I. Introduction

The Twilight Zone episode "Mirror Image" follows the internal strife of a young professional woman, Millicent Barnes, as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that she is sharing a bus station with her doppelganger, despite the irrationality of the situation. Millicent initially takes her encounters with her duplicate as evidence that her mind is failing but soon grows confident that she is correctly perceiving the strange phenomena around her. Fellow travelers and the bus station employees do not share Millicent's irrational explanation of the situation—that a collision of two planes of existence necessitates Millicent's replacement by her counterpart—and, viewing her experience as a descent into madness, call the police to have her whisked away to a mental hospital.

Plotlines in which protagonists experience inexplicable yet undeniable phenomena and subsequently become mad through accurately interpreting their surroundings are common for the series. The Twilight Zone employed madness as a metaphor to critique late-1950s and early-1960s American society, harnessing the universal potential to slip into madness through failing to live up to societal expectations of normal behavior as a narrative technique to challenge the strict American cultural ideals of uncompromising rationality, social conformity, and the organization of life around work. In knowing that there is this other realm of the Twilight Zone where the rules of the real world do not apply, viewers recognize the reality of the strange happenings therein and watch as characters like Millicent Barnes are made mad for overcoming the limitations of logical thought to make sense of these irrational realities. I write "made mad" here to convey the social construction of madness as revealed by The Twilight Zone, in which other characters produce madness in the protagonists in an attempt to regulate their nonnormative thoughts and behaviors. 2 In centering the cultural production of madness—rather than relying on the stale trope of "going mad" that focuses on the individual—the series shows that the ideals of rationality, conformity, and living a life driven by work contribute to the American conceptualization of what constitutes a properly functioning mind. 3 The Twilight Zone reinstructed its contemporary viewers to embrace the latent madness within them to explore what other possibilities exist for understanding their world.

During its production from 1959 to 1964, The Twilight Zone occupied a unique position in American television as a popular series whose express purpose was to expand its viewer's minds past the limits of what American society deemed normal and acceptable. As Wolfe notes, "the most popular TV sitcoms of the late 1950s… like I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best, were bland glorifications of home and family both suburban in setting and conformist in social outlook." 4 The Twilight Zone, on the other hand, broadcast stories that explored the dark side of American life. With an average weekly audience of eighteen million viewers over the course of its original run, roughly one in ten Americans was tuning in to watch the series each week. 5 Against this competition, and with its significant viewership, The Twilight Zone stands out as a popular alternative to these idealized depictions of American life, offering a second opinion with its critical reading of American cultural ideals.

Much has been written about The Twilight Zone, with many scholars recognizing the series's project to challenge its contemporary American society. Boulton outlines how Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling used the science fiction genre to avoid censorship while publicly confronting racism, right-wing political extremism, and Cold War paranoia with his series. 6 Mortenson argues that The Twilight Zone's signature shadowy imagery serves to visually represent the Zone as "a liminal space where imagination trumps reason"—a space where the series can address delicate social issues like conformity, suburban life, racial tensions, and nuclear anxiety. 7 Wolfe sees the inability of logic and reason to make sense of the happenings of the Twilight Zone as encouraging viewers to explore alternate ways of knowing and experiencing the world around them. 8 Feagin similarly notes that the twist endings of The Twilight Zone discredit the alleged superiority of rational thinking by revealing to viewers that their failure to accurately interpret the episodes' pre-twist plot points stems from their insistence on maintaining a strict, logical worldview. 9 These scholars collectively recognize The Twilight Zone as a critique of rationality, conformity, and conservatism (both political and social) that sought to push viewers to reevaluate how they thought of the world and what they should expect from it.

Having convincingly identified the critical project driving the series, however, scholars of The Twilight Zone overlook the integral part that madness plays in its critiques. 10 Even those who have offered readings of the famous episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a fresh-out-of-the-sanitarium Bob Wilson witnesses a gremlin dismantling the engine of the plane he is traveling on, quickly move past an analysis of madness and take up an exploration of its metaphorical representations, despite the episode's consistent and prominent featuring of Bob's anxiety. 11 Telotte describes the episode as Wilson's coming to terms with the fact that "the calm, quiet, brightly lit aeroplane interior is itself the artificial, deluded world—just a fragile barrier against the real world outside that is dark, chaotic and threatening"—in other words, Bob learns that early-1960s Americans use modern technologies to insulate themselves from the ugliness and uncertainty of the world, with his anxiety serving only as the entry point to this revelation. 12 Both Lintott and Wolfe describe Bob's witnessing of the gremlin as "outlandish" in a way that extracts eccentricity from his madness and discards the rest. 13 While these readings might mention or allude to Bob's recent stint at the mental hospital, they do not adequately attend to the importance of madness to the episode's plot; taking madness solely as a metaphor, or erasing it with euphemism, ignores the real presence of madness in the narrative and simplifies the episode's critique of American cultural ideals. Analyses of other Twilight Zone episodes similarly incompletely represent the critiques they make by overlooking the presence of madness as both metaphor and madness itself. 14

The historical backdrop against which The Twilight Zone was created supports the reading of its episodes for madness itself in addition to its metaphorical representations. The Twilight Zone originally aired during the time of the American deinstitutionalization movement wherein political mobilization against the inhumane conditions of mental hospitals and innovations in pharmaceuticals affected the release of mental health patients back into American society. Anti-asylum activism gained popularity during the 1950s and 1960s as stories recounting the cruelty of mental hospitals became increasingly common. Even as early as World War II, conscientious objectors working in asylums had reported that their conditions were dire. 15 Pop-culture entertainment media like Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) portrayed asylums as inhumane prisons whose objective was not the treatment or rehabilitation of patients in need of help but instead the punishment and sequestration of Others from the public. 16 Modern medicine answered the calls of anti-asylum activists with new antipsychotic drugs like chlorpromazine, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1954, which reduced asylum patients' violent or aggressive outbursts, providing treatment options that did not need to be administered in mental hospitals. 17 Many released patients were pushed to the streets and jails because of the lack of infrastructure to continue their care after their release, including keeping them on the antipsychotic drugs that had promised their successful reintegration into American society. 18 With deinstitutionalization, the American public encountered a newfound visibility of mental illness, both in the media and on the streets.

