Ray Bradbury Theater '89: The Pedestrian (aka The Ghost In The Machine)

"The Pedestrian" is one of Ray Bradbury's simpler but by no means lighter pieces. First published in The Reporter in 1951 and later included in The Golden Apples of The Sun in 1953, it offers a brief window into a dystopian 2053, of which everything we need to know is revealed through the back and forth between two contrasting figures - one an unassuming human engaging in a seemingly innocuous act, and the other a machine representing the cold voice of authority, which interprets said act as a threat to the established order. The former, a writer named Leonard Mead, is out for his usual evening stroll, which simply isn't done in a world where everyone is in the practice of sitting in all of the time and watching TV. The machine, a robotic patrol vehicle, finds Mead's behaviour so incomprehensible that it finally apprehends him. Mead steps inside the vehicle, where he finds that its innards "smelled too clean and hard and metallic", the polar opposite of the outside air he is addicted to unlawfully inhaling. There is some humor in their exchange, such as when the car asks for Mead's profession and, hearing that he is a writer, records this as "No profession", but overall it's a disquieting glimpse into a possible future for humankind, one that I fear the rise of streaming (even without the aid of a pandemic) has made all but inevitable. It is a story which strikes an even greater nerve with me at this present moment in time, when I find myself yearning for the evening walks I was, not so long ago, accustomed to taking to and from my local cinema. This is a routine that I need to believe can still come back somehow.

"The Pedestrian" was adapted into an installment of the anthology series Ray Bradbury Theater, which aired August 4th 1989 as part of the show's third season. The episode was directed by Alun Bollinger, and Mead was portrayed, with all the expected eloquence, by David Ogden Stiers (best known for playing Major Charles Emmerson Winchester III in the TV series M*A*S*H, throughout the 90s/00s he also became a fairly ubiquitous presence over at Disney, providing the voices of Governor Ratcliffe from Pocahontas and Jumba from Lilo & Stitch, among others). As with every episode of the series, adaptation duties were performed by Bradbury himself and, given the concise nature of the original story (a straightforward adaptation, I suspect, would struggle to fill more than seven minutes), "The Pedestrian" is an especially fascinating example for how Bradbury is required to further expand on the dystopia he dipped into briefly in 1951.

Thematically "The Pedestrian" bears some resemblance to Bradbury's 1950 story "There Will Come Soft Rains", in its unsettling depiction of a futuristic world where technology continues to operate in the absence of humans. The twist here being that humankind is technically still around, but it may as well not be. The character of Mead represents the last waning flickers of genuine humanity in a world that has otherwise surrendered all thought, will and action to the allure of the machine. He is alive, aware and occupies the real world, as opposed to the artificial one propagated through televised image. The implications are troubling in spite of, of perhaps because of, the implied lack of violent destruction in engendering humanity's fall from dominance - here we've a scenario in which technology rules the roost simply because humankind was too apathetic to stand in its way. Mead's fate at the end of the story, while lower-key and more civilised than the nuclear blast implied to have annihilated the human occupants of the house in "Soft Rains", is no less distressing. The final line of the story - "The car moved down the empty river-bed streets and off away, leaving empty streets with the empty sidewalks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night" - point to a bleak outcome, making it clear that what we have just witnessed was the sole remaining flame of humanity being permanently extinguished. Mead was the last of his kind, a point further reinforced by the machine's honing in on his lack of reproductive prospects - Mead admits that he has no mate because nobody wanted him, and the machine notes that a spouse might have been handy in supplying him with an alibi. Mead has lived alone, and seems fated to expire alone too.

