But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it the smile of the self-deluded, pretending their impossibility is empowering truth? Or is he pranking true believers? Is this modern male Mona Lisa foxing you, or is that his way of conveying that he’s beyond all this, that he’s one step ahead of you? No matter; if the stories can’t be taken at face value, there’s a reason they work on you nonetheless, and that has to do with the power of stories themselves and the way they function in the realm of metaphor.
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Everyone has that event in their lives that set the standard for their developing personality; I trace mine to seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in its original roadshow engagement. Being all of 9 years old, and enthralled by director Stanley Kubrick’s vision of primitive man, boggled by his abrupt shift to the near future (I’ll still be alive when this takes place!), and mystified by the drawn-out climactic quantum leap Beyond the Infinite, I had never seen anything like it before. I remember the family discussing what it all meant afterward, though I don’t recall what was said, and always suspected the hippies in the aisles we suburbanites found as entertaining as the movie – there for the ultimate trip – had their own idea where Kubrick was coming from. But the one thing I absolutely took away from that night was the importance of taking things the next step, to never be content with the superficial and the norm.
Which set me up to appreciate when our local UHF affiliate began airing reruns of the 1959-to-1961 half-hour Alcoa Presents television dramas later syndicated as One Step Beyond and hosted by that eternal enigma, John Newland. Cincinnati-born (“where nothing ever happens”) Newland had his own kind of career. Starting out as an actor in television’s youth, he began supplementing that work directing mostly television, for which he’s become better known than his acting gigs. His show, created by Merwin Gerard and directed entirely by himself across its 74-episode run, purported to dramatize factual occurrences based on documented paranormal events – “a matter of human record,” as the show’s catchphrase went – but really. Could anyone above a tabloid mentality accept any of it as truth? What can’t be written off as coincidence in some of the scenarios – intuitions that miraculously (often disastrously) pan out, repercussions from the heat of debate, phenomena with simple explanations but for certain characters’ ulterior motives – covers its ass with dramatic license (maybe the necklace didn’t actually have a life of its own, but wasn’t the stop-motion animation cool?), innuendo (can you prove it didn’t happen?), or outright fabrication, as in its pilot-episode evocation of a “possession” that survives in no documentation beyond circumstantial similarities. When Newland says the episodes are “authenticated,” that doesn’t mean they happened, only that someone said they did.
But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it the smile of the self-deluded, pretending their impossibility is empowering truth? Or is he pranking true believers? Is this modern male Mona Lisa foxing you, or is that his way of conveying that he’s beyond all this, that he’s one step ahead of you? No matter; if the stories can’t be taken at face value, there’s a reason they work on you nonetheless, and that has to do with the power of stories themselves and the way they function in the realm of metaphor.
Most episodes involve some sort of interrupted journey, from the pilot “Bride Possessed” (Virginia Leith, herself betwixt Kubrick’s first feature, Fear and Desire, and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) diverted from her honeymoon hotel to a mental-clinic overnighter, to the next episode’s Titanic fiasco and the next’s fateful train ride. Many characters find themselves out of their element, including Cloris Leachman’s American photographer on assignment to capture the “spirit” of France (truly, Marcel Dalio), which turns out to be the actual ghost of a murderer in her flat; “The Inheritance” finds young Irishman Sean McClory a gigolo in Mexico; “The Vanishing Point” involves a young couple’s trauma in the house they’ve just moved into. If there’s a single, unifying motif in the run, it would have to do with its title statement of intent: each character exceeds him- or herself in some way. (This it shares with its ’60s successor The Outer Limits; Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, on the other hand, dwelled more on stasis, when not outright regression.) Sadly, few of these resolve happily. Make of that what you will.
Though only the director, Newland carried forward several of these concepts to later movie-of-the-week projects, including especially the fantasy or suspense dramas Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and its predecessor and forebear Crawlspace. The latter features a retired couple – apparent academics, childless and newly relocated to rural America, as are the young urban professional and his wife in Afraid; it shares with other ’70s TV movies Bad Ronald and Afraid, again, the plot device of uninvited inhabitants in the house (read: mind, and see that pilot title, again). Matters of rationality in conflict with the irrational are common to all. Afraid folds in historical context, similar to Beyond’s “Bride,” “Delusion,” “Dark Room” and others. That the focus of the paranormal visitations so frequently resides in female characters (“I’m just a hysterical woman”), as it does in Afraid, suggests something about femininity itself disrupting everyday consciousness; that it recurs so often suggests a message nagging that very consciousness; that the dramas so often end unresolved or with the messengers of this new awareness brought to bear suggests an advancement over the status quo still waiting to be puzzled out rationally.
So in the interests of analysis, let’s take a closer look at that pilot – whose natural purpose would be to set the standard and lay the groundwork for what would come after – to take that pioneering First Step Beyond.