Madness was not, however, the exclusive property of these newly released patients—conventional wisdom of the time made clear that everybody had at least a little bit of it. Psychoanalysis reached its heyday in American medicine and pop culture between the 1940s and 1960s, with even non-doctors regularly encountering Freudian ideas in their daily lives. 19 Psychiatrists welcomed this popularity as an opportunity to make a lot of money: With middle-class Americans preoccupied with maintaining the health of their unconscious minds, practitioners left the asylums and set up private practices where they could welcome this new kind of patient. 20 The 1950s was an era of rapid growth in the healthcare industry, with the rise of the preventative medicine approach to physical and mental health. A 1959 Life magazine article found that "patients now see their doctors twice as often as they did 30 years ago," as insurance companies and the media had begun pressuring Americans "to go see their doctor before it is too late." 21 This shift in patients' attitudes toward medicine from treatment to prevention represents a concerted effort on behalf of these insurance companies and other media actors (like the pharmaceutical companies that advertised in magazines like Life, as well as Life itself) to cultivate mass concern about staying healthy in the face of inevitable and costly disease. Preventative medicine and psychoanalysis collided in the idea that lying dormant in all people was a latent madness, which responsible middle-class Americans would ensure did not overtake them. 22 This threat-from-within characterized American cultural attitudes toward mental health during the time that The Twilight Zone was produced, undoubtedly informing its content.

In order to demonstrate that The Twilight Zone used madness metaphors to challenge viewers to reject the strictly rational, conformist, and work-centered lives culturally prescribed to them, I adapt the disability studies theories of compulsory able-mindedness and the mad border body for my reading of the series. I first analyze the title sequences of The Twilight Zone for the ways they encourage viewers to read all episodes through the lens of madness, even when an individual episode seems unconcerned with the mind. I then turn to three episodes that use robust madness metaphors to explore different facets of the series's critique of American cultural ideals. "Mirror Image" (aired February 26, 1960) presents a protagonist who chooses to recognize her irrational reality rather than abandon truth for conformity. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (aired October 11, 1963) hijacks the viewer's gaze to make them adopt the irrationality of a madman, harnessing their emotions to expose able-mindedness as a compulsory social norm. "The Arrival" (aired September 22, 1961) offers a counterargument to the notion that work regulates a mind gone mad, arguing that a life consumed by a demanding career creates pressures that can actually cause severe harm to the mind. These episodes are only three of the many that use madness metaphors; I have selected them because they demonstrate that The Twilight Zone's use of madness is not solely metaphorical but also exposes the dangers of compulsory able-mindedness to Americans and American society. All three episodes end with their protagonists sent to asylums for their deviations from American cultural ideals, punishing them for their nonconformity and offering normalization as the only cure for culturally produced madness.

II. Literature Review: Madness Metaphors: Compulsory Able-Mindedness and the Mad Border Body Enter The Twilight Zone

I approach my analysis of The Twilight Zone's use of madness metaphors through the budding theoretical perspective of disability media studies, as outlined by the works of Ellcessor, Kirkpatrick, Hagood, and McRuer, who recognize that a greater overlap between disability studies and media studies will improve both fields. 23 In the introduction to the collection Disability Media Studies, Ellcessor, Hagood, and Kirkpatrick write that they "hope that media scholars will become aware of a broader range of embodiments that shape and are shaped by our encounters with media… the field needs to recognize dis/ability as central to the study of media." 24 My goal with this essay is to initiate this application of a disability studies lens on a critical analysis of The Twilight Zone, as the many academic papers and several books dedicated to the series overlook madness as a theme. Far from being a project to merely expand the discourse on The Twilight Zone to include analysis of yet another identity category, this essay demonstrates the integral part that madness plays in the series's critiques of late-1950s/early-1960s American society. 25 An analysis of The Twilight Zone's critical position on modern American life is incomplete without a thorough discussion of the ways it represents madness.

Foundational for many critiques of disability metaphors is Mitchell and Snyder's narrative prosthesis. Mitchell and Snyder coin the term to articulate the common literary practice of using disability to "[lend] a distinctive idiosyncrasy to any character that differentiates the character from the anonymous background of the 'norm.'" 26 Narrative requires intrigue, and, while deviating from norms outside a book's binding can be dangerous for the real-life deviant, deviation is tantalizing on the page. Disability becomes a go-to characterization device to spice up a tale replete with "uninteresting" able bodies, the default. 27 When authors invigorate their narratives with the alluring Otherness of disability, they typically flatten their disabled characters' disabilities to be only representations of Otherness, devoid of complex characterization or any sense of ordinariness and oversaturated with symbolism. 28 The symbolism that a disabled character facilitates becomes the entirety of that character, eliminating any potential for insight on the lived experiences of disabled people. The pervasiveness of narrative prosthesis helps explain the dearth of scholarly analysis of madness in The Twilight Zone; disability is so common in entertainment media, and so commonly points to anything but itself, that to take up an analysis of disability as disability might seem unnecessary.

Like Mitchell and Snyder, Davis argues in "The Ghettoization of Disability" that the reduction of disability to symbolism is not exceptional but a rule in film: "In an ableist culture disability cannot just be—it has to mean something." 29 He notes that filmic representations of disability evoke predictable audience responses depending on the disability depicted, and that if a protagonist is shown to have anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, or "delusions," like those which Millicent Barnes experiences, then "the film or television special (never a series) will revolve around that character going mad. The madness, in turn, will then symbolize the response we might all have to a dehumanizing, stressful, disabling and demeaning society. The character becomes a tragic stand-in for any viewer facing the human condition." 30 Characters who descend into madness spark an empathetic response in viewers, who identify with these characters' generalized experiences of tragedy, pain, or uncertainty. With Mitchell and Snyder's narrative prosthesis in mind, the generalization of going mad to signify experiencing hardship is understandable; this is the very purpose of these characters' deviations from the sane norm. But Davis takes the role of these disabled "stand-ins'' a step further, arguing that when they triumph over their impairments or gain acceptance from the non-disabled people around them, their stories provide a comforting conclusion for nondisabled viewers who fear that they might someday become disabled themselves. 31 The Twilight Zone episodes that follow characters as they go mad deny their viewers the comforting conclusions that Davis describes, preventing them from seeing madness, along with their own problems or concerns, neatly resolved at the close of each episode. As The Twilight Zone forces its audience to grapple with the discomfort of unresolved madness, Mitchell, Snyder, and Davis' work on disability metaphors cannot fully explain how the series employs madness to critique the cultural ideals of 1950s/'60s America. Helping to round out a theory of madness metaphors in The Twilight Zone are the works of Schalk and Hillsburg, who analyze disability in literature for both metaphor and material reality.

Although disability metaphors have met plenty of scholarly scrutiny, it is possible for literature and film to portray disabilities with more realistic complexity, and writers can even use disability metaphors to radically challenge cultural ideologies that hierarchize people based on dis/ability, race, gender, and more. 32 In "Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night,'" Schalk argues that Duryea-Gode disease (DGD), the condition that Butler created for the short story, acts as a disability metaphor that exposes how ableism and anti-Black racism share elements of their historical construction and control of bodies. 33 For Schalk, disability metaphors "need not be either/or (i.e., this representation is either about race or about disability); in fact, they are often both/and, due specifically to the mutually constitutive nature of oppressions." 34 Hillsburg similarly concludes her analysis of Mary McGarry Morris's book A Dangerous Woman by arguing that the story of an angry, mentally ill woman is not just a metaphor for her response to patriarchal control or just a tale about being disabled in an ableist society, but one of "the devastating violence that occurs when individuals cannot adhere to hegemonic notions of normalcy"—both/and. 35 Crucial for both/and disability metaphors is that they intertwine a reading of oppression, pain, or hardship with a nuanced representation of disability; the disability cannot exist solely to highlight some other thing. 36 In The Twilight Zone episodes I analyze below, madness functions as a both/and metaphor in which the inescapable threat of one's latent madness is used to critique the rigid American cultural ideals of rationality, social conformity, and organizing one's life around work, which perpetuate ableism, among other oppressive ideologies. The series presents madness as a social construct that, while devalued in American society, is actually necessary to fully understand the strange happenings of the Twilight Zone. The protagonists of these episodes abandon conformity by embracing madness to encounter reality and are swiftly punished for the counter-normative approaches they adopt to make sense of their world, revealing the limitations of a society built on compulsory able-mindedness.

