The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite bits of media ever created and Rod Serling is one of my favorite American writers. To answer this question we have to look at three things: The post WW2 America, The Cold War and creator/writer Rod Serling.

I could take every piece of Serlings work and analyze the man (and Mods be dammed I'd love to do just that), but when looking at the historical reach of the Twilight Zone, it is impossible to make a assessment without assessing Serling himsef and the multitude of themes in his writing.

Rod Serling was the creative spark behind the Twilight Zone. On top of being the face of the show, the episodes he wrote consistently rank among the most favored, and it is not unfair to suggest that everything that made the show what it was is due in part to his influence. Serling, like many men in America in the late 50s and early 60's was a WW2 vet. He survived the pacific theater with a purple heart, four bronze stars, an arrowhead device, and in the 16 years between his enlisting, aged harder than a US President

Rod Serling 1943Rod Serling 1959

Wit this in mind, I want to look at some of the characters we see in the Twilight Zone. The series makes regular use of, as you observed, isolated individuals. Whether textual or subtextual, many protagonists were heavy drinkers, heavy smokers and people wrestling with private demons. Many of Serling's stories evoked nostalgia, featuring protagonists who pined for simpler times and/or simpler lives. Walking Distance, A Stop at Willoughby, Kick the Can and Back There all deal with themes of nostalgia, changing the past, and the comforts of simplicity amid a decidedly uncomfortable life.

Other themes that the series would play with (a lot) were that of death. Death is constantly portrayed as something beautiful, tantalizing and oddly comfortable. It is a seductress in Perchance to Dream and a kind, handsome, young man in The Passersby.

Death is always beautiful. It is feared by the living and multiple times over the moral is that death should be accepted.

The point is, while you talk about isolation, isolation was not the only motif in The Twilight Zone that resonated with audiences.

This isn't to suggest Rod Serling lived his life with one foot in the macabre. His daughter describes him as " a very positive, fun, down to earth person."But, at the same time, I think it behooves us to consider how much Serling was pulling from personal demons when he wrote characters wrestling with personal demons and, to get to the meat of your question, why this resonated with so many Americans in the late 50s and early 60s.

The dark underbelly of 1950's suburbia has become an assumed truth of fiction. Countless stories set in the 1950's and 60's juxtapose the conservative conformity with modern reprobates like racism, homophobia, drug use, spousal abuse and PTSD; all of which certainly existed in this time frame, and without public acceptability, but it's arrogant of our cohort to assume every one of these sins was under the surface of every home as we "correct" the facade with our openness to these problems. I bring this up, because there is a trend to recontextualize this time period for what we think it's problems were from our heuristic, and not where the people, at the time, would actually find anxiety.

It is pop-scholarly to cite that horror stories are reflective of the anxieties of their time. From stated metaphors like Romero's Night of the Living Dead, to meta farces like Wheedon's Cabin in the Woods, it is generally agreed that successful horror movies are successful because they tap into something cultural at the time (though still debated (I have a great video on this subject for the movie Halloween, but the source is not scholarly and I'd rather not risk things with the mods more than I have already, but PM if you're interested)). With that in mind, I would like to highlight that, if not self evident, The Twilight Zone is a horror series that frames itself in fantasy and science fiction.

A lot of the social commentary found in The Twilight Zone was not original to The Twilight Zone. Years before the Monsters were due on Maple Street the paranoia of enemies within was criticized by, Invasion of the Body Snatchers where even our friends could be enemies. Several of the Twilight Zone's best stories were screen adaptations of stories written by other authors, including, but not limited to, Time Enough at Last, I Shot an Arrow into the Air, Four O'Clock (all stories that deal with grown men in the throngs of alienation). In a lot of ways they are stock stories. Many classic Twilight Zone tails have been retold without reference or allusion and many more have been parodied as cliche, but what made these stories so resonant (as I see it) was that, in the post WW2 world, conventionally existential anxieties were made tangible.

