Linda Ganus
In 1963, Rod Serling’s popular series The Twilight Zone was renewed for a fourth season with a few formatting conditions: renaming the series (dropping “The” from the title); hiring a new producer, Herbert Hirschman, who also designed the new surrealistic titles; and moving the 30-minute show to a 60-minute time slot the network needed to fill. Serling was apprehensive about padding the show unnecessarily with writing that merely slowed down the action, so one of the strategies he adopted, which would both take advantage of the longer time format and also help set Twilight Zone apart from competing sci-fi programs, was to improve the quality and breadth of the show’s musical scoring. This not only filled moments that would have otherwise needed dialogue but also helped enhance the characteristic uncanny content of the shows. One lesser-known episode from this season, “Miniature,”[i] is a compelling work that uses original jazz instrumental scoring and pre-existing classical piano music as psychological devices to advance a story about a man obsessed with a dollhouse.
Well-known composer Fred Steiner had created the popular theme music for the crime thriller series Perry Mason in 1957, and was hired to create the score for “Miniature.” Steiner cleverly and intentionally combined original and repurposed classical and jazz music both diegetically (as a plot element) and non-diegetically (the music/sound is not audible to the characters in the story, only to the viewers). Furthermore, by blurring the usages of these two film-scoring techniques in “Miniature,” Steiner creates dissonances between what the audience (and characters) are seeing versus what they are hearing, thus complicating the viewer’s own perceptions and making the story and its conclusion even more enigmatic and uncanny.
Acclaimed actor Robert Duvall guest-starred early in his career in “Miniature.” It first aired on 21 February 1963, soon after Duvall had made his big-screen debut as the misunderstood recluse Boo Radley in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. “Miniature” features Duvall as another quiet, sensitive loner, Charley Parkes, who prefers visiting local museum exhibits by himself to socializing with his work colleagues or going on dates, much to the consternation of his traditional family. Among the excellent supporting cast are Claire Griswold as Alice; Barbara Barrie as Charley’s sister, Myra; William Windom as Charley’s acerbic psychiatrist, Dr. Wallman; and, in a touching performance of neurotic parenting balancing humor and pathos, Pert Kelton as Charley’s smothering mother.[ii]
Charley encounters a dollhouse
Charley (Robert Duvall) by the museum dollhouse
On his lunch break one day, Charley decides to visit the nearby museum. This action is underscored with a solo flute playing a slow, jazz-inflected melody. Avoiding a sudden rush of tourists, he ducks into a side room of antiquities, noticing a Victorian dollhouse featuring a miniature model of a young woman seated at a tiny antique fortepiano. As he turns away, he hears a simple melody and turns back to see the small doll alive and playing the piano. Her music has a lilting, rocking quality, like a lullaby. He asks the friendly guard how they “get the music to play” in the exhibit, and the guard politely wonders what music Charley is talking about . . . apparently only Charley hears it. Entranced, Charley is late returning to work. His boss fires him for not being a “team player,” adding a snide remark about him still living at home with his mother. Charley passively accepts his firing with surprisingly little distress.
Upon his return to the claustrophobic Parkes home, Charley’s mother interrogates him about getting fired again and threatens to call his boss. (There is no music underscoring any of the scenes in Charley’s home.) With her grating voice and aggravated expressions, Mrs. Parkes as played by Kelton is an exhausting whirlwind of anxiety, narcissism, and hypochondria. She alternates between infantilizing Charley and pressuring him to move out and be “normal.” Charley’s characteristic flat affect in response to her histrionics reads as either autism-coded, or one of meek withdrawal from an emotional maelstrom which may harm him, but with nowhere else to turn. Despite this, Charley can’t refrain from happily whistling the tune he heard in the museum as he gets ready for bed. This arouses the suspicions of Mrs. Parkes, and she follows him into his cramped bedroom, even offering to help him take off his own shoes as he shoos her away.
Charley visits the dollhouse more frequently, and the melody that Alice plays progresses into a series of ever-more intricate variations. Worried, Charley’s married sister, Myra, meets him in a pizza parlor and tries to set him up on a date with her friend. (In this scene, Steiner scores the ambient music playing in the pizza shop with a cheesy version of “La donna é mobile,” a popular aria sung by a womanizing duke in a Verdi opera . . . It’s diegetic music but also signals that, despite her good intentions, Myra’s interference with Charley’s emotional life will not end well.) The blind date takes place outside in a large, dimly-lit park, and Myra’s chum turns out to be a gum-snapping, sexually aggressive bombshell who tries to seduce Charley and is humiliated when he pulls away. She impulsively slaps him for not kissing her and suggests he see a doctor.
Alice (Claire Griswold) at the piano
Charley’s dollhouse visits become obsessive. He starts seeing other characters in the dollhouse, a small maid and a villainous male dandy who visits the house. All the action between Alice and the other two dolls is mimed, and Charley hears (as do we) melodramatic underscoring music that might be played for a silent film, but by toy instruments. He starts becoming anxious one day as the male doll seems to play out a seduction of Alice. Charley’s emotions become more and more fraught about what he and we perceive as a mini-primal scene about to play out in front of him. Charley panics, and the frantic music is suddenly broken by a loud crash as Charley shatters the protective display glass to rescue Alice and is led away by the guard to a mental hospital and the care of Dr. Wallman.