The Twilight Zone does not employ madness metaphors in a singular, uniform way. Some characters, like Millicent Barnes, have no diagnosed conditions prior to entering the Zone but are made mad by those around them for accurately perceiving the strange phenomena of the alternate dimension; others, like Grant Sheckly, have conditions that initiate their encounter with the Zone; still others, like Bob Wilson, both have diagnosed conditions prior to entering the Zone and find their encounters there to produce new conditions or exacerbate existing ones. Even though these disability metaphors fall on a spectrum that includes "actual" mental health conditions alongside perceptions of madness, they are united by their common critique of compulsory able-mindedness as a dangerous foundation of American culture, where all Americans have the potential to fail to maintain a convincing performance of sanity.

The concept of compulsory able-mindedness originates with McRuer's adaptation of Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity to the study of physical disabilities. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, McRuer argues that, like heterosexuality, able-bodiedness is differentiated from an undesirable Other (disability) and defined by contrast as a norm. 37 Able-bodiedness is compulsory in that, as an identity constructed as superior, it encourages aspirations toward it through endless re-performance and devalues those who cannot achieve it. I use the passive voice here because as a norm, able-bodiedness seems to "[emanate] from everywhere and nowhere;" indeed, the compulsoriness of able-bodiedness, like heterosexuality, is so naturalized because of its obfuscated origins. 38 While compulsory able-bodiedness is deeply woven into the fabric of our culture today, McRuer locates its origin in the nineteenth-century rise of industrial capitalism, an economic system that reoriented life around the ability to offer one's body up for manual labor, requiring a predictable, standardized body—as well as, I would add, a predictable, rational mind for taking direction, meeting deadlines, and reaching production goals. 39

Throughout this essay, I use the term compulsory able-mindedness to more precisely reflect the madness metaphors of The Twilight Zone. Although some episodes highlight physical disabilities (also in metaphorical ways, as in "Eye of the Beholder"), I focus here on the mind because of its centrality to the series's critiques of strict rationality, social conformity, and the primary position of work in normative American life. 40 I adopt Schalk's definition of able-mindedness for its concision and thoroughness: In Bodyminds Reimagined, Schalk defines able-mindedness as "the socially constructed norm of mental capacity and ability that is typically posed in binary opposition to mental disability… [and] includes concepts such as rationality, reasonableness, sanity, intelligence, mental agility, self-awareness, social awareness, and control of thoughts and behaviors." 41 As with Schalk's analysis, I foreground the mind in this essay even though it cannot be entirely excised from the physical body because The Twilight Zone is primarily concerned with madness, although I will nod at the inseparability of the bodymind throughout the analysis below with close readings of the episodes' visual representations of madness through the bodies of the actors who play mad. 42

Able-mindedness, as a norm, is positioned as the ideal side of a sane/mad binary, but its required endless performance for only tenuous or deferred achievement reveals the vast gray area between these two extremes. 43 McRuer, again adapting Butler's gender theories, terms the "inevitable impossibility" of forever and fully achieving able-bodied identity ability trouble. 44 If the "always elusive normalcy" of compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness exposes the normate position as aspirational, not actual, then the only social positions that have any sort of stability are those at the mad extreme or approaching it. 45 While the origins of compulsory able-bodiedness/mindedness are shrouded by their normative structure, the idea of ability trouble was actually central to psychoanalytic psychology, albeit from a controlling rather than critical perspective: Lying dormant in each person was the potential for a psychotic break—what I have above called latent madness—waiting to be stirred by the mounting pressures of modern life. This latent madness of each individual is echoed by Kafai's conceptualization of the mad border body, defined as a positionality between the constructed, binary identity categories of sane and mad. 46 Stemming from her own "phenomenology of living" as a woman with manic-depression, Kafai puts the mad border body in conversation with racial and queer forms of passing and border crossing in order to argue that the sane/mad binary is political, not natural. 47 The flexibility of the mad border body stokes fear in the normative society that seeks to define it away and grants "transformative power" to those who identify with this positionality. 48 Although Kafai offers the mad border body as a "personal template," putting her work in conversation with McRuer reveals that the mad border body need not be limited to describing only Kafai or others who have similar lived experiences; where able-mindedness is unachievable yet compulsory, all people who have not been deemed fully mad could to some degree occupy a mad border body so long as they recognize the inevitable failure of their normate performances and wield this knowledge critically. 49 By rejecting culturally normative understandings of the world—understandings which they themselves had previously accepted uncritically—in order to truly witness the Twilight Zone's strange phenomena, Bob, Millicent, and to some extent Grant can all be understood as occupying mad border bodies.

III. Structural Madness in The Twilight Zone

Before analyzing individual episodes as representative of how The Twilight Zone uses madness metaphors to critique American cultural ideals, I want to briefly discuss the series's title sequences, as they prime viewers to interpret all episodes through the lens of madness, revealing madness as integral to the very structure of the series. In the title sequence of season one, Serling's voiceover tells viewers that the Twilight Zone is "the dimension of imagination," the "middle ground between… science and superstition" that lies "between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." 50 The title sequences of the other seasons similarly describe the Twilight Zone as "a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." 51 Before even being introduced to the characters or plot of the episode, viewers learn that the story they are about to watch will involve unfamiliar rules of existence, the blurring of the boundary between logic and fantasy, the manipulation of one's firmly held beliefs and horror at the realization of their shortcomings, and the need to imagine otherwise in order to make it all make sense. These voiceovers instruct viewers to understand the inexplicable phenomena of the Twilight Zone as real—not inventions of the protagonists' minds. In recognizing this reality, viewers are already positioned to empathize with the characters who are made mad, opening them up to taking a critical stance on the American cultural ideals that help produce madness.

