Remember this episode of Rod Serling the Twilight Zone? Oh, this plot has been done and redone since, but then the…

Plot – Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh treatment (the maximum number legally allowed) in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the treatment are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged so that her face cannot be seen. She is described as being “not normal” by the nurses and doctor, whose own faces are always in shadows or off-camera.

The outcome of the procedure cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the bandages are removed. The reaction of the doctor and nurses is horror and disappointment. The procedure has failed, and her face has undergone “no change — no change at all”. The camera pulls back to reveal to the audience that she is actually beautiful.

At this point, the doctor, nurses and other people in the hospital are revealed to be horribly deformed by our perspective, with large, thick brows, sunken eyes, swollen and twisted lips, and wrinkled, pig-like snouts. Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as the disfigured faces of everyone she runs into, the norm in this society, are revealed. Projection screens throughout the hospital project an image of the State’s despotic leader giving a speech calling for greater conformity.

Eventually, a handsome man (by our standards) afflicted with the same “condition” arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her “own kind”, where her “ugliness” will not trouble the State. Before the two leave, the man comforts Tyler, saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

This is what I look around and feel I am living… I see, terribly overweight, sloppily dressed people, who are rude, arrogant, pushy and angry… or I see some who have so much b
otox and filler in their faces that they almost don’t look like people, but more like some kind of plastic humanoid. It’s one thing to maintain your appearance and quite another to freeze your face and to blow up your lips… and some do this, so they must think it attractive. 

Then while some are dressed in sloppy tee shirts and pants others are in overly tight attire with overly high heels and all sorts of garb all over them so that they appear like a Barbie doll or a street walker… then some have piercings and tatoos, pink hair, purple hair… etc.. some wear big black tents with only a small space for them to see out. Some wear head scarfs to cover their hair, but wear tight pants and very high heels… some look like they haven’t bathed in weeks…

There seems to be fewer and fewer at normal weight, healthy, fit, clean, naturally attractive, even features, moral, mannerly, happy people… If they are around they are the rarity and at one time, they were the norm…

Myself andothers who have shared similar thoughts, if you are thin, attractive, healthy, smile, have good teeth, no filler in your face or blow fish lips, no tatoos, dress appropriately in clothing that fits, with the appropriate amount of accompaning jewelry, then many either stare like you are a freak, or with a kind of envy that creates fear in those receiving their observation.

It feels like I am in the twilight zone as I manuver in this world where I fit in less and less. I have a ‘condition’ that isn’t the norm. Where do I go to be with those of my kind?…

It’s scary out there. Have we truly entered the Twilight Zone?