The aptly-named, chain-smoking Dr. Wallman, played with brilliant coolness and condescension by William Windom, confronts Charley and tells him that the dollhouse and animated Alice are delusions, presenting him with the actual Alice wooden doll in a small, cotton lined box. We perceive her through Charley’s point of view as the live Alice asleep in a kind of miniature coffin, to the sound of the Alice/Mozart theme played non-diegetically by the orchestra underscore as Charley cradles the doll and cries over her.
Charley soon returns to his family miraculously “cured,” all smiles and saying he knows the doll is not alive now. He even seems happy to let his mother make him comfortable before bedtime and take his shoes off! As he shuts the door to his tiny room, Charley drops his fake smile and makes a break for it out of his bedroom window. Escaping back to the museum, he hides in one of the museum’s sarcophagi and sneaks out after closing hours to rejoin and rescue Alice. The family and Dr. Wallman chase after Charley, seemingly cornering him in the antiquities room; then he vanishes. Only the guard notices that Charley is now snugly inside the dollhouse with Alice, but he appears willing to keep it a secret as the episode abruptly ends on a seemingly whimsical note.
The expansive interiority of the dollhouse
But is this just a light-hearted happy ending? Being the Twilight Zone, there is slight chance of that. The apparent contradictions of finding expansiveness and freedom by escaping into a miniscule artificial world seem unresolved, like a Zen koan. Throughout the episode, our point of view has been both aided and vexed by the accompanying music. We are shuttled back and forth between the limitless interior of Charley’s imagination and the banal conformity of his 1950’s suburban social world, where small hostilities passing between people can diminish each other bit by bit. This could have been an episode with a fairly pat “twist” ending. It isn’t a huge surprise when Charley magically joins Alice in the dollhouse at the end . . . in fact, the mechanics of how that happens is elided and conveniently left to our imaginations. As they search for him, Charley’s family and Dr. Wallman splinter off in all different directions in a kind of reverse mirroring of Charley’s interior spiral into the intimacy of his (and Alice’s?) world of imagination. The viewer may speculate that the “small” world of childlike dollhouse play may be more meaningful than the socially circumscribed, narrow “reality” blinding the Parkes family and Dr. Wallman to Charley’s different social needs, but one might be left wondering why exactly that might be.
Perhaps it might be helpful to consider some examples of what the miniature might represent in a larger cultural sense in order to better make sense of the seemingly contradictory elements in this episode, made even more complex by the score.
The American-British poet H.D. compared immensity contained in the miniature to a flower latently contained in a small seed, whose petals would open up in a spiral, circling to infinity.[iii] A further illustration of this paradox might be from another well-known science-fiction/fantasy series that delighted in conceptual puzzles: in the same year that “Miniature” aired, the pilot episode of the British series Doctor Who was broadcast. The series famously featured a time-traveling spaceship called the T.A.R.D.I.S., which had an old “timey-wimey” phone booth exterior, but revealed an elaborate, spacious interior, filled with technological gadgets. The Einsteinian nature of the T.A.R.D.I.S.’s relative dimensions in space vis-à-vis its location in time was represented by coding it visually as “bigger on the inside than the outside” through the visual magic of set design and props; we have already mentioned that Twilight Zone leaned more into an audio realm for this kind of signification.[iv]
Poet and literary critic Susan Stewart has drawn on influences from her mentor Gaston Bachelard and others in her research theorizing about our relationships to gradations in size and scale in the world around us. In her work, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), Stewart posits that we view miniature replicas as spaces of memory and play that can only be activated by imagining life and activity within, such as the space of a model building, a ship in a bottle, or a dollhouse. The paradox is that while the external boundaries of a miniature seem small, the imagined world can be as elaborate and vast as one wishes. Stewart also proposes that the miniature is a site of longing, since it is impossible to physically live in the small space, creating a longing or nostalgia for an origin, such as a primal, pre-oedipal state or even the mother’s womb, that one can no longer inhabit. Stewart mentions Freudian theory in this context, claiming that the miniature is always uncanny (a quality found in most, if not all, Twilight Zone episodes) because it is simultaneously familiar (a replica) and strange (smaller than scale).
Stewart’s theory becomes especially illuminating when thinking of the many traumatic passages that Charley Parkes traverses during the episode—escaping a rushing crowd of museumgoers in the opening scenes by hiding in a dark side room; his anxiety on his date in the dark, open park; and, perhaps most picturesquely, climbing into and out of the museum sarcophagus where he has hidden for hours! In his attraction to the dollhouse, Charley may have been acting out a wish to return to an ideated mother who was not separate from himself, much less his own problematic mother.