In addition to the script, the audio and visual components of these title sequences also work to structure the series around madness. The music that accompanies season one's title sequence is dreamy, but in a nightmarish way: its gradually building melody unsettles the viewer, while its repetitiveness lulls as if hypnotic. Season two brought with it The Twilight Zone's iconic guitar picking and aggressive percussion that serve to startle and disorient the viewer. The series retains this theme song in the rest of its seasons' title sequences, indicating Serling's satisfaction with the anxious tone it sets for the episodes it precedes. Season three's title sequence opens with hypnotic, spinning eccentric circles that encompass the entire screen before drifting away from the audience and disappearing into the vastness of outer space. This opening offers hypnosis as the door through which viewers enter the Twilight Zone, reinforcing the connection between the happenings of the Zone and madness. The matter-of-fact tone of Serling's voice also encourages viewers' association of the Zone with hypnotherapy. Like a hypnotist ushering a patient into their unconscious, Serling makes commanding statements to guide the viewer into this strange place: "You are traveling through another dimension;" "You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone." 52 These imperatives cast Serling as both a tour guide and a psychoanalyst, an authority who leads viewers through unfamiliar territory by manipulating their minds. Finally, after most episodes' title sequences, Serling appears on screen to directly address the audience, frankly introducing the plot that will unfold and the characters involved—in essence, giving his diagnosis of the episode to come. With its title sequences alone, The Twilight Zone structurally links the Zone to the mind—both the characters' and viewers'. The mind here is a medicalized mind, a mind slipping into madness or maybe already made mad, as is clear from the many audiovisual references to hypnosis present in these title sequences. I now turn to the individual episodes that I have selected, whose madness metaphors expose able-mindedness as a compulsory norm that is socially constructed in part through the American cultural ideals of rationality, social conformity, and making work the purpose of life.

IV. Doppelgangers-As-Conformity, Anti-Rationality, and Punishment in "Mirror Image"

Instead of chronicling the gradual decline of Millicent's mental health, "Mirror Image" presents a transformation of her perspective from a mindset of uncompromising rationality to one that prioritizes lived experience over scientifically deduced knowledge. By allowing herself to realize that her duplicate is real, Millicent embraces the positionality of the mad border body most precisely of the protagonists of the three episodes I examine, as she refuses to perform able-mindedness for those around her, even though she could pass as sane if she discontinued her pursuit of truth. As a both/and metaphor, Millicent's madness first and foremost signifies her experience of being made mad but also presents a critique of American society's culture of social conformity, which treats individuals as interchangeable parts, with her doppelganger's literal duplication and replacement of her. Millicent's refusal to perform able-mindedness or conform to the standards of middle-class American behavior results in surveillance by those around her who seek to uphold these norms and, ultimately, in her punishment, with her forced removal to a mental hospital by police. Finally, using the sound of a bell to train viewers to recognize the actions of Millicent's doppelganger, "Mirror Image" concludes by forcing viewers to consider their own future experiences of inexplicable phenomena, pushing them to adopt the mad border body positionality themselves.

"Mirror Image" outlines three stages of Millicent's transformation into a mad border body: her normate stage prior to her encounters with her doppelganger, a denial stage where she clings to able-mindedness for fear of deviating from the compulsory norm, and the final stage in which she adopts the positionality of the mad border body. Stage One: In the opening monologue, Serling describes Millicent as "not a very imaginative type… not given to undue anxiety or fears, or, for that matter, even the most temporal flights of fancy" (S1E21, 3:12). She lacks any characteristics that could be construed as mental illness, even relatively safe traits like having a colorful imagination or dreaming too big. Millicent is rational and career-driven, a "quote, girl with a head on her shoulders, end of quote" (S1E21, 3:26). Serling draws attention to the cultural importance of having one's head on one's shoulders by verbalizing the quotations around the common expression, thereby encouraging viewers to linger on the social construction of the value placed in rational decision-making. His tone is matter-of-fact, but also a bit smug: Millicent's rationality fails to prevent her from encountering her doppelganger; in fact, having her head on her shoulders hinders her grasp of the Zone's reality. When reason can no longer explain her experiences, Millicent's sense of self is thrown into crisis, and she enters Stage Two. After seeing her doppelganger for the first time, Millicent meets fellow traveler Paul Grinstead, introducing herself by saying, "I'm Millicent Barnes… at least, I was Millicent Barnes" (S1E21, 11:15). The irrationality of her reality tests her understanding of herself to such an extent that she worries that the experience might have fundamentally altered, or even erased, her identity—and in some ways it has. For one, Millicent soon understands that the doppelganger seeks to replace (erase) her, and, perhaps more important, her experience at the bus station will forever mark her as unable to firmly, once-and-for-all achieve sanity, regardless of whether or not her duplicate is successful in taking over her life. Her latent madness exposed, she reexamines what makes someone mad and arrives at Stage Three. After Millicent faints from seeing her doppelganger a second time, she awakens from her unconsciousness, literally and metaphorically, recalling to Paul something she once heard about an alternate plane of existence, where "each of us has a counterpart… [who,] after the two worlds converge, comes into our world, and in order to survive… has to take over!" (S1E21, 16:43). Millicent is contemplative, speaking in short bursts followed by pauses, but her self-assuredness is clear. She recounts the hypothetical series of events with rising confidence, and concludes that this science fiction defines her reality. Having passed for a normate until this fateful evening at the bus station, Millicent struggles to grapple with the irrationality of her reality but eventually becomes a mad border body. Her firm belief in the reality of the strange phenomena she witnesses challenges the system of compulsory able-mindedness that makes her mad because she rejects rationality, thereby revealing madness as socially constructed.

Millicent's madness also serves as a metaphor that critiques the extreme social conformity prized by early 1960s American culture. Doppelgangers are by definition replicas of individuals, and, as Millicent is portrayed as being an ideal American woman (pre-madness, at least), one could almost imagine that having two of her would fit the bill for conformity rather nicely. "Mirror Image" offers exact duplication as a hyperbole of American conformity in order to highlight the instability of a society that devalues originality. Instead of concluding the episode with a celebration of Buffalo, New York's having two Millicents—two girls with heads on their shoulders—one replaces the other, with the real Millicent locked away in an asylum. That the final scene of the episode shows Paul chasing after his own doppelganger reinforces The Twilight Zone's critique of the ideal of conformity as producing a revolving door of the same people, uninteresting and interchangeable. 53

Before this final scene, however, Paul personifies the social pressure to perform able-mindedness, as he tries to convince Millicent to abandon her pursuit of truth and facilitates her punishment when she refuses to do so. As Millicent becomes more and more certain that she has in fact crossed paths with her doppelganger, Paul desperately tries to get her to see the light of reason, and upon failing, urges her to feign normativity, imploring her, "Forget about it, please! Don't think about it," (S1E21, 18:01). When she rejects his last-ditch effort to salvage her normativity, he surreptitiously calls the police to have her removed from the bus station—and the American public sphere. While Paul feels helpful for calling the police to get Millicent's alleged mental illness treated, his actions actually punish her for being the subject of strange phenomena external to her mind. That Millicent's madness is not the result of some biological difference of her brain does not ultimately matter, though, for the social construction of madness relies on cultural ideals like rationality and conformity, which Millicent has surely deviated from. Paul, along with the baggage handler and custodial worker, all function as agents of surveillance who monitor normativity in the station and produce madness in those who violate its boundaries. None of these agents of surveillance is a doctor, but they need not be, as defying American cultural ideals constitutes madness in this era of extreme conformity.