Each episode is bookended by Newland’s on-camera narration, his sober, reasonable affect giving the effect of rational normality to ground the pursuing events and bring the viewer back to earth on the other side, with the sense in conclusion that the opening definition of reality has been elasticized to encompass more than mundane experience. Here, he eases the viewer in by recounting similar “documented” case histories, namedropping “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, known for rendering diagnoses from 15,000 miles away – incorrect diagnoses, but hear him out – as well as a suspiciously unnamed painter who could only paint a girl he’d never seen (shades of Portrait of Jennie) till, you guessed it, he meets her in a Sicilian village, not the first artist to finally find his dream girl. His narrations often extoll the sheer ordinariness of the people whose lives are affected by the intrusion of the unknown on their lives, as if to reassure suburban ’50s Americans of their own proximity to the exceptional and the sublime, like a gigolo conning sad, desperate dowagers with the promise of romance.
Fittingly, “Bride” opens on a wedding party, like the series kicking off a hopeful long run, and by its end indicating the unexpected union of reality and the supernatural, and, by extension, consciousness and the unconscious, and the male and female (and, may as well throw in, series and viewer). Further grounding the episode in the familiar, the newlyweds are simple moving-van trucker Matt Conroy and his first-time-out-of-the-bayou bride Sally, being fêted in a bar by Matt’s horny working-class buddies. (The drama is surprisingly candid about sexuality, for the time.) Their teasing competition for her attentions will erupt into the show’s main motif as Matt moves them from the reception to the honeymoon hotel they never make it to in the course of the events “documented” here, being sidelined into a possession plot again pitting the groom against two other men for Sally’s affection.
On the way, Sally bemoans having never learned to drive, which Matt the trucker, behind the wheel of course, vows to fix, showing him to be more progressively minded than the times, again, would lead you to expect. For such a hothouse flower and her spouse, driving signifies agency. (They met when he moved her cousin back to Louisiana, their attraction being founded on his ability to transport her from one state to another.) So it’s significant when she first takes the wheel metaphorically by issuing navigation commands in a place she’s never been before, then materially on commandeering the car they’d both abandoned when she charged from it on a mad quest leading to a portentous cliffside, driven by a powerful, unexplained force. (Curiously, another woman would repeat this flight four episodes on.) Trucker Matt is left without a vehicle of his own, Sally’s dive into the unknown taking him along with her. When the camera finds her again, settling in at the home of the spirit possessing her, a peculiar detail there establishes whose story this will be after all, an unfinished portrait on an easel resembling no one so much as her new hubby, whom a cop informs the estate “isn’t settled yet.”
Turns out this new affect belongs to young heiress Karen Wharton, who went off that cliff two weeks before and whose body was found so mangled they had to identify her through dental records. Her old self has been obliterated, as the newly named Mrs. Conroy must relate. When SallyKaren is taken to the Shelby Clinic for observation, the head doctor (and Wharton’s one-time suitor; such medicos were a staple of the series), Alexander Slawson, explains via his taped interview with “them” how Karen had secretly married ne’er-do-well Dan Stapler, who she claims murdered her when he found out she wouldn’t inherit the family fortune. The blatant erotics of her account of their affair is a clear slap in the face to both men present with equal desire for the alternate aspects of her personality, and echoes off Sally’s libidinous delight dancing at the reception. Her financial independence is bolstered by another random detail, so precise and inconsequential to the rest of the narrative it invites closer scrutiny: Karen’s assertion, by way of certifying her i.d., that she was born in Fort Washakie, Wyoming – known for little more than as the burial place of Sacagawea, who led the twin male explorers (as Matt and Alex would become) Lewis and Clark through Sally’s native Louisiana Territory and would be named the National American Women’s Suffrage Association’s symbol of independence. So SallyKaren will be MattAlex’s guide into the unknown – though familiar to her – realm of women’s exploitation. (Sacagawea was married off against her will.)
For Sally, this new personality also represents Freud’s notion of the Family Romance, the idea that one is better than one’s origins, as though switched at birth. She was another among a sorority of fictional characters at the time experiencing a similar “possession” by archaic revolutionary forces, from 1945’s Bewitched and The Woman Who Came Back to 1956’s Search for Bridey Murphy and Fright, 1957’s The Undead and forward to The Exorcist and Audrey Rose. All are representations of another of Freud’s theories, that of “regressive masculinity,” in the term’s original usage, as a woman’s sense of personal agency lost to socialization and the onset of adolescence. (Men share a similar ideation of lost femininity, usually connected to their closeness with the mother.) Her temporary residence at the clinic puts her in company too with contemporaries in 1948’s The Snake Pit and the spate of women-in-prison pictures of the era, as well as related dramas of multiple personalities Lizzie and The Three Faces of Eve (both 1957). That Karen’s account includes information she couldn’t possibly know indicates that it’s neither woman’s testimony after all, but all women’s.
Her murderer is repeatedly derided for his lack of means and, rhymingly, masculinity. Reliant on women’s largesse like “Inheritance’s” Mario, he screeches “like a petulant woman” when her refusal to give him a divorce sends him into a tantrum. The presence of such a key figure in the drama in word only (and in that fleeting glimpse in his portrait) suggests an idea more than an actual person, or the governing consciousness the dream of the play unwinds in. When at the end of Karen’s interview Matt and Alex each ask themselves “What’m I gonna do?” it’s clear that he’s a part of them, Karen’s story laying down a quest or gauntlet for each to work out through their own actions in the ensuing adventure.