Theme and variation, repetition and nostalgia
Returning to the musical score of “Miniature,” the particular sonata that Steiner chose, the first movement of Mozart’s Sonata No. 11 in A Major, has important formal musical elements that complement and reinforce the psychological particulars of the story. The first: the entire movement is a Theme and Variations, an unusual formal structure for the first movement of a classical sonata. This means that the tune, or theme, is repeated and embellished/expanded with every succeeding variation. In addition, the theme starts with a melody that rocks between the notes C# and D, a minor second (the smallest interval in the Western diatonic system). Mozart, in his inimitable and playful way, transfigures this small minor second into several increasingly complicated variations, all using that close interval. Finally, the minor second is also an interval that Mozart often uses for emotional affect as he does here in this theme and its variations: a dissonant minor second neighboring or passing tone suggests a “sighing” or “sobbing” quality, subtly suggesting a sensation of yearning and longing in the listener.
In fact, Steiner’s choice to start the entire episode with that same motif fragment exaggeratedly slowed down as non-diegetic underscoring—the solo flute playing in the introductory scene—makes the first “diegetic” appearance of the “real” Mozart music (at least, to Charley) something already recognized and remembered by us (if not Charley) and hence something we code as nostalgic. Musicologist and film scholar Giorgio Biancorosso reminds us that a leitmotif only becomes a leitmotif and signifier after repeated hearing, not on the first introduction. Using another famous film score motif as an example, Biancorosso states, “I have shown how the notorious shark motif in Jaws, for example, acquires its remarkably specific reference – that the shark is mounting an attack – only after as many as three different presentations over the course of six minutes of screen time” (213). I can’t resist adding that the Jaws motif is also a minor second . . . a small interval doing some large menacing work.
Strategic silence also takes on dramatic importance in “Miniature.” As mentioned previously, there is a looming silence that pervades all of the scenes in the oppressive Parkes household. Barbara Barrie, playing sister Myra, often resorts to subtle, silent eyerolling as her small and futile resistance to her nuclear family’s conventions and expectations. And, Alice the doll is really a 1950s construct of femininity; we never hear her speak. It is worth questioning whether Charley is projecting everything he assumes Alice to be feeling in a scene in which he pours out his feelings to her – even such a benign character as Charley clearly feeling the masculine presumption to be able to do so. The artistic choice for the speechlessness of Alice runs the risk of relegating Alice’s appeal to her mere outward appearance and that of Charley’s (and our conditioned) male gaze, but I like to think that the author, frequent Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont, wrote Alice’s character and storyline to open up another space through which Charley (and we) can begin to know the interiority of Alice . . . that of the music she plays. That is the way she speaks to Charley . . . and to us.
Alice and Charley sit together – in the dollhouse
One might also wonder at what kind of “happy-ever-after” life might be implied for the two lovers at the denouement of the story, as Charley and Alice sit beside each other on the toy divan. They content themselves by playing with an antique slide viewer; as miniatures, they gaze contentedly at even smaller miniatures in a kind of compulsively repeating set of fractal diminutions, a dollhouse Zeno’s paradox. Again, visual details here form an interesting tension with the sounds at the end. Steiner decides to score the last variation for his orchestral players instead of the dollhouse piano, conflating the “imaginary” but diegetic piano music with the non-diegetic orchestral underscoring to create a fractured fairy tale ending that is tinged with naturalism. We are left somewhat unsatisfied, not sure what has been real, and the tension between the visual and aural cues at least hint to an uncertain future of endless, but intentionally chosen, pleasant compulsion.
This combination of a brilliantly quirky musical score, stellar casting enhanced by echoes of the actors’ previous roles, and a smart, lyrical script that is both psychologically powerful and poetic, proves to be much more than the sum of its parts, illuminating the liminal space of this Twilight Zone overlooked classic, “Miniature.”
[i]“The Miniature” episode was aired once in 1963, then withdrawn from syndication because of a lawsuit brought by a contributor who claimed he had submitted a script about a mannequin that comes to life and that the story idea had been plagiarized. His lawsuit and his appeal were eventually dismissed, but the episode was only rebroadcast once again in 1984 as part of a Twilight Zone Anniversary Special. It is available on DVD and on streaming platforms today.
[ii] Pert Kelton was the original Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners, but was fired by the network after only seven episodes because her husband was blacklisted by the McCarthy-era Red Scare in Hollywood. She later cleared her name and returned to play Alice’s mother on the series.
[iii] Referring to lines from The Flowering of the Rod, the third poem in H.D.’s wartime poem, Trilogy, https://voetica.com/poem/4137.
[iv] The T.A.R.D.I.S., the name of which was coined in the pilot Doctor Who episode by Susan, the first Doctor’s companion, stood for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Susan explains to befuddled visitors: “I made up the name Tardis from the initials . . . I thought you’d both understand when you saw the different dimensions inside from those outside” (“Unearthly Child”).
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Penguin, 2014.
Biancorosso, Giorgio. “Memory and the Leitmotif in Cinema.” Representation in Western Music, edited by Joshua S. Walden, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 203–23.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, Penguin, 2003, pp. 121–62.
“Miniature.” Twilight Zone, season 4, episode 8, written by Charles Beaumont, directed by Walter Grauman, CBS, 21 February 1963.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 2007.
“An Unearthly Child.” Doctor Who, season 1, episode 1, written by Anthony Coburn, directed by Waris Hussein, BBC, 23 November–14 December 1963, The Doctor Who Episode Transcripts, http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/1-1.htm.