With the sound of a bell, "Mirror Image" trains viewers to identify certain events that take place in the bus station—like Millicent's suitcase moving back and forth from the baggage room—as coming from her doppelganger, then uses this pattern to influence viewers' perception of their own lives. After Millicent has been removed from the station, Paul's bag goes missing with that recognizable ding of a bell, indicating to the audience that he is about to meet his duplicate (S1E21, 23:00). The closing monologue begins as a distraught Paul frantically looks around for his doppelganger—and a rational explanation for his irrational reality (S1E21, 23:37). Serling's last words are, "Call it parallel planes or just insanity. Whatever it is, you find it in the Twilight Zone," equating Millicent's accurate, albeit irrational, interpretation of her reality with madness in a final nod to the social construction of able-mindedness, and the bell dings once more before the credits roll (S1E21, 23:50). The episode's Pavlovian use of the bell trains the audience to recognize each interaction that the protagonists have with their doppelgangers, but at the close of the episode, the protagonists are not to reappear on screen, and the sound of the bell can only precede the remainder of the viewers' lives. With this final ding of the bell, viewers are led to anticipate their own experiences of inexplicable phenomena, experiences that will test their willingness to overlook reality to maintain conformity and avoid madness. They do not really have a fair choice, though, as even Paul, who firmly sticks to his normative rational worldview for most of the episode, is unable to prevent his encounter with his duplicate from altering his perspective. With its use of Pavlovian conditioning, "Mirror Image" encourages viewers to confront the American cultural ideals of rationality and conformity, leaving as their only option the adoption of the mad border body positionality.

The Twilight Zone's "Mirror Image" employs a critical both/and madness metaphor to simultaneously signify the social construction of able-mindedness and the inadequacy of a culture that devalues originality. Millicent initially resists madness, searching for a rational explanation of her doppelganger, but eventually abandons her impulse to conform and trusts her irrational perception of the world around her, becoming a mad border body. Although Millicent is ultimately punished for her refusal to perform able-mindedness and maintain social conformity, "Mirror Image" presents her punishment not as a warning but as a critique, and the episode encourages viewers to reevaluate their own adherence to strictly rational thought—and their complicity in a system that penalizes those who cannot, or will not, maintain normativity. I now turn to the episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which takes viewers' identification with a made-mad protagonist even further by putting them inside Bob's mind as he navigates his anxiety and fights to save his fellow air travelers from a gremlin-caused crash.

V. Mental Breakdown at 20,000 Feet

The episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" follows Bob Wilson after his six-month stay at a sanitarium, prompted by a mental breakdown on a flight. Bob must now take to the skies again in order to return home, testing the effectiveness of his treatment. Although he is allegedly cured of his "over-tension and over-anxiety, due to under-confidence," he has some doubts, and for good reason: In the opening monologue of this episode, Serling forewarns that "contrary to Mr. Wilson's plan" to return to some semblance of a normal American life, the destination of his flight will not be his hometown but instead "the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone" (S5E3, 3:13, 4:15). His journey will be disrupted by a gremlin, who, balancing on the wing of the plane, works to dismantle its engine—and the formerly institutionalized Bob is apparently the only passenger aboard who can see it. Through deft camera work, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" forces viewers to share in Bob's anxiety about air travel, uncertainty of the gremlin's reality, and eventual fear that the plane will be downed by this very real threat. Bob's madness is both material and metaphorical, standing in for rationality and social conformity with his aversion to flight signifying inappropriate middle-class American behavior. His failure to reproduce normative comfort with flight technology contributes to his madness, revealing able-mindedness as socially constructed in part through one's ability to conform to class-based behavioral standards. The episode also portrays modern medicine as inadequate for curing patients whose minds are made mad by their deviation from the American cultural ideals. Nonetheless, Bob, his wife, Julia, and the flight attendant all place an immense amount of faith in the curative powers of medicines and mental institutions. This faith is so strong that, even when given an abundance of evidence with which to question the success of Bob's treatment at the sanitarium, those around him continuously advocate for medical intervention to try to fix Bob's non-normative behavior.

Early on in the episode, visual cues encourage viewers to identify with Bob's anxiety about air travel. From the beginning of the episode, Bob is jumpy, tightly grips his seat's armrest, and makes dramatic, anguished faces. Drawn-out, slightly upward-angled close-ups of Bob's face show his eyes shifting about anxiously as he purses his lips, gulps, and chews at nothing. Progressively more sweat accumulates and drips off his face as the episode moves along. This combination of skillful acting from William Shatner, makeup, and camera direction indicates that Bob's past mental breakdown will not be a one-time occurrence, thereby sparking in viewers a nervous anticipation of his next one. But this anticipation is that of an onlooker from the other side of the television; it is not until the flight attendant makes her final run through the cabin before takeoff that viewers begin to feel trapped in the plane alongside Bob and start to co-experience his anxiety about plane's safety. The flight attendant leaves the cockpit and quickly closes its door behind her, her eyes shifting downward suspiciously (S5E3, 4:45). After closing the door, she looks up, maintaining her strange expression for the slightest moment before putting on her happy, everything's-fine customer-service face. But her smile is forced and becomes distorted both in how she steadfastly holds it, losing any semblance of authenticity, and because of the overhead lighting that darkens her eyes as she moves down the aisle, making her expression appear sinister. The camera follows her briefly down the aisle from a single point, like the eyes of a person craning their neck. This shot is not from Bob's point of view; it is the audience's gaze, and viewers might imagine that they are another passenger on the flight. Bob does not notice the flight attendant's foreboding expression—scrutinizing her face is solely the audience's domain, allowing viewers to identify with Bob's flight anxiety through their own observations. Now trapped in the cabin alongside Bob and sharing his paranoia about the flight's safety thanks to this exclusive evidence, the audience becomes the only other maladjusted occupant of the plane. All of the other passengers besides Bob and the audience have gotten comfortable in their seats and resumed their friendly banter or settled into a nap, reflecting a proper, middle-class American comfort with air travel. Against this standard of normative behavior, Bob and the audience have nonconformist concerns, and the episode builds off this initial identification with Bob's anxiety in subsequent scenes that involve the gremlin by placing the viewer in Bob's body itself for an even more intimate understanding of his perspective.

