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The Virus is Due on Maple Street
What warning can a classic episode of The Twilight Zone bring to the COVID-19 crisis?
COVID-19 is the first real global crisis of the 21st Century, and with accelerating global warming and unprecedented CO2 levels, it won’t be the last. Some pundits have asked why so much attention is being paid to this epidemic, with extraordinary measures being taken at national levels, when it is nowhere near as much a threat as climate change which is an existential threat to our civilisation if not our species. It’s the immediacy of the perceived threat, something that people are seeing on a personal level, responding to the hysteria whipped up by the media. It’s ‘every man for himself.’
Seeing the videos of people panic buying and actually fighting over toilet rolls, I was reminded of an episode of The Twilight Zone: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. First broadcast in 1960, the episode, written and narrated by Rod Serling himself, observes what happens over the course of an afternoon as an ordinary suburban street dissolves into anarchy and murder after what is no more than a power cut. A boy remembers the plot of a comic book which told about the precursor to an alien invasion, and suddenly friends and neighbours, consumed with paranoia, turn on each other seeing each other’s usual behaviour as now somehow sinister. The twist in the tale? The camera zooms out to two…
