Dalha D.
Mannikin
I was recently watching episodes from the old Twilight Zone series, and stumbled across Season 3, Episode 33, The Dummy. What struck me about this episode was how eerily Ligottiesque it was. There's just something about it that's always stuck with me, it's got such a different character than much of the rest of the show. Almost like it has clandestine knowledge about the nature of the human condition that hides itself effortlessly in metaphor.
It starts off in a dingy little night club, 1960's era. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air, and people are closely gathered at tables around a lighted stage, drinks in hand. The main act: A ventriloquist and second-rate entertainer Jerry Etherson, and the dummy in his lap named Willie. They start rattling off the routine, but as it continues, Willie shoots off what appear to be unexpected lines, and Jerry rushes on to other jokes, as though Willie was going off-script. At the close of the show, Willie keeps making jokes while Jerry is bowing out, and he claps his hand around Willie's mouth to get him to shut up, seemingly all a part of the act. But the second Jerry walks behind the curtain, he lets out an arrested yelp, pulls his hand away from Willie's mouth, and runs off backstage. The dancers behind the curtain notice this, and we see their faces contort slightly in confusion as Jerry makes his way out.
In the next scene, Jerry is seen in a small back room, relatively unfurnished, with music trickling in from the next act. He makes sure to slam the door securely shut, somewhat muting the music, and takes a deep breath. He looks at his hand for a second before walking over to the mirror, dumping Willie on a chair behind him, and sits down at it. He holds his head in his hands for a second before inspecting his hand again, which is revealed to bear the deep impressions of teeth marks. He looks up at the reflection of Willie, whose head is turned away, and looks back down in deep consternation.
Cut to Willie, who is now staring with that nonsensical expression of stupefied visciousness and cruelty, intently at Jerry. Those glassy eyes. Those dead puppet eyes.
Cut to an over the shoulder shot of Jerry. We see a double reflection of him, once in the large mirror in front of him, and another, closer reflection of his face in a hand mirror off to the side, such that we can see his every facial expression. The larger reflection shows Jerry looking downwards, with Willie menacingly lingering just behind him. Jerry's eyes slowly crawl up to look into the mirror, but just before his gaze meets Willie's, he suddenly spins wildly around to face him. The camera pans over to Willie... Whose head is now 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
Jerry slowly swivels back around, and stares into space for a non-trivial amount of time, evidently considering this for a moment. Then he stoops down and pulls open a drawer, and when his hand comes back he's clutching a bottle of whiskey and a small paper cup. He sits up and tips his head back to take a drink, and as his eyes move to the mirror again he happens to catch a glance of Willie, who's now looking at him directly, with that same expression of dreamy malignance. Jerry stares back. Just then the door opens, and as if on cue the music from the stage stops.
Jerry's agent, Frank, enters into the scene, and after seeing the bottle of whiskey on the table the two of them have a heated exchange about Jerry's alcoholism-fueled "delusions" about Willie. Here are some notable lines:
"You give in to some bad hooch, and then you have bad nightmares. Take away the hooch and you take away the nightmares." "No, you got the chronology wrong, Frank. First the nightmares, and then the hooch. I drink because I have to, and I have to... Because of him."
"It's like a well-rehearsed off-color gag. Patient goes from himself to a lifeless dummy, and then is unable to separate himself from the dummy. Oh, that's all very psychiatric and erudite, and worth about two-and-a-half bucks a word, but it's not right. It's not right! I told them that, I tell you that. It's no more schizophrenia-paranoia than it is athlete's foot or a head cold! WILLIE'S ALIVE!"
At the end of this scene Frank leaves, and Jerry decides to get rid of Willie and use his other dummy, Goofy, for the next act. After the show is over, he places Goofy on the couch, snatches Willie by the collar, and walks over to the trunk by the door. He flips the dummy around to face him, and takes a moment to look him in the eye. "Sweet dreams Willie, your next booking is in the fireplace." Jerry then throws him in and slams the lid down, making sure to fasten all three latches and pull the key out of the lock. As Jerry is about to leave, Frank walks in to tell him that he's resigning from the club.
"You and I have had it, Jerry. I have gone the route and then some. You don't need an agent, you need medical help. I think it's reached that now."