The plot soon progresses past just portraying Bob's uncured mental illness, with the gremlin appearing as an additional—but inseparable—source of anxiety for Bob and the audience. With the introduction of the gremlin, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" begins incorporating subjective shots from Bob's point of view, forcing viewers into Bob's mind to experience this harrowing event in the most direct way possible. In one example of this, Bob writhes in his seat for over half a minute, trying to work up the courage to open the curtain of his window to see if the gremlin is still on the wing (S5E3, 8:30). The scene alternates between close-ups of Bob's face and subjective shots of his sleeping wife, putting viewers in Bob's head as he prepares himself to take a peek. There is no dialogue or music to ease the building tension in the scene—that is, until Bob finally tears back the curtain, revealing in jump-scare fashion the gremlin's grotesque face pressed onto the glass. Horns blare and cymbals crash, and the film editors cut from a medium close-up of Bob looking at the gremlin to a close-up of the gremlin from Bob's point of view. Viewers now feel Bob's fear, both alongside and as Bob. Telotte notes the importance of the shared gaze between Bob and the audience, arguing that, through the incorporation of subjective shots from Bob's perspective, the audience joins Bob as the only witnesses of the gremlin on the wing, leaving them to "wonder for much of the narrative… if he is simply projecting that nightmarish image, giving external shape to his inner fears, or if, perhaps by virtue of his 'difference', he sees more than normal people." 54 Viewers' wonder about whether or not the gremlin is actually there within the reality of the episode, whether the episode is a tale of madness or misunderstanding, is an additional source of gnawing anxiety for them to wrestle with—and one that they share with Bob. But posing the question of whether this story is one of madness or truth, as Telotte does, precludes the possibility that it might be both. In fact, it surely is: Regardless of the reality of the gremlin—and it is real—Bob will be deemed mad because what he claims to see exists outside the bounds of rational thinking.

As the episode forces viewers into Bob's mad mind, it also works to portray the insecurity of Americans' faith in modern medicine's ability to cure mental ailments. The faith starts out strong: As they settle into their seats, Julia assures Bob, "If you weren't well, Dr. Martin just wouldn't let you fly all the way back home. It's just that simple" (S5E3, 1:50). She has full faith that he is cured of his illness, and works to convince him that his uneasiness is just a reasonable bout of nerves—after all, this is a test of the success of his treatment, but it is one that he should surely pass. But soon Bob starts seeing the gremlin, and the faith that the people around him have in modern medicine begins to dwindle. Rather than critiquing the cure-all potential of American psychiatry, however, Julia and the flight attendant take the path of trying to cover up and ignore Bob's madness. Though she is clearly alarmed by Bob's behavior, the flight attendant is quick to dismiss his first sighting of the gremlin, reassuring Julia that "it's nothing" (S5E3, 7:00). Even after multiple sightings and outbursts, Julia lies to Bob and herself about his sanity: Bob asks her with pleading, teary eyes, "Do I look insane?" to which she forces a chuckle and lightly replies, "No, darling, no" (S5E3, 12:34). But her face oversells her confidence in his sanity, and he knows she is lying. In an attempt to convince her that he is not insane, Bob grabs Julia's face and shoulder in a way that he intends to be comforting, but she flinches—he's gone mad, and that makes him physically dangerous (S5E3, 13:50). Despite what she says about Bob's state of mind, it is clear that Julia no longer believes that Dr. Martin was correct in signing Bob's release papers. Moreover, the primary concern of Julia and the flight attendant seems not to be Bob's welfare but maintaining the appearance of normalcy, feigning Bob's rationality and behavioral conformity, however unsuccessfully.

Despite the ineffectiveness of Bob's past treatment, the sanitarium remains the only avenue imaginable to the normate Julia for fixing his unwanted mental illness. Still trying to convince Julia of his sanity and the danger that the gremlin poses to the passengers on the flight, Bob gambles with his future by appealing to her faith in psychiatry, saying that if she tells the pilots to keep an eye on the wings and they see nothing, he'll recommit himself to the sanitarium (S5E3, 14:18). As the sanitarium clearly did not yield the results Julia would have wanted (a normate for a husband), it is an odd choice to re-appeal to its promise. But the episode portrays this as the only conceivable option for respectable, middle-class Americans of the time, with the treatments administered by the sanitarium concerned first and foremost with correcting non-normative behavior. With nothing else to do but return to the sanitarium once more in attempt to secure unachievable normalcy, Bob's experience (always shared with the audience) of being made mad leaves viewers to ask for more—more from themselves, each other, and in particular from an American culture that enforces rigid cultural ideals of how people should view and participate in the world. Bolstering this reading are the several instances throughout the episode when Bob refuses to take sleeping pills or medicine to calm his nerves. At one point, he even pretends to take a pill and then stealthily discards it (S5E3, 19:30). Bob's rejection of pharmaceuticals is a quiet protest of the controlling system that produces his madness and tries to push him toward conformity. By embracing his madness in order to really see the world around him, Bob can be seen to adopt the politicized positionality of the mad border body, challenging the American cultural ideals of rationality and conformity—and saving his and the other passengers' lives.

The final scenes, in which Bob's anxiety culminates in his killing the gremlin and he is subsequently detained by paramedics and police, portray the danger of compulsory able-mindedness by harnessing the established viewer identification with Bob to offer a dissatisfying—rather than triumphant—conclusion to the episode. Initiating the episode's climax, Bob desperately steals a gun from a police officer on board to take matters into his own hands and kill the gremlin (S5E3, 20:30). He busts open the emergency exit, empties the revolver into the gremlin, and lets out a big yell as blaring horns and shrieking strings compete to see which can make the viewer's heart race faster (S5E3, 21:40). The camera zooms in on his screaming face, lingering momentarily, and then the close-up becomes a transition, in which the audience briefly becomes Bob for one final time: The dissonant music and screams of Bob and the other passengers abruptly cease, and the camera returns to Bob's perspective. The audience as Bob looks up at a police officer, who is at the foot of the gurney that the audience/Bob is strapped onto. The plane has landed safely while the audience/Bob lays unconscious after the incident. Viewers then leave Bob's body to see him being carried out of the plane by paramedics. 55 The flight engineer turns to the flight attendant and describes the incident as "the nuttiest" suicide attempt he's ever heard of, providing a rational, medicalized interpretation of Bob's actions (S5E3, 23:34): There couldn't have been a gremlin on the plane's wing, it must have been a suicide attempt—after all, crazy people do commit suicide. Now outside the plane and about to be loaded into an ambulance, Bob is content. Julia reassures him, "It's all right now, darling"—still putting her faith in modern medicine—and he sits up, responding, "I know. But I'm the only one who does know… right now" (S5E3, 23:40). With Serling's closing monologue, the camera zooms out to reveal the gremlin-damaged plane wing. Bob's first stay at the sanitarium might have had no cause other than his mind, but this one will have had an exterior, tangible reason. Despite the physical evidence of the gremlin's reality, nobody bothers to check the wing to see if Bob had accurately interpreted his surroundings. That nobody inspects the plane for damage can represent nothing except a willful overlooking of the inexplicable for the sake of avoiding being deemed mad alongside Bob. The other passengers had looked on in horror as Bob shot at the gremlin, yet nobody came forward to support his account of what happened. Collectively, the other passengers, the flight crew, the police officers and paramedics, and even Julia band together to sweep the incident under the rug, sacrificing Bob to maintain their sanity. But they don't challenge their worldviews so that the audience can: In seeing this conspiracy against Bob, with its goal to maintain the status quo for those who can benefit from it, viewers are encouraged to question the lengths they go to present themselves as non-mad, even if it means concealing what they know or believe about the world.