It's interesting, then, that Bradbury would choose to completely eliminate this element from the television adaptation - his strategy for adjusting the story to longer-form storytelling is to add a second human, Bob Stockwell (Grant Tilly), whom Mead coaxes into joining him on his nightly prowl, to the extent that the singular pedestrian promised by in the title becomes somewhat misleading. The story now consists of three acts - Mead arriving at Stockwell's apartment and persuading him to abandon his sedentary existence for the thrills of the world beyond, the walk itself and Stockwell's steady reconnection with the natural world, and finally the climactic confrontation between the human protagonists and the despotic machine, in this case not a car but a drone helicopter. At the end of the episode, Mead is apprehended, as in the original story, but Stockwell remains free, thus facilitating a more optimistic ending in which Mead's rebellion is implied to have not been in vain. If the subtle but devastating bleakness of those closing lines is what appealed to you most about the original story, then you may struggle with this adaptation. Personally, though, I find myself endlessly charmed by the manner in which Bradbury expands the scenario into a two-character piece, one where we are acutely aware of the vulnerability and humanity of both characters throughout, and which builds to a resolution that, while more upbeat than the source, offers no shortage of poignancy. In both forms, this is a powerful story, albeit for different reasons.

As with the series' adaptation of "A Sound of Thunder", "The Pedestrian" faces a few challenges in terms of its technical limitations, which I don't think it overcomes quite as elegantly as does "Thunder". Compared to that episode, which called for a time machine, a dinosaur and a prehistoric jungle, "The Pedestrian" is a relatively simple story that consists largely of two men encircling a darkened apartment block - it's when their mechanical nemesis enters the picture that things get a little ropey. The space-age helicopter that chases and ultimately corners the two protagonists looks fine for as long as it is seen from above and partially obscured by its blinding searchlight. When it descends down to ground level, however, the prop in question looks conspicuously smaller than it's evidently supposed to be. It resembles a toy - more specifically, the kind of toy you would assemble from parts found inside a Kinder Egg. An automated car would, presumably, have been easier to convincingly stage, and though I suspect the antagonist was altered into a helicopter to allow for a more visually dramatic climax, it comes at a cost. On the plus side, the drone helicopter is at least commandingly voiced, by Stig Eldred.

The other challenge the adaptation faces is in dealing with the inevitable irony created in transferring a story with an obviously anti-television rhetoric from the page to the screen. The meaning of the piece changes, however implicitly. In both versions of the story, Mead is a writer whose profession has been rendered redundant in a world where reading has been completely supplanted as a pastime through the all-out dominance of television. In the original story, there is a kinship between Mead and the reader, brought on through the understanding that they share a threatened territory. In the television adaptation, the story ends up becoming a critique of the viewer themselves, which is where the addition of Stockwell proves particularly vital, for he functions as our surrogate viewer figure. As with "A Sound of Thunder", our allegiances are transferred in the adaptation - Mead remains a sympathetic character, but it is Stockwell with whom we predominantly identify, in that we, too, are apprehensive about the prospect of our protagonists setting foot outside. Stockwell is reluctant to abandon his television, not because he is particularly invested in whatever interchangeable images it dangles before him, but because it promises safety and certainty, in exchange for his total passivity (Mead describes the television set as "the head of the Medusa", which is possibly an even wittier rebuke than Sideshow Bob's chattering cyclops remark). And yet, when Stockwell's curiosity finally overrides his trepidation and he ventures outside with Mead, the episode ensures that we remain conscious of the fact that we, ourselves, are still seated. There are moments where Mead and Stockwell linger outside windows through which we can see the television images blaring, and it becomes apparent that we are once again scrutinising our own selves in the supposed comfort of our natural habitats, from the vantage point of the outside world that is passing us by. Here, we find ourselves with two different shows competing for our attentions, almost like two channels playing side-by-side, and the distant TV images become crude distractions that seem mindlessly disconnected from anything happening within the real world - a point made particularly salient during the jarring contrast between the mindless chaos of the gunshot noises emitting from a TV set and the tranquillity of the outside world, with its autumn mist and twittering owls. There are other times when the two worlds appear to bleed eerily into one another - notably, when Mead makes a remark about the dogs in the building fearing them for their ability to wander outside, to the mirth of both himself and Stockwell, and the laugh track of an adjacent TV seems to roar in response. What could be a more haunting contrast than that between the warm, organic laughter between two friends and the very epitomisation of banality, artificial emotion and predetermined responses. The gag is doubled-edged - on the one hand, the muted laughter of the TV set seems feeble, the reaction of an outside force attempting to appear in on a private joke that it blatantly does not comprehend. But there is also something unpleasantly intrusive about it, a troubling reminder of the fundamental artificiality of what we are seeing play out in both worlds.

