Deaths-Head Revisited," a former S.S. captain named Gunther Lutze (the cold-eyed Oscar Bergei) revisits the Dachau concentration camp out of nostalgia, only to encounter Alfred Bekker (the quietly captivating Joseph Schildkraut, who had previously played Mr. Otto Frank in THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK on stage and screen), a former inmate of the camp. Rod Serling was one of the first television writers to deal with the Holocaust, and his work here is unforgettable due to such powerful lines as Bekker's final one, and to Serling's own moving and timely closing narration, which tells us why we must "never forget." The fact that the Holocaust victims are referred to not as "Jews" but as "human beings" demonstrates Serling's talent for cutting to the moral core of an issue.

This video features two imperishable TWILIGHT ZONE episodes dealing overtly with totalitarianism, oppression, and freedom. This is Serling at his most "on the surface" and preachy, but his preaching fits the subjects perfectly. The wonderful Burgess Meredith is back, giving an endearing and startlingly real performance as the "obsolete" librarian. And Joseph Schildkraut (from THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK) is eloquent as the ghost of a Nazi prisoner. These important episodes are essential to any ZONE collection.

The episode "The Obsolete Man" is a philosophy lecture in video form, as T-Z episodes always tended to be. The problem is that if you inject some lesson into entertainment, a lot of people aren't going to entirely get the point. To this day, the consensus on this episode is mostly that it's Cold War-era "boogeyman" propaganda about totalitarian societies--its resemblance to certain scenes in the screen version of Orwell's "1984" tends to create the misapprehension that it's an offshoot. But what librarian Wordsworth has been busted for is that he deals in a banned item--books. Burgess Meredith as Wordsworth has always had a talent for playing bookish types and Fritz Weaver is almost typecast as the tyrant he faces. It's a standard cliche that totalitarian regimes don't like people to read the wrong things because it might lead to disloyalty. Nazi Germany burned books because of that very rationale. More recently, the Religious Right did the same during the 1980s here in America. In the case of both symbolic acts, there was a loud and avid audience for any such event. Nobody likes people who read too much--at least nobody that matters. Is the term "bookworm" an accolade? Hell no. "Excessive reading" is one of the classic symptoms of the nerd--he can't relate to real people because he's always reading. It's always assumed that when a kid wears coke-bottle glasses, too much reading is why. When I was a kid, if my dad had been required to pay a fine to me every time he spoke the phrase "with his nose in a goddam book", he might not have gone broke--but I would have gotten a bigger allowance from him than I actually did get on a weekly basis. When a neighboring county ran into a budget deficit this year, library services were among the first cutbacks. I guess the lesson I see in this episode is that books might indeed be considered as a "toxic substance" by totalitarian societies, but the grassroots bias against too much reading because it isn't "cool" is a problem in and of itself. A lot of people don't like reading because it bores them, but when people impose that preference on others, you don't have to live in a Fourth or Fifth Reich for something to be wrong with that picture.