Roadkill

The past couple of weeks I've been living in America. It hasn't changed at all since was here in August 2005. There is still hardly anything to do here so I end up watching TV (which is amazing) or downloading gigabytes of stuff off of my wireless broadband connection (yes I'm showing off... I'm taking advantage of my only opportunity). One thing I've been watching lately is the Twilight Zone, a sci-fi series that first aired in the 50s and 60s. In many ways it indirectly addressed many social issues in America at the time. There was one episode that really messed with my head and made me question everything I was brought up to believe was normal.

It starts off with a woman, Janet Tyler, in a hospital with bandages covering her face lying in bed. She's on her 11th visit to get facial reconstruction surgery and if she doesn't look "normal" this time, she'll be forced to live in a village with other people with the same "disability". There is always something blocking the hospital workers faces, whether it's a shadow or something in the way, which adds to the creepiness of this episode. Finally they take the bandages off at an agonizingly slow speed. Then finally, they all come off, everyone is shocked and she screams she looks up and she looks completely normal (actually quite hot, her name is Donna Douglas in real life). She tries running, but they pin her to the wall, The Doctor turns and shows his face, and he looks like some sort of pig-type alien thingy. They show the faces of everyone else, and they're all the same, and in this parallel universe, the beautiful are considered ugly and the ugly are considered beautiful. She runs around the hospital trying to get out and runs into a room where she bumps into the leader of the village that she would be forced into. Walter Smith, the leader, (awesome name by the way) tells her about it and says "there's a very old saying 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'" and tells her to keep saying that when she goes to the village.
This twist really made me think about how people are treated differently just for not being "normal". We have no right to define what is normal. It also made me think about what "beauty" is. Is it really some chick that resembles the Half-life babe? It depends... In our own little world, the answer is yes, if we're talking about physical beauty, however 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' which discredits anything seen by anyone but the beholder, whoever that may be. Who are we to say anything is ugly? Janet was brought up believing that she was abnormal but if she lived in our world, she could walk down a street and not get any negative attention at all. I'm sure that if we lived in the dimension that this story was set in, then we'd all be forced to live in that village of "freaks", who we’d find to be normal. That's why this episode made me think. What if I was the freak? Treated differently ever since you were brought into this world. In our little world, it’d be someone who is looked down upon because of their skin pigment, a relative, a disability, the list goes on... something they can’t control nonetheless. Who decides to make them this way? God? Because I find it hard to believe that God is what caused us to suffer. God makes us the way we are, but he doesn’t make us suffer. It’s man that makes us suffer; we put down our own kind. We decided what we think is normal and we want to attack anything that is different. Why can’t we stop attacking each other? When will we stop choosing to create problems for each other and evolve? All we’ve been doing since the dawn of creation is attacking our own kind… we could all be living like kings... if we all chose to... but that day will never come.

Anyways, there's a lot of thought food in the Twilight Zone series, check it out. I've sketched a few very awesome frames from the Twilight Zone as well. Guess TV ain’t what it used to be… what else is new? Yeah the name of my blog is new… got tired of degrading myself… it got old after a while… I’ll change it again when something else pops into my head.