"You never believed me, did you, Frank?"
"Yeah, I believed you. I believed you had obsessions. I believed those obsessions were eating you up alive, but I also believe, Jerry, you're letting them!"
"He talks when I don't talk. He tells jokes I never heard of before, gives me bum cues. He's alive, Frank. That's why I locked him in that trunk. Goofy and I are going to fly out of here, Frank. We'll fly to Miami, Los Angeles, maybe that place in Kansas City."
"The place in Kansas City is the same as Miami, which is the same as Los Angeles, which is the same as Sioux City, Iowa, which is the same as any town south, west, north of here. They're all the same, Jerry, and you're not going to leave Willie by hopping a plane, or a train, or a taxi, or a one-horse shay. This thing you lick right here, this thing you lick at the source. This thing you... Don't run away from."
"We'll see."
Later, as Jerry is heading out of the back door, carrying Goofy, he is greeted by a man doing some accounting at a desk by the door. The second Jerry turns around he hears a voice say, "You're not gonna leave me in that stuffy old trunk... Are ya?" He stops, paralyzed. He slowly turns around and stares at the man sharply. He notices Jerry's still there and asks, "Was there something, Mr. Etherson?"
"Did you say something?"
"I said... Goodnight, that's all."
Jerry's eyes drift away and you can see in his countenance the confirmation of some malicious truth. He tells the man goodnight. He walks out the door, and after a few paces lights up a cigarette, but just as he does so he hears the voice again: "Aww come on old sport, I wouldn't lock you in a trunk..." Jerry looks up to someplace off screen, as though someone was watching from above. He half whispers, "Willie? Where are you Willie?" He's still looking around when the door behind him suddenly opens, and two of the dancers from the previous show appear. This rips him out of his bewildered stupor and he trades farewells. He then picks Goofy back up and walks down the vacant alley in the dead of night. At this point the plucking violins start up to symbolize his heightening dread and increasing heartbeat. From behind, he hears "Hee-hee-hee-hee..." He whips around to find no one. He continues walking again, hesitatingly, and with an escalating air of distress, before starting into a frantic sprint. He comes to a screeching halt when he sees, cast against an adjacent wall, the shadow of Willie sitting in a chair.
"Hey Garibaldi! ...Didn't you forget someone? Didn't you forget... Willie?"
He's petrified with fright, the camera rotates to symbolize that he is now completely unhinged from reality, and he stumbles backwards into a wall in complete disorientation, as though the whole of the world was rolling like a marble under his feet. Just then is heard the clacking of high heels from behind him, it's one of the dancers again. She's startled to see him in such a state of dismay. Being so desperate to not be alone, he makes up an excuse that he was waiting for her, and that he wants to get a drink with her or something, anything to not be alone. As he's explaining this to her, he begins, by degrees, to become more agitated. He starts to get closer, grabbing on to her arm, lightly at first, but with an increasingly tight hold. She's immediately disturbed by this, and while he's pleading with her she goes to push him away, to no avail. He gets closer, grabbing on tighter, and his tone takes on a fever pitch of desperation and derangement, to the point of yelling. She runs away after ripping herself out of his grasp, terrified and screaming. Jerry stands there, now in a state of delirium.
"Ee-he-he-he-he... Eeeehe-he-he-hee..."
The music suddenly ascends to a crescendo, and in an instant, he's running back through the alley. He throws open the backdoor and runs into the nightclub. It's even more abandoned than the alley. Odd shadows are cast against the walls. He runs around the nightclub in a frenzy, the scenes shot at strange, twisted and tilting angles all the while the disembodied voice of Willie is psychotically taunting him with jokes from act with Goofy. When he reaches the backroom, Willie is now exploding with bone-chilling, demoniacal laughter. Jerry runs to the trunk, and, struggling with the latches, he tears open the lid.
He throws his hands into the trunk and wrenches out the flailing and screeching Willie, all the while the asylum orchestra is playing with utter frenzy. He struggles with Willie before slamming him down onto the floor and smashing his skull open with a sickening shatter of porcelain and splintering of wood, the dummy equivalent of snapping bones and rending skin.
