SUBTEXT IN "WALKING DISTANCE"
Directed by Robert Stevens in 1959 for the Twilight Zone television series, "Walking Distance" presents interesting issues for subtextual analysis based on dialogue, mise-en-scene, Bernard Herrmann's underscore, and editing. It also teaches a careful attention to all elements of a film.The dialogue emphasizes years and ages several times in this brief episode. Yet the years don't add up.
Martin Sloan is 36 years old (2:2), but he hasn't been back to Homewood in 20 years! That means he left at 16 and hasn't returned to see his parents in all that time.
These years cannot be ignored since they're repeated throughout the film: to the gas station attendant, to the counter clerk, by the father, by the host and narrator (Rod Serling.
Sloan's driver's license expires 25 years after he sees his father, in 1960. Hence the date of his meeting with his father in the past is 1935. Since Sloan hasn't been back to Homewood in 20 years, the current date is the Rock 'n' Roll era, 1960.
So the dialogue suggests Sloan's happy childhood was an illusion. But the mise-en-scene shows this too. In no scene is either parent shown to be sympathetic people; their reaction to Sloan is one of either hostility (when they don't know who he is) or cold indifference (when the father does learn who he is). In fact, the parents slam the door in Sloan's face (1:4); to slam the door in one's face is a common idiom of rejection ("he slammed the door in my face").
We assume this fantasy is a Freudian repetition of past rejection. (Note the similarities to "Little Girl Lost," another in the Twilight Zone series, also with a subtext of parental [specifically, maternal] rejection.)
Related to this motif of rejection is the motif of lost identity, emphasized in the mise-en-scene. Four times the issue of identity is developed. In three of them, Sloan tries to prove his identity (who he is) by showing his name on his identity cards, as if one's identity is not in one's person but on a card. Twice his claim to being who he is is rejected by others (the boy; the parents: 1:1-2; 2:1). Neither the boy (Sloan as a child) nor his mother cares about the identity on his cards.
The point is, true identity is based on love, not on laminated cards issued by the government. This is especially shown in 2:2, when the father knows for certain Sloan is his son; yet it doesn't change his stern attitude in the least: the father shows no sign of love at all, reflecting the real state of affairs in the past, despite Sloan's apparent nostalgia for the past.
In fact, Sloan's nostalgia for the past is never expressed in terms of parents but in terms of park bands, merry-go-rounds, etc. as if they were an escape from an unhappy childhood, not a fulfillment of an unhappy childhood: or why revisit the past? As the father tells Sloan, "you have been looking behind you." We assume Sloan is longing for a good relationship with his parents that never was and that can never be, now that his parents are dead.
As Freud taught us, we revisit the past (as in a repetition compulsion) because the past (the family melodrama) has been unresolved in the present. People with good relationships in the past can live in the present; Sloan is haunted by the past because he has had an unhappy past, as is shown by the fact that he lived with his aunt each summer and he hasn't revisited his parents in 20 years!
So the name of Homewood is not only a pun (on "homeward") but a paradox: because there IS no home to go back to!
Moreover the illusion continues in the present, as the form cut from the merry-go-round to the spinning record in the jukebox shows (2:3-4): the circle of illusion continues in Rock 'n' Roll as it did on the merry-go-round: both are escapes from an unhappy childhood.
The quest for identity is poignantly shown by the scene in which the young Sloan carves his name into the wood (1:3). Who Martin Sloan is is the main theme of the film, which shows us that now, in the present, all he is is a name on identity cards. (The name Martin Sloan is repeated throughout, including by host, Rod Serling, as if to emphasize the theme of identity—or the lack of it.)
Finally, Bernard Herrmann's great score is elegiac throughout, as if in mourning for a childhood that in fact never was. (Herrmann's elegiac score is similar to the elegiac viola solo in "Little Girl Lost," another Twilight Zone episode that Herrmann scored.)
The ending of "Walking Distance" is similarly elegiac. Sloan is as unlikely to find happiness in the present as he was in finding it in the past. But in being rejected by his father once again (the father tells him sternly he is not welcome), Sloan accepts the fact of his failed relationship to his parents and, to this extent at least, has achieved some kind of catharsis, or purging of his unhappy past.
This catharsis is a kind of wisdom, shown by Sloan's present limp: a symbol (as in the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the night) of Sloan's night journey into his past (the cathartic scenes in "Walking Distance" occur at night). The limp suggests a loss of innocence as well as a gain in wisdom.
Is this analysis of subtext and theme in "Walking Distance" "over reading"? After all, it's "only" a television show.
I don't think so. The dialogue is too insistent and carefully worded to be mere coincidence; the mise-en-scene (the showing of identity cards, the cold parents) is too evident; the underscore elegiac, not merely nostalgic. All these cannot be accidents, but carefully designed elements to dramatize a subtext that, in this case (unlike the case of "Little Girl Lost"), rises to the level of a theme.