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet'' forces viewers into Bob's mad mind to make them rethink the supposed infallibility of rationality, challenge their unquestioning faith in American psychiatry, and critique able-mindedness as a compulsory and dangerous social norm. Bob's madness is a both/and metaphor that reveals how Americans are made mad through their failure to reproduce the standards of middle-class American life. He can be seen as occupying a mad border body, as he resists his devaluation as a madman, is confident in his ability to accurately interpret his surroundings, and uses his non-normativity for the betterment of his community. Bob's ultimate punishment for his insight, while disappointing for the viewer, serves as a call to action for greater compassion, understanding, and acceptance of difference in American society.

VI. "The Arrival" of Madness Through Labor

While Serling was certainly no Communist, The Twilight Zone did on occasion critique economic inequality and the exploitation of workers under American capitalism. 56 One such occasion is the episode, "The Arrival," which follows Federal Aviation Agent Grant Sheckly, whose mind constructs the mysterious case of Flight 107, in which an airplane lands with no passengers, crew, or luggage, in attempt to cope with his failure to maintain a perfect record of solved air crash investigations. 57 By portraying Grant's hallucination of being a perfect laborer in response to his human fallibility, "The Arrival" employs a both/and madness metaphor to argue that having a life consumed by a demanding career, while central to the idealized American middle-class identity, can actually inflict severe damage on an individual's psyche. 58 This depiction of madness caused by the pressures of work counters the 1950s American belief in the unequivocal good that working does for the mind, as seen in educational films like Mental Hospital (1953). Finally, the double plot twist in the latter half of "The Arrival" stimulates viewers' imaginations, guiding them to adopt multiple, contradictory interpretations of the episode—all of which expose the mad-making potential of the demanding labor expectations of American capitalism.

If being a good laborer was central to defining American normativity during the post-World War II economic boom, work became a treatment for Americans' mental illnesses. This ideology appears in the film Mental Hospital, released just eight years prior to "The Arrival." In the film, Fred Clanton is admitted to an Oklahoma state mental institution for symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. 59 Although the film introduces the multiple methods of therapy used at the time to treat people with mental illnesses—including hydrotherapy, electroshock therapy, and insulin shock therapy—labor is named the "first step along the road that leads to recovery and release" (Mental Hospital, 4:47). Chores in the kitchen and on the hospital grounds provide "the therapy of busy hands," an identification of labor not only as helpful in its ability to distract but as the core element of a multifaceted therapeutic regimen (Mental Hospital, 4:33). Fred's job as a hospital grounds crew member eventually cures his schizophrenia, and when his doctor asks how he's feeling, he replies, "Fine, Doctor. As a matter of fact, I feel like going back to work!" (Mental Hospital, 15:42). The film thus portrays labor not only as a preeminent therapy for mental ailments but also the goal of post-treatment life. As a cured Fred packs his suitcase, the narrator reports that the hospital is proud to send him home to "face the world as a man again!" (Mental Hospital, 17:57). Work has banished Fred's mental non-normativity and solidified his masculinity through empowering him to realize his capacity to be a productive member of American society. Given the historical context in which Mental Hospital was produced, it is unsurprising that doctors might prescribe labor as a treatment for mental ailments, as the goal was to mold patients into the normative American identity, a central component of which was being a successful, self-reliant worker. The stakes of these patient transformations couldn't be higher: During the Cold War, bad workers, not excepting those who were unproductive because their mental illnesses impeded their capacities to work jobs designed for normative, able-minded Americans, could, within Red-Scare logic, be Communists, Communist sympathizers, or potential recruits to the Communist cause. Moreover, the inability of an American worker to embody the self-reliance, productivity, and competitiveness of the idealized laborer under capitalism was not solely a failure of the individual but a failure of American capitalism and, by extension, America itself. Americans with mental illnesses, then, must be redirected back to the labor that consolidates American capitalist excellence—in other words, "cured." The Twilight Zone's "The Arrival" counters this dominant ideology of labor-as-treatment, portraying a less optimistic view of work's influence on the mind. 60

While Mental Hospital extols work for its healing power, "The Arrival" imagines its destructive potential. The episode opens in the midst of Grant's mad fantasy, and viewers are led to believe that he has a perfect record in his twenty-two years solving cases of crashed planes. After the mysterious landing, Grant, Airline Executive Bengston, Public Relations Representative Malloy, and Ground Crewmember Robbins gather in the hangar to inspect the plane for clues that could lead them to a rational explanation for why it landed without any passengers or crew. After throwing around ideas, Grant has a flash of brilliance, theorizing that because each of them sees a different model number on the plane's tail and different seat colors, they have all been hypnotized in a conspiracy of "Mass Suggestion"—in other words, the plane doesn't exist (S3E2, 13:00). If "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" are any indication, this is a bold and potentially dangerous claim for Grant to make, and Malloy provides the obligatory "Are you mad?" in response to it (S3E2, 14:12). Viewers might expect that Grant, like Millicent and Bob, will soon be forcibly taken to an asylum, but although his theory approaches irrationality, it only matches the irrational situation that everybody in the hangar knows to be real, so he is given the opportunity to prove it. Outside the hangar, he puts his hand in one of the plane's running engines, and, instead of mangling or killing him, the plane disappears, leaving behind a very satisfied Grant (S3E2, 16:41). For a moment, it seems that irrationality triumphs over reason yet again in the Zone's reality, but then the other men disappear, and Grant's theory turns on its head. Viewers learn that the entire mystery was an elaborate trick of Grant's mind in a plot twist that refocuses the entire episode retrospectively. Throughout the episode, Grant notes the familiarity of the pilot's and passenger's names; they turn out to be casualties of a disappeared flight—Flight 107—from seventeen or eighteen years ago that was lost in fog and never found, making it the only case that Grant could never solve (S3E2, 20:52). Grant's failure would come to haunt him and ruin his confidence in his work. Upon realizing his mental break, Grant becomes hysterical, and denial sets in as he whimpers, "But I never been licked on a case yet. Never. We've always found the causes. Always," (S3E2, 21:47). Rather than accept his inability to solve this one case, Grant has constructed an alternate world where everyone around him is confronted with a problem that only he can solve, an irrational situation that requires an equally outside-the-box explanation that only he can provide, thereby absolving him of his real-world inadequacy in his work. This single failure on the job marks Grant as a failed American man and reveals the immense power that work has on the mind and one's standing in American society. 61 While this twist deviates the episode from the pattern that emerges when viewing "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" together, "The Arrival" nonetheless exposes madness as culturally produced—this time, specifically out of the pressures of work in a society that makes excellence in one's career a primary site of identity-formation.

