Now that I finally have a Netflix account, I’m renting and rewatching movies and TV shows that freaked me out when I saw them as a kid. One of the first such shows I thought to review was from the ’80s revival of The Twilight Zone, specifically a segment from the first episode named “A Little Peace and Quiet” and directed by Wes Craven.
I would have seen this on TV in the autumn of 1985, and the story is simple enough I remembered it fairly well. A stressed out housewife unearths from her flower garden a golden necklace with a small, sundial-shaped pendant. She puts it on and discovers she can stop time by saying “shut up” and restart it by saying “start talking.”
This comes in handy for enjoying relaxing breakfasts without her four demonic children screeching and her idiot husband complaining that she hasn’t laundered something of his. She freezes time in the supermarket to nab the last box of Choco Poppers cereal. Later at home, two young preppies going door to door stop by to raise her awareness about the alarming growth of the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal. She zaps time, drags their stiffened bodies down her walk and lays them flat on her lawn. Then she retreats indoors and restarts time, much to their confusion.
This vague threat of nuclear annihilation runs through the episode, popping up in a radio broadcast early on and later during a televised newscast about stalled peace talks. And it all ends with the Russians launching the Big One, apparently directly at the housewife’s neighborhood. She freezes time at the sound of air raid sirens and wanders outside in her robe to the town’s square, where everyone is panicked and motionless. As she comes to an old man staring at the sky, she follows his gaze to see the missile of doom suspended in midair.
O.K., discard the frozen-time effects, especially earlier in the episode when the actors strain so hard to stand motionless that they waver. Definitely discard that missile, a blatantly cheesy effect even for the mid-’80s. (Sample writer-director commentary on the DVD: “We would have done that a little differently,” followed by laughter.)
Nuclear paranoia wasn’t keeping me up at night in the mid-’80s, but it may have been responsible for a certain malaise, particularly with haunting nuclear-holocaust entertainments like The Day After and the “Russians Are Bad Guys” streak in lighter fare (Rocky IV, Rambo III, etc.).
But what really freaked me out was the idea that this Twilight Zone woman was trapped forever in a purgatory of her own creation: if she restarts time, everyone dies. As I rewatched the episode I realized I had forgotten that it ends simply with a stillframe of the missile. In my mind, I had extended the story to include the woman wandering alone, taking food and making shelter wherever she needed, roaming the abandoned country, maybe at some point growing so lonely or desparate that she restarts time and ends it all. That still kinda freaks me out.