Mead's disdain for television is rooted in its disconnect from reality, and he highlights the paradox of much of this technological progress being in service of a nostalgia designed to stifle any kind of engagement with the present, or indeed the future, through an immersion in the images of yesteryear. Mead refers to the city being haunted, in that, "90% of the actors we see on our TV screens have been dead for forty years," and, watching this in 2020, I can't help but contemplate the additional irony now that both Stiers and Tilly themselves are no longer with us (although they are quite recently deceased, in both cases). The aforementioned laugh track itself becomes a ghost, a disembodied voice from another time and age that lingers aimlessly on, long divorced from anything that might once may have given it meaning and comprehension, and putting me in mind of Chuck Palahniuk's (inaccurate but still amusing) observation, in his 2002 book Lullaby, that "Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950's. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead." In this world, where there is seemingly little to distinguish the dead and the living, the implication is that the viewers themselves too have become ghosts, pale shadows of their former selves (or at least of their human potential) bound to a time that is wildly out of joint. "Progress", here, is about stagnation, a denial of change almost to the point of living death, which stands in contrast to the natural world and its impassive continuation of its familiar rhythms and cycles outside the viewers' windows.

At the end, as Mead approaches the helicopter (compared to the original story, where he protested innocence, here he goes willingly, in order to convince the drone to spare Stockwell), he is shocked to discover that it is unmanned, and reflects on the possibility that human authority too might be a thing of the past, with the technology enforcing the law all by itself. This echoes the nightmare vision of Bradbury's original story, yet Mead seems at least partially excited by the idea, as it is confirmation of the overall absurdity of their existence. His final words to Stockwell, "What will they think of next?", offer something decidedly not present in the original story - that is, the possibility of an additional chapter. The story ends with the world left in a state of dark inertia, suggesting that nothing more is to follow. Here, the very presence of Stockwell negates such an ending. The helicopter releases Stockwell after establishing that he is not a repeat offender, and instructs him to return home immediately; initially, it looks as if he intends to comply, for he yells out into the night sky his intention to destroy the walking gear that was given to him by Mead. Along the way, however, he notices a dandelion growing beside the sidewalk and cannot resist picking it up and blowing the seeds, thus replicating an action demonstrated by Mead earlier in the episode. The final image is of the dandelion seeds dispersing in the wind, a visual metaphor which, with its obvious implications of new life and regrowth, conveys exactly the opposite meaning to the closing words of the original story, in suggesting that Stockwell will continue to walk in Mead's stead and that, eventually, the future envisioned by Mead - "the day when people, like dogs, realise that they're sick and they go into the fields and eat the sweet grass" - will come to pass. The seed of rebellion has already been planted, and will only continue to spread from here.