As is common for episodes of The Twilight Zone, which often encourage multiple, overlapping, and even contradictory interpretations, "The Arrival" ends with a second twist that calls into question the revelation that Grant's mind constructed the landing of the empty plane. In his concluding monologue, Serling reports that, like Millicent and Bob, Grant will be taken to an asylum, with the incident of the mysterious plane landing clinically diagnosed as an "illusion." But, he continues, addressing the viewer directly, "If you choose to think that the explanation has to do with an airborne Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship in a fog-enshrouded night on a flight that never ends, then you're doing your business in an old stand in the Twilight Zone," (S3E2, 23:58). This conclusion twists the story again, in a much vaguer way: Was the empty plane real? Could it somehow be connected to the Flight 107 that was lost nearly two decades prior? Does Grant's insistence on the reality of his illusion signify his adoption of the mad border body positionality, from which he acknowledges his irrational lived experiences despite the "evidence" of their fabrication? The ending raises questions that the audience is unequipped to answer with the information given in the episode, but discerning the truth in this fictional story is beside the point: "The Arrival" provides the audience with multiple possible interpretations to choose from because the driving goal behind The Twilight Zone was to stimulate viewers' minds and force them to think beyond the limits set by the American cultural ideals of rational thought and conformity. Furthermore, no matter which interpretation(s) a given viewer will arrive at, Grant ends up in a mental hospital all the same; right or not about this Flying Dutchman, he is made mad by the unachievable standards set by American capitalism and removed from the public, not only for his irrationality but also for his inability to cope with the pressures of his work.

Whereas Mental Hospital offers labor as a cure-all for mental illness and a defense of the American way of life, "The Arrival" presents labor as a danger to the psyche when made central to one's identity as dictated by American capitalism. With "The Arrival," The Twilight Zone uses madness as a metaphor for living in a society that idolizes work. In the process, the episode locates an individual's inability to work in accordance with American standards of success as a source of madness, revealing the social construction of able-mindedness. As with "Mirror Image" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Arrival" challenges viewers to rethink not only the social conformity and strict rationality of late-1950s/early-1960s American culture but also the many ways that America produces and devalues mad Americans.

VII. Conclusion

The Twilight Zone was born out of an American culture that idealized social conformity and rational thought, during a time of post-World War II economic expansion that encouraged Americans to lead work-centered lives. Dissatisfied with these restrictive cultural ideals, Serling's television series frequently used madness as a narrative device to expand viewers' minds. Viewers learn from The Twilight Zone's title sequences that the Zone does not follow the rules of the real world, opening up the possibility that characters like Millicent, Bob, and Grant are correctly interpreting the inexplicable phenomena that they experience. This potential for accurate irrationality exposes the protagonists' madness as culturally produced, with the characters around them policing their adherence to the normative standards of middle-class American behavior. From this surveillance, it becomes clear that able-mindedness is a compulsory social norm. While the language of compulsory able-mindedness that I have used throughout this essay comes from twenty-first-century disability studies scholarship, this mid-twentieth-century television series nonetheless portrayed madness as socially constructed, the negative half of a binary that determines Americans' standing in society, right to self-determination, and humanity.

With this paper, I have worked to demonstrate that scholarly analyses of The Twilight Zone have thus far overlooked madness as a crucial component of the series's critiques of the American culture of its time. On the one hand, The Twilight Zone uncovers the important roles that social conformity, rationality, and the idolization of labor play in the production of madness in American citizens. On the other hand, the series reveals able-mindedness as a foundational element of these cultural ideals. Rather than merely arguing for a scholarly identification of madness in The Twilight Zone, I have attempted to highlight madness as an integral yet underappreciated part of the series's critical stance on American society.

In addition to portraying the mutual construction of able-mindedness and these cultural ideals, The Twilight Zone consistently presents the asylum as a dangerous facet of American society. By the end of their episodes, Millicent, Bob, and Grant all end up in asylums as punishment for their nonnormative worldviews. While these episodes do not include scenes set in mental hospitals, others do feature medical facilities to critique their treatment of mad people and their powerful position in mid-twentieth century American society. "Twenty Two" depicts the hospital where Liz Powell stays to recover from "overwork and nervous fatigue" (and dreams that turn out to be visions of the future) as a callous place where doctors silence their patients by rationalizing everything and revel in the power that their careers grant them, even sexually harassing those in their care. 62 "Person or Persons Unknown" presents the medical field as a branch of law enforcement, with David Gurney, who wakes up one morning as a stranger to everyone he knows, removed by police from his alleged place of employment and institutionalized. 63 When David escapes his detainment, the police and his doctor band together to hunt him down and return him to his prison, the asylum. Taken together, "Mirror Image," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," and "The Arrival," as well as "Twenty Two," "Person or Persons Unknown," and other episodes, reveal The Twilight Zone's anti-asylum stance. Given that The Twilight Zone did not rise to fame as an anthology of anti-asylum texts, it would be a stretch to argue that the series contributed as much to the American deinstitutionalization movement as, say, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. But it would be equally inaccurate to claim that the series did not offer subtle yet provocative representations of mental hospitals to encourage viewers to question the authority of these institutions to override Americans' freedoms, as the series consistently denounced asylums as punitive detention centers where made-mad Americans could be sequestered from the American public sphere indefinitely.

In addition to bringing madness into the scholarship on The Twilight Zone and recognizing its episodes as pop-culture anti-asylum texts, this essay joins the work of Schalk and Holder in its understanding of the potential for science fiction to critique ableism and imagine anti-ableist futures. 64 Holder notes that the science fiction genre is often put to ableist uses in stories wherein advanced societies possess technologies with which to fully "cure" (read: normalize) people with disabilities, thereby presenting the erasure of disability from society as progress, but imagining disability-free futures is far from the only way that science fiction can convey stories of mental and bodily non-normativity. 65 With "Mirror Image," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Arrival," and other episodes, The Twilight Zone presents stories in which made-mad protagonists are removed from society, effectively returning their surrounding environments to normalcy by disguising the actual, inexplicable phenomena of the Zone as madness—but these are stories not of a utopian future but of a deeply flawed present. Although the strange happenings of the Zone are fictional and did not reflect the reality of 1950s and '60s America, characters like Millicent, Bob, and Grant demanded empathy from their contemporary viewers who were subjected to relentless pressure to perform compulsory able-mindedness, social conformity, rationality, and perfect labor—despite the impossibility of success. With each American's latent madness waiting to rear its ugly head as they dealt with the daily struggles of modern American life, becoming a Millicent, a Bob, or a Grant was not as impossible as it might initially seem. The science-fiction dimension of the Twilight Zone illuminated the real-world issues of its time, pushing viewers to find creative, nonnormative, or even mad alternatives to the American status quo.