Matt distinguishes himself again by standing up to Alex’s sedating Sally; an agent of movement, he wants to bring her to consciousness, even if that means dormant Karen coming along with her. Both men operate as functions of the sleeping mind, working in concert for the production of dreams, the doctor as healing agent and censor keeping threatening information from arising too abruptly for the ego to process in the course of dreamwork. That’s why his own “drastic” plan to shock Sally into reality by showing her a picture of Karen (including the inscription, To Alex, the dearest man I know) fails when she refuses to acknowledge it: she’s already moved on; she’s one step ahead of him. What he wants is to regress her, and she’s having none of it. Her flight from both men to finger Dan is her attempt to expose Guilty Manhood to all, and it works.
There’s a downed tree by the side of the road to the “beautiful, wild and secluded” area Sally directs Matt to early in the drama and where she returns to now. When all three characters need to climb under another fallen phallus and Karen must move a third to get to the object of her search, the buried statuette Dan used to bludgeon her with – so murderously, we remember, it erased her identity – it’s like a repeated motif in a work of art or obsessive-compulsive behavior in life: our mind is trying to tell us something by constantly bringing it to our attention. Manhood has not lived up to its charge to love, honor, and cherish its feminine counterpart, causing her to act out on behalf of everyone by taking that huge step beyond even her own self (again, dead Karen could not have known Dan’s actions after killing her), in the faith it would bring the men along with her. When Matt lifts her dirtied face from the ground it’s like afterbirth, or the earthy face of Eve exonerated in the “wild, beautiful” Eden of her dishonored, sexual past. His “Well, what now?” to Alex in the car afterward echoes their mutual “What’m I gonna do?” earlier – and is a fair question.
Does he blow it then when Sally wakes from her fever unaware of what’s gone on the last long night and he tells her “We got lost for awhile but we’re all right now,” or is he speaking for Alex, himself, and all men, having learned a lesson brought into their consciousness alone? When he adds “We’re gonna be married a long time, Mrs. Conroy,” it might sound like a reaffirmation of patriarchal ownership (she’s still possessed, only now by him; again), I prefer to think this new awareness has strengthened his commitment to his feminine other, if spoken in the language of 1959. The ultimate hope of Matt’s “what now” is that even if he doesn’t know, exactly, at least he’s asking the question, and understands the answer lies with her.
It’s notable how often the show featured young women at a similarly liminal point in life, including “The Premonition’s” 11-year-old, in 1901, who believes she will be crushed under her father’s crystal chandelier (she isn’t; that fate is reserved for her granddaughter) and in “Make Me Not a Witch,” where Bad Seed Patty McCormack discovers supernatural powers, like many a movie 13-year-old. (Anywhere else, such power would be recognized as the capacity to produce life.) “Premonition” spends most of its time anticipating the girl’s coming-out and engagement party 10 years later, allying its dreadful fate with marriage; that this destiny catches up with her in another 37 years, postwar, when returning vets were taking back the jobs women like her granddaughter had been inhabiting in their stead, adds to the poignancy in her sudden turn from relief to grief. (She, also, is sedated, like the fearful protagonist of “Moment of Hate.” Kudos again to Matt for resisting doing so to Sally.)
Some artists insist they’re vessels for a higher power to express itself through them. That’s modesty talking, not sense, and I’m not sure they don’t realize that, on some level. Still, I know what they mean. It’s surprising sometimes what comes out of my own unconscious when examining texts like One Step Beyond – what associations, contingencies, references, internal rhymes, reasons, and potentialities there are to be limned if one opens oneself to the simple possibility they’re there. Frank Barron, in Creativity and Psychological Health, ascribes to creativity “an ability to transcend the ordinary boundaries or structures of consciousness . . . to break through the regularities of perception, to shatter what is stable or constant in consciousness, to go beyond the given word,” and I’ll give it that. Maybe it seems supernatural at times, but that’s more a criticism of day-to-day perception than an affirmation of the unreal. There was a period where I thought it romantic to pursue other worlds, which I now see as a flight from or disavowal of the gifts and wonders of this one. Now I find myself wanting to immerse myself in another this world, whose interstices, relatedness, and intricacies are a universe unto themselves. Who needs ghosts or fate or animated necklaces to make life seem more than it is? We people are fascinating enough.
Though I’m not sure its makers realized it, I’m sure that’s the true meat of One Step Beyond. The fear in so many of its characters in the face of the unstoppable as well as their power to see it coming, their ability to feel what others feel to the extent they might think they can read their minds or foretell their fate, to see the signs others miss, to heal, to care, to even change the future when given the chance – that’s the real, human material beyond the mystical gobbledygook we get so distracted by in our lonesome desire for better. It’s touching, this urge for transcendence, and poignant to see it acted out in stories like these. We’re so tragic, us people. May we never lose sight of that in our fixation on what isn’t there. There are beyonds within, too, and, anymore, that’s enough for me.
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All images are screenshots from the series.