Same scenario, radically different conclusions. And while ordinarily I'm very leery of the practice of tacking upbeat endings onto thoroughly grim works of fiction, in this case I think the more optimistic outcome is entirely valid in context. In expanding the story to focus on the rapport between two otherwise isolated individuals, it becomes one about loneliness and human connection. An implication in the TV adaptation that was not explored in the original story is the idea of the television providing surrogate companionship for humans who are cut off and stranded in their own private bubbles. Whereas in the story, Mead's unmarried status was indicative of both his being a societal outcast and the last of a doomed breed, in the TV version it is mirrored in Stockwell's own solitude. He too is alone, and informs the drone at the end that his wife is long dead. Mead identifies the television as "she", leading into his aforementioned Medusa analogy, but also enforcing the sense that the television has become a substitute partner for Stockwell following the death of his wife, with whom he is forced to compete for Stockwell's attentions. The story becomes a kind of love triangle, and as with any love story, the connection forged between Mead and Stockwell brings with it the promise of renewal and movement forward. During the climactic confrontation, when the drone quizzes Mead and Stockwell as to why they would go outside to look at things when they have television sets, Mead admits that his has been broken since April (the story is set in November), which comes as a shock to Stockwell. Given that Mead claims to have been going on these nightly walks for years, it seems unlikely that this was a terrible loss to him - clearly, he understands that a television is no substitute for the flesh-and-blood companionship he has pursued from Stockwell - but Stockwell is clearly disturbed by the revelation that Mead has been one his own this entire time, with his doleful protest that, "You never told me", suggesting that he sees a missed opportunity for action on his part, while at the same time being awed at Mead's resilience. This take on "The Pedestrian" is about a fleeting moment of solidarity in a world where such reaching out is actively discouraged, the tragedy being that the connection is struck down almost as soon as it has begun. But Stockwell's brief time with Mead has already changed him, enabling him to grow and develop in a way that his nightly grind of non-stop television immersion seemed designed to stifle. Having wandered this far from his comfort zone, he finds that he cannot go back again. There is too much of Mead within him now. The episode closes with Stockwell still out in the cold, now assuredly his natural habitat.

The Strange Case of Laurie and Charles (Shirley Jackson)

Horror writer Shirley Jackson is most renowned for her short story "The Lottery", once aptly described by The Simpsons' Kent Brockman as "a chilling tale of conformity gone mad". Still, when I read her 1949 anthology The Lottery and Other Stories (partly on account of Brockman's recommendation), I found that I was less taken with the titular story, although it left more than its desired share of psychological scars, than I was the comparatively modest and less dramatic "Charles". First published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1948, this story presents a wry snapshot of contemporary family life centred around a child's first few weeks at kindergarten, narrated from the viewpoint of a parent who is apprehensive about him taking his first major steps into the wider world. It made such a strong impression, I suspect, on account of its amusing twist ending, which is, truth be told, far from the most shocking you'll ever encounter. In fact, I have met other readers who've complained that the twist is all-too easy to see coming, and that they figured it out well in advance of the protagonist. And fair enough, that was my experience too. But then I think that's more-or-less the point. In the early stages of the story we share the narrator's apprehension over what her son is witnessing, but as the story continues we grow increasingly disconnected from her suppositions, as our own intuition clues us in as to what is more likely going on. From then on, it becomes a matter of revelling in the dramatic irony as she edges ever closer to that uncomfortable sting in the tail.

Anyway, if you've never read "Charles" then I advise you to do so before reading any further. Spoilers will follow.

"Charles" is told from the perspective of a mother whose small child, Laurie, has recently started kindergarten and developed an apparent fascination with an ill-behaved classmate named Charles. Charles' belligerent attitude and hearty appetite for rebellion regularly bring him into conflict with adult authority; each lunchtime, Laurie returns home with a daily report of Charles' misdeeds and the entailing punishments he was forced to endure. In spite of Charles' penchant for lashing out violently at the other children, he seems to have amassed quite the following, with classmates lining up to play with him, even when instructed otherwise by their teacher, and dutifully staying behind to watch whenever Charles is kept after school. The narrator notices that Laurie's behaviour at home is becoming increasingly unruly and attributes this to the negative influence of Charles. She and her husband are troubled by Laurie's veneration of Charles, yet they come to share in his fascination with the unseen hell-raiser, to the extent that "Charles" becomes a catch-all metaphor for any kind of mishap or misdemeanour around their household. They are surprised, and incredulous, when Laurie's stories later indicate a shift in Charles' behaviour - he begins to help his teacher around the classroom and goes for days without causing trouble - although a relapse eventually occurs when Charles discovers the joys of curse words. The narrator attends her first PTA meeting where, tellingly, she is far more interested in learning more about Charles and his family than she is her own son. However, she is surprised when Charles and his barrage of bad behaviours are never raised. At the end, she manages to get Laurie's teacher aside and hears that Laurie had a difficult start adjusting to kindergarten, but that his recent behaviour has been more positive. The narrator starts to talk about her favourite subject, Charles, and how much he has evidently impacted her son. The teacher looks puzzled, and gives her the bad news: "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten." 

