You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Social trauma teleplays are a site where the dramaturgical and the psychoanalytic meet. Social traumata disrupt the imaginative processes of a culture. In the wake of these disruptions, stories begin to return — told in theatre, novels, poetry, film, and television. Some stories contribute to the distortion, falsification, and suppression of these ruptures. Others confront the rupture. They resist and repair.1
Rod Serling, perhaps the preeminent script writer of the Golden Age of Television, famously captured the paradox and power of our faculties of imagination.
[I]t is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.
Serling and his compatriots who played with the lights and shadows of the new medium of television were not only intrigued by the in-between zones of reality and fantasy but sought to chart a course from our deepest fears toward our highest aspirations.
These writers had come of age amidst global upheavals: the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, the Second World War. Their work in the 1950s reflected those upheavals, while also turning to the great turmoils of the day, the Atomic threat, anti-communist hysteria, and the rumbling movements for civil rights and equality.
The reverberations of these social currents, ruptures, and threats pressed writers and other artists to give an account of origins and effects, as well as offering possible paths of resistance and repair. What one of us has termed the “social trauma teleplay” describes a genre of early television that aimed above all else at articulating an ethical challenge to its