the truth; semiotically, “twilight” defies “zone,” just as, in the fantastic mode, the supernatural
phenomenon defies a hyper-realistic representation of our world.9
The short format of the series serves the delicate narrative balance between the highly
credible and the impossible, indispensable to create and maintain the fantastic effect, by
preventing either terms of the opposition from overcoming the other while preserving tension
and hence retaining narrative authority - it is not a coincidence if the longer, 60 minutes
format, which was adopted during the fourth season, was abandoned during the fifth and last
season, which returned to the original 30 minutes format (commercials included). If the
impossible were to completely obliterate reality, we would find ourselves in the marvelous; if on
the contrary, the unexplainable were to be rationalized, the narration would fall into the
uncanny.
Just as the short story remained the chosen format for fantastic narrations from
Maupassa nt to Lovecraft to Jean Ray,10 the condensed format of the Twilight Zone episodes is
propitious to the fantastic, for it allows to create and sustain a narrative authority based upon a
semiotically unresolvable conflict without allowing any of its terms to defeat the other, which
would necessarily displace the tension and imply a modal shift, either into the marvelous or
into the uncanny.
Wonders of Reality
Paradoxically, The Twilight Zone is also privileged ground for the study of the fantastic
because of its insistence in representing a very “normal” reality, which is subverted by the
introduction of an element or phenomenon which produces the fantastic effect; the more
normal the environment appears, the greater surprise the supernatural element will cause, and
hence generate tension and narrative authority. The supernatural element which clashes with
this hyper-realistic environment can belong to the semiotic code of another anti-realistic mode,
9 The sam e can be said regarding the more recent X-Files series: “files" refers to an organized, administrative
reality while the “X ” symbolizes the yet unidentified, that is the unknown.
10 Stephen King might have been the first author to convincingly stretch the fantastic effect for hundreds of pages, by
carefully dosing constantly the most identifiable reality and the supernatural, such as in Needful Things or The D ark Half.
Previous examples, such as Jean Ray's Malpertuis or Jean-Paul Raemdonck' Han remain isolated attempts, the latter far from
being convincing; as to Jean Ray, he is still more read because of the adventures of Harry Dickson than because of
Malpertuis, and although Harry Dickson's mysteries are theoretically more uncanny than fantastic, for the apparently
supernatural occurrence is rationally explained at the end of the narrative syntagm, very much akin with the structural
characteristics of the detective story, said explanation is often far-fetched enough to escape the boundaries of acceptable
realism; when it comes to the great classics, Oscar Wilde's The Picture o f Dorian Gray remains, in terms of extension, the
proverbial exception that confirms the rule, or at least the tendency.
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