In an instant, all is dead silent. Cut to a close-up of Jerry's face, his wide open, bloodshot eyes conveying his plummet into total psychosis. He beholds the horror of the scene: On the ground are a broken and twisted pair of glasses, an ear, and a glass eyeball, pointing directly back at him. He stoops down in uncertainty, picking up the pair of glasses and with painstaking slowness, pulls them up to inspect. As he rises, his gaze moves up to focus straight into the camera. His countenance falls back down to the floor, and he keeps his eyes on whatever's there on the ground as he stumbles back and hits the light switch behind him.
The orchestra sets the scene with lunatic mockery and we discover the remains of Goofy, his limbs bent at strange angles and his entire head in pieces. Jerry whispers, "Wrong one... How could I get the wrong one?" For a second or two he sits there, pondering, and a startling response with a telling note of sarcasm is heard behind Jerry.
"Maybe you need glasses..."
The camera snaps to the couch, where is perched Willie with a condescending half-smile. Cut to a hyper close-up of Willie's face. Here we can see how the light shines off his watery puppet eyes, where a hollow blackness resides. "Why don't you take the eye test? Now what am I holding out in front of me? I'll give you a hint, it's between D and F, don't peek, don't peek. Whaddaya say, pardner, whaddaya say... What do you say... we get down to business...?"
"...How can you be real when you're made of wood?"
"Hee-hee-hee-heeee...Eee-hee... You made me real. You poured words into my head, you moved my mouth, you stuck out my tongue, you jerk. Don't you get it? You made me what I am today... I hope you're... Satisfied... From the song, of the same name..."Jerry just sits and looks at him. We can see the shadow of realization, of something sinister, pass through him, and he hangs his head in a final despair to the tune of Willie's intensifying shrieks of laughter which reach a zenith, and the scene closes.
At the introduction of the next scene, we get the sense of déjà vu as the setting is almost identical to one at the beginning of the episode. A man with a chair appears from behind the curtain, sets it down, and introduces the next act, "Willie and Jerry". Cue the applause. Now we're backstage, facing the backs of the pair, who come out as the curtain gets pulled back and they sit down. The routine begins as usual, and the camera walks up to the both of them, turning around to reveal Willie, now a human. The camera pans over to Jerry, now a dummy with a hideous and startling complexion, stretched into a permanent smile. The scene ends as the two repeat the same inane jokes that were heard from the beginning.
Think of it: wood waking up.
It starts off in a dingy little night club, 1960's era. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air, and people are closely gathered at tables around a lighted stage, drinks in hand. The main act: A ventriloquist and second-rate entertainer Jerry Etherson, and the dummy in his lap named Willie. They start rattling off the routine, but as it continues, Willie shoots off what appear to be unexpected lines, and Jerry rushes on to other jokes, as though Willie was going off-script. At the close of the show, Willie keeps making jokes while Jerry is bowing out, and he claps his hand around Willie's mouth to get him to shut up, seemingly all a part of the act. But the second Jerry walks behind the curtain, he lets out an arrested yelp, pulls his hand away from Willie's mouth, and runs off backstage. The dancers behind the curtain notice this, and we see their faces contort slightly in confusion as Jerry makes his way out.
In the next scene, Jerry is seen in a small back room, relatively unfurnished, with music trickling in from the next act. He makes sure to slam the door securely shut, somewhat muting the music, and takes a deep breath. He looks at his hand for a second before walking over to the mirror, dumping Willie on a chair behind him, and sits down at it. He holds his head in his hands for a second before inspecting his hand again, which is revealed to bear the deep impressions of teeth marks. He looks up at the reflection of Willie, whose head is turned away, and looks back down in deep consternation.
Cut to Willie, who is now staring with that nonsensical expression of stupefied visciousness and cruelty, intently at Jerry. Those glassy eyes. Those dead puppet eyes.
Cut to an over the shoulder shot of Jerry. We see a double reflection of him, once in the large mirror in front of him, and another, closer reflection of his face in a hand mirror off to the side, such that we can see his every facial expression. The larger reflection shows Jerry looking downwards, with Willie menacingly lingering just behind him. Jerry's eyes slowly crawl up to look into the mirror, but just before his gaze meets Willie's, he suddenly spins wildly around to face him. The camera pans over to Willie... Whose head is now 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
Jerry slowly swivels back around, and stares into space for a non-trivial amount of time, evidently considering this for a moment. Then he stoops down and pulls open a drawer, and when his hand comes back he's clutching a bottle of whiskey and a small paper cup. He sits up and tips his head back to take a drink, and as his eyes move to the mirror again he happens to catch a glance of Willie, who's now looking at him directly, with that same expression of dreamy malignance. Jerry stares back. Just then the door opens, and as if on cue the music from the stage stops.
