The original Twilight Zone was one of the most formative and influential television shows of all time, and a personal favorite of mine since childhood. For ten-year-old me, it was a perfect blend of somewhat scary and thoughtful sci-fi/horror entertainment. It was stimulating and complex and frightening in a way that really affected me as a child. I remember watching “To Serve Man” for the first time, learning, along with the protagonist, that he will most likely not survive his Martian vacation, and then having to go to a friend’s birthday party as soon as it ended. It was the first time I felt unsafe in the daylight and needless to say the party didn’t feel so fun and innocent either after that. It was the first show I remember watching that changed and challenged my views of the world and I’m eternally grateful to Rod Serling for fighting for its place in the world.
Last semester I took a class called “Sexual Objects”, an art history class focused on sex and sexuality in contemporary art and culture. In that class, we had multiple discussions around the ideas of sex dolls and robots, focusing on documentaries like “Guys and Dolls” (very much not the musical) about Real Doll sex doll owners. I began thinking about the “consciousness” of these non-living women, and the ways their consciousness’ and their autonomy was inferred and dictated by the men who owned them. It seemed disturbing, that the woman of those men’s dreams was one who couldn’t have an identity beyond what was impressed upon them by their lovers.
Following this thread of consciousness and autonomy, I began thinking about the idea of consciousness in non-human women in terms of speculative and science fiction. Since its conception, these genres have told stories that has challenged our perception of humanity, using non-human creatures and creations to ask questions of sentience beyond the sphere of natural organisms. I decided ultimately to focus on the women of The Twilight Zone (1959), due in part to my familiarity and experience with the show and the stories it tells and the sheer number of episodes that focus on non-human women. I was intrigued with how one of my favorite shows explored these threads, and more importantly, if the women were given enough character growth to explore these threads on their own. The results were a little more complicated than I had expected.
While these characters posed questions of consciousness, of the souls inside these synthetic women, in many cases their inner lives were much less explored, or explained, than the lives of the men around them. Ballet Dancer gets a few good lines in “Five Characters In Search of An Exit”, sure, but the story no doubt belongs to the Major. She just gets to cry for him at the end. And Alicia may get to prove to Correy she can feel and think in “The Lonely”, but she remains a satellite character meant to relieve Correy’s loneliness until he gets to feel sad over her quick and dirty execution. Viewing these stories again, I felt a surge of anger and sympathy of these characters whose stories, in some cases, I felt robbed them of greater examinations of their inner lives. Thus the project of this zine turned less into an examination of consciousness but an exploration of these feelings of thoughtfulness and rage and an attempt to give these characters the closer examination that they deserve.
The title of this zine comes from the first episode featuring a synthetic woman, “The Lonely”. As James Correy unpacks a woman (Alicia) from a strange box left to him by a sympathetic cargo pilot, he reads what is assumed to be an informational booklet on his new companion. “For all intents and purposes” he reads incredulously, pacing back and forth around Alicia in deactivation mode, “this creature is a woman”. It’s a strange remark that certainly is meant to make Alicia’s humanity seem more incidental and insidious to Correy when she does wake up, but I kind of really dug it. It felt kind of mysterious and powerful as a descriptor, like Vampirella’s calling card. Ultimately, it just felt right and that’s all ya really need for a snazzy title. I hope you enjoy these creatures, or at the very least, learn to see them a little differently.