As I say, I don't believe that the reader truly shares in the narrator's (presumable) shock at the final implication (that Laurie was describing his own behaviours all along) as Jackson telegraphs it clearly enough in the preceding text. The parents are not exactly innocents, in spite of how guilelessly they swallow their son's daily reports, and they patently set themselves up for a humbling at multiple points throughout the story. The instant their fascination extends beyond Charles himself and onto the kind of parents who could have raised such an unruly monster, you can practically feel their superiority sneaking around and up behind them to bite them in the buttocks. The sweet irony at the centre of the story has less to do with Laurie convincing his parents of the existence of this phantom Charles than it does his inadvertently conning them into turning the cold eye of judgement upon themselves. The unspoken tension of the piece arises not from Laurie's obsession with Charles, but from the narrator's obsession with another phantom in the form of Charles' mother, about whom she is plainly drawing a number of unpleasant conclusions. The final line functions as a punchline, a joke at her expense, for her fixation has, ultimately, amounted to a tremendous self-own.

And, in spite of this, I have to admit that I do feel a certain degree of sympathy for the narrator. A question that persistently bothers me whenever I return to the story is, "Was she supposed to have figured it out on her own?"  To be totally fair to her, it's not as though the school have made any kind of effort to get in touch with her about her son's behaviour. She misses the first PTA meeting, thus enabling the myth of Charles to continue for a while longer, but she has a valid enough reason for doing so (her younger child was sick). When you're aware of the twist, then looking back through the story there a number of points where she seems to miss what is plainly right under her nose - the most glaring example being when she describes how Charles became "an institution in our family", and Laurie's exhibition of unruly behaviour at home, by filling his wagon with mud and pulling it though the kitchen, gets lost amid the ordinary chaos of family life (I note here that Jackson is perhaps not quite as on the nose as she could have been - while the baby actually "was" a Charles when she cried all afternoon, Laurie simply "did" a Charles). And yet, in her defence she's hardly alone in her willingness to accept her son's stories at face value, as her husband is every bit as clueless as she is. In fact, her husband has no interest in attending the PTA meetings at all, although he does ask the narrator to invite Charles' mother around for a cup of tea afterwards so that he can satisfy his morbid curiosity without leaving the comfort of his home. (Then again, "Charles" was written in the 1940s, and perhaps there was an expectation back then that attendance of PTA meetings was solely the mother's responsibility? On that note, the judgements of both parents are only ever explicitly projected onto Charles' mother - the possibility that Charles' father could be a negligent role model is never raised. Make of that what you will.)

I think the answer to my question is most implicit in the teacher's tactful remark: "We are all so interested in Laurie." The protagonist's main failing throughout the story is that she has simply not been all that interested in her own son. This is likewise underscored during Charles' apparent gravitation toward good behaviour - the narrator's husband asks her to find out at the PTA meeting "what happened to Charles", to which the narrator responds, "I'd like to know myself", an exchange that seems poignant when you know that they're actually inadvertently admitting just how poorly they understand their own son. The assumption that Laurie's insolent behaviour at home is due to the negative influence of Charles is appealing to them because it is convenient, in enabling them to project responsibility onto an outside factor. Their resulting fixation with Charles' mother is rooted in their eagerness for her to be held accountable for the disturbance. We can see how this fixation is further obstructing Laurie's efforts to relate to his parents his school experiences during an episode where he informs them that "Our teacher had a friend come to see her in school today", and both parents simultaneously respond, "Charles's mother?" (he was, in fact, referring to his gym teacher). Attending the PTA meeting is, likewise, treated less as an opportunity to understand how Laurie is functioning at school than it is to see Charles' mother get her much-anticipated comeuppance. The narrator is bothered when, during the meeting, nobody stands up and apologises for how her son has been acting - a statement which, unbeknownst to her, drips with the uncomfortable suggestion that the rest of the meeting is silently judging her and wondering why she is not making a similar display of contrition.