Jerry's agent, Frank, enters into the scene, and after seeing the bottle of whiskey on the table the two of them have a heated exchange about Jerry's alcoholism-fueled "delusions" about Willie. Here are some notable lines:
"You give in to some bad hooch, and then you have bad nightmares. Take away the hooch and you take away the nightmares." "No, you got the chronology wrong, Frank. First the nightmares, and then the hooch. I drink because I have to, and I have to... Because of him."
"It's like a well-rehearsed off-color gag. Patient goes from himself to a lifeless dummy, and then is unable to separate himself from the dummy. Oh, that's all very psychiatric and erudite, and worth about two-and-a-half bucks a word, but it's not right. It's not right! I told them that, I tell you that. It's no more schizophrenia-paranoia than it is athlete's foot or a head cold! WILLIE'S ALIVE!"
At the end of this scene Frank leaves, and Jerry decides to get rid of Willie and use his other dummy, Goofy, for the next act. After the show is over, he places Goofy on the couch, snatches Willie by the collar, and walks over to the trunk by the door. He flips the dummy around to face him, and takes a moment to look him in the eye. "Sweet dreams Willie, your next booking is in the fireplace." Jerry then throws him in and slams the lid down, making sure to fasten all three latches and pull the key out of the lock. As Jerry is about to leave, Frank walks in to tell him that he's resigning from the club.
"You and I have had it, Jerry. I have gone the route and then some. You don't need an agent, you need medical help. I think it's reached that now."
"You never believed me, did you, Frank?"
"Yeah, I believed you. I believed you had obsessions. I believed those obsessions were eating you up alive, but I also believe, Jerry, you're letting them!"
"He talks when I don't talk. He tells jokes I never heard of before, gives me bum cues. He's alive, Frank. That's why I locked him in that trunk. Goofy and I are going to fly out of here, Frank. We'll fly to Miami, Los Angeles, maybe that place in Kansas City."
"The place in Kansas City is the same as Miami, which is the same as Los Angeles, which is the same as Sioux City, Iowa, which is the same as any town south, west, north of here. They're all the same, Jerry, and you're not going to leave Willie by hopping a plane, or a train, or a taxi, or a one-horse shay. This thing you lick right here, this thing you lick at the source. This thing you... Don't run away from."
"We'll see."
Later, as Jerry is heading out of the back door, carrying Goofy, he is greeted by a man doing some accounting at a desk by the door. The second Jerry turns around he hears a voice say, "You're not gonna leave me in that stuffy old trunk... Are ya?" He stops, paralyzed. He slowly turns around and stares at the man sharply. He notices Jerry's still there and asks, "Was there something, Mr. Etherson?"
"Did you say something?"
"I said... Goodnight, that's all."
Jerry's eyes drift away and you can see in his countenance the confirmation of some malicious truth. He tells the man goodnight. He walks out the door, and after a few paces lights up a cigarette, but just as he does so he hears the voice again: "Aww come on old sport, I wouldn't lock you in a trunk..." Jerry looks up to someplace off screen, as though someone was watching from above. He half whispers, "Willie? Where are you Willie?" He's still looking around when the door behind him suddenly opens, and two of the dancers from the previous show appear. This rips him out of his bewildered stupor and he trades farewells. He then picks Goofy back up and walks down the vacant alley in the dead of night. At this point the plucking violins start up to symbolize his heightening dread and increasing heartbeat. From behind, he hears "Hee-hee-hee-hee..." He whips around to find no one. He continues walking again, hesitatingly, and with an escalating air of distress, before starting into a frantic sprint. He comes to a screeching halt when he sees, cast against an adjacent wall, the shadow of Willie sitting in a chair.
"Hey Garibaldi! ...Didn't you forget someone? Didn't you forget... Willie?"
