Based on your viewing of The Outer Limits episode “The Bellaro
Shield” and understanding of Jeffrey Sconce’s essay on the show,
explain how The Outer Limits expresses and potentially
intensifies particular anxieties prevalent during the early 1960s.
Before the images of the show The Outer Limits had the opportunity to grace the screen, an ominous message directly addressing the audience blared out, “There is nothing wrong with your television set, do not attempt to adjust the picture, we are controlling transmission...” First aired on the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, and during the period when the world was plunged into uncertainty and paranoia due to tensions amongst world powers in the Cold War Era, The Outer Limits was a show that was cloaked in controversy. To many, television was still a foreign and somewhat “alien” form of technology and imposed a fear within the general population of technology that was being controlled by a source that would glean the ability to “control” the American family. As well, many American families saw the terror of this control even more frightening than going and viewing a horror movie, because while after a horror film they had the ability to go home and separate themselves from it, The Outer Limits didn’t give them such an ability, they were home. There was also the issue of “monsters in the static,” or households’ television sets containing ghosts or other otherworldly monsters within its body. These superstitions and fears remained even years after The Outer Limits was cancelled. This fear was primarily stimulated, like that of the “control” of television from the fact that television was a new form of technology that many did not quite understand. As well as creating a fear of the paranormal and the inability to control one’s television set, there was also the fear that the show was creating psychological effect of “electronic nowhere” which was believed to have amplified the feeling of claustrophobia within individuals, especially housewives, as they found themselves trapped within the home. This often resulted in a number of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia due to these people seeing their homes, not as safe havens from the world, but rather trapping them and subjecting them to the terrors that existed within the screen of their television.
ReplyDelete