"Charles" is, on one level, a cautionary tale about the perils of judging others, for we never know when that judgement might ricochet awkwardly back on us. On another level, it is a humorous and down-to-earth account of a universal parental nightmare - the point at which your child ventures into the outside world and you no longer control who they will encounter or how their own interests and personality will develop. The narrator ends up having to confront the greater nightmare still that your child might even be the one who tempts others to the dark side. First and foremost, though, "Charles" is a story about the fear of and inevitability of change. At the start of the story, before the titular menace has entered the picture, the narrator is having to deal with the reality that the idealised version of Laurie, the "sweet-voiced nursery school tot" no longer exists, and that she is losing him to the wider world. There are two parallel stories unfolding along this theme - the first-hand account of how the narrator responds to the loss of that sweet-voiced tot and the more complicated creature who had taken his place, and the second-hand account of how Laurie copes with the disruptions to his own established routine. If we read between the lines, then it seems reasonable enough to conclude that Laurie's acting out at school is in response to the dramatic changes to his day-to-day life - his assumption of the "Charles" persona suggests both resistance to these changes and enjoyment at having a whole new set of boundaries to test. His eventual improvement suggests that he is beginning to settle. By this point, Laurie/Charles is ready to assume a new role, but not so ready that he cannot resist the occasional relapse.

This leads us into the story's other key question, which is why Laurie feels the need to draw a distinction between the boy he is at home and the child he becomes at school. After all, it's not as though there is a world of difference between Laurie and Charles - he is as contentious toward his parents' authority as his teachers and besides, I suspect that he is a mite too young to be terribly conscious of the kind of image he maintains in their eyes. The obvious answer is that Laurie would sooner avoid having to face additional repercussions from his parents for his behaviours at school, but at the same time is compelled to attempt to communicate with them what he is going through. Laurie's daily excitement in relating news of Charles' latest misdeeds makes it unclear if he actively enjoys the deception, or if he is reacting to how much further he is able to go over the line each day, as if awed by his own capacity for defiance. The story becomes doubly poignant if you read it from the perspective that Laurie, unable to understand his situation or why he is compelled to behave as he does, has been reaching out to his parents the entire time.

For Laurie's parents, the phantom Charles becomes emblematic of this unwelcome process of change. He is dreaded to the point that he basically becomes an incorporeal entity, a corrupting influence who permeates the family home and unleashes all manner of disturbances within - which, in reality, are the kind of banal, everyday mishaps one would expect to occur in a family home on any given weekend. The baby cries too much, the father knocks down some items with the telephone cord, and even Laurie's aforementioned adventure with the mud-filled wagon seems entirely devoid of genuine malice. This is the point in the story in which the narrator unwittingly reveals that Laurie could take on the role of Charles, but it is also the point in which she unwittingly exposes the source of their troubles as coming from inside their family unit and not the world outside. Charles may be an intruder in their domestic paradise, but Laurie's parents seem reluctant to let their adopted scapegoat go - when Laurie later brings reports of a quieter, more obedient Charles, his father suggests (somewhat ludicrously, given the age of the child) that "when you've got a Charles to deal with, this may mean he's only plotting". The reality is that Laurie, having made the initial shift from sweet-voiced tot to insolent hell-raiser, is on the cusp of yet another change - his time as Charles was merely a phase, one of several steps on his ongoing development as a person. This underscores one of the other great ironies of Jackson's story - that Laurie, ultimately, is more resilient and accepting of change than either of his parents; for all of his freshness, he does not share in any of their prejudices. Just as his parents would sooner their son remained frozen as a sweet-voiced tot for eternity, they are comfortable with "Charles" being forever pigeonholed as an incorrigible undesirable whose only talent is for spreading ruination, and the picture they accordingly paint of his mother alongside. Hence the other implicit meaning of the teacher's closing statement that, "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten." Nobody is as two-dimensional as they assume.