He's petrified with fright, the camera rotates to symbolize that he is now completely unhinged from reality, and he stumbles backwards into a wall in complete disorientation, as though the whole of the world was rolling like a marble under his feet. Just then is heard the clacking of high heels from behind him, it's one of the dancers again. She's startled to see him in such a state of dismay. Being so desperate to not be alone, he makes up an excuse that he was waiting for her, and that he wants to get a drink with her or something, anything to not be alone. As he's explaining this to her, he begins, by degrees, to become more agitated. He starts to get closer, grabbing on to her arm, lightly at first, but with an increasingly tight hold. She's immediately disturbed by this, and while he's pleading with her she goes to push him away, to no avail. He gets closer, grabbing on tighter, and his tone takes on a fever pitch of desperation and derangement, to the point of yelling. She runs away after ripping herself out of his grasp, terrified and screaming. Jerry stands there, now in a state of delirium.
"Ee-he-he-he-he... Eeeehe-he-he-hee..."
The music suddenly ascends to a crescendo, and in an instant, he's running back through the alley. He throws open the backdoor and runs into the nightclub. It's even more abandoned than the alley. Odd shadows are cast against the walls. He runs around the nightclub in a frenzy, the scenes shot at strange, twisted and tilting angles all the while the disembodied voice of Willie is psychotically taunting him with jokes from act with Goofy. When he reaches the backroom, Willie is now exploding with bone-chilling, demoniacal laughter. Jerry runs to the trunk, and, struggling with the latches, he tears open the lid.
He throws his hands into the trunk and wrenches out the flailing and screeching Willie, all the while the asylum orchestra is playing with utter frenzy. He struggles with Willie before slamming him down onto the floor and smashing his skull open with a sickening shatter of porcelain and splintering of wood, the dummy equivalent of snapping bones and rending skin.
In an instant, all is dead silent. Cut to a close-up of Jerry's face, his wide open, bloodshot eyes conveying his plummet into total psychosis. He beholds the horror of the scene: On the ground are a broken and twisted pair of glasses, an ear, and a glass eyeball, pointing directly back at him. He stoops down in uncertainty, picking up the pair of glasses and with painstaking slowness, pulls them up to inspect. As he rises, his gaze moves up to focus straight into the camera. His countenance falls back down to the floor, and he keeps his eyes on whatever's there on the ground as he stumbles back and hits the light switch behind him.
The orchestra sets the scene with lunatic mockery and we discover the remains of Goofy, his limbs bent at strange angles and his entire head in pieces. Jerry whispers, "Wrong one... How could I get the wrong one?" For a second or two he sits there, pondering, and a startling response with a telling note of sarcasm is heard behind Jerry.
"Maybe you need glasses..."
The camera snaps to the couch, where is perched Willie with a condescending half-smile. Cut to a hyper close-up of Willie's face. Here we can see how the light shines off his watery puppet eyes, where a hollow blackness resides. "Why don't you take the eye test? Now what am I holding out in front of me? I'll give you a hint, it's between D and F, don't peek, don't peek. Whaddaya say, pardner, whaddaya say... What do you say... we get down to business...?"
"...How can you be real when you're made of wood?"
"Hee-hee-hee-heeee...Eee-hee... You made me real. You poured words into my head, you moved my mouth, you stuck out my tongue, you jerk. Don't you get it? You made me what I am today... I hope you're... Satisfied... From the song, of the same name..."Jerry just sits and looks at him. We can see the shadow of realization, of something sinister, pass through him, and he hangs his head in a final despair to the tune of Willie's intensifying shrieks of laughter which reach a zenith, and the scene closes.
At the introduction of the next scene, we get the sense of déjà vu as the setting is almost identical to one at the beginning of the episode. A man with a chair appears from behind the curtain, sets it down, and introduces the next act, "Willie and Jerry". Cue the applause. Now we're backstage, facing the backs of the pair, who come out as the curtain gets pulled back and they sit down. The routine begins as usual, and the camera walks up to the both of them, turning around to reveal Willie, now a human. The camera pans over to Jerry, now a dummy with a hideous and startling complexion, stretched into a permanent smile. The scene ends as the two repeat the same inane jokes that were heard from the beginning.
Think of it: wood waking up.