In the 1950's America's reconstruction from the Second World War was psychological compared to the rest of the worlds very physical reconstruction. The land was unscathed, but the people had seen firsthand what war meant, and this says nothing of The Bomb. For many Americans the question of when the horrors of war would come to American soil was not a question of if, but when, and would they be able to confront it when it did. America was at the center of the world stage, and every American now fit into an economy infinitely more complex than the pre-war isolationism allowed for.

With the burden of being a part of a super power, nostalgia leaned far more halcyon than what we would see in later decades and The Twilight Zone challenged this. With many World War II vets carrying scars from the war at a time it wasn't talked about The Twilight Zone told stories of dead soldiers cursed to relive the horrors of war in endless loops (I know I decried our tendency to project PTSD into this time period earlier, but you don't need a BA in English to see how stories like Deaths-Head Revisited, The Arrival and especially A Quality of Mercy, were written for a nation with memories of the war). Finally, with the uncertainty of a nuclear future and threats all around stories where death was neither friend, nor foe, but friendlier than our fears would manifest helped mollify an ambiguous threat that somehow seemed more ready than ever before.

Edit: many grammar mistakes and redundancies, I wrote this between breaks at work

I can 't address the sci-fi tropes of this question really at all (I do have an answer to "Is cyperpunk's Asian flavored aesthetic simply a reflection of its birth in the eighties, when Japanese culture was just entering chic, or did the Asian economic development trigger the anxiety that led to cyperpunk?") . If you say that's how the themes of Twilight Zone were, I'll believe you. I always associated the Twilight Zone more with uncertainty and fear that we all know are associated with the Cold War.

However, I believe you because these were major themes of social science leading up to this period and especially in this period. If I expected mass culture to reflect mass concern, these are two of the themes (along with paranoia and conformity) that I'd expect in this period. But let's do some background first.

Social scientists, policy makers, politicians, and everyone else seems to be very worried about the transition from a mostly agrarian society to an industrial one. After all, for literally all of recorded history, urbanites were the minority and peasants were the majority. Most of the great sociologists of the era–-Marx, Durkheim, Weber (to a lesser extent), Tönnies, Simmel, the Chicago School, W.E.B. DuBois (to a lesser extend)–-were deeply concerned with this issue. Later sociologists, most famously Anthony Giddens in Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, argues that these great thinkers were basically talking about the emergence of capitalism but I don't think that's quite fair. Even if you're an orthodox Marxist, one must see that this period (let's say the very Long Nineteenth Century from the Industrial Revolution in the 1760's to WWI) brought massive change in a wide variety of fields, in both the economic base and the socio-cultural superstructure. It was characterized by both industrialization and urbanization. And many people were quite worried about it.

You see, people had tended to think of society as made up of tiny little communities. Romantic nationalism–one of the dominant political movements of the era–saw the true heart of the nation preserved and pure in the villages and, in some ways, perverted and soiled in the cities (of course, many of the people who argued for the purity of the countryside lived in cities, but so it goes). I'll just address two examples of how this popped up in social science. In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies talked about how there was Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. You can read the Wikipedia for more, but basically the "community" was characterized by roles, values, and beliefs based on consistent social interaction (as you'd have in a rural community where everyone knows your name) and the "society" was characterized by roles, values, and beliefs based on more anonymous, more indirect interactions (as you'd have in the city where you might not even know your next-door neighbor). Tönnies didn't think society was bad, but he did think that it was unnatural and basically one had to build community within society, as it were. Émile Durkheim reviewed Tönnies's book and hated it. I don't know if he had read it before finishing his own Division of Labor in Society (1893), but if it isn't a response to Tönnies, it might as well be. He argues that there are two types of solidarity, organic and mechanical. In a fun subtle little propaganda move, though, he called the one that typified the rural village mechanical solidarity and the one that typified the city organic solidarity. It's almost like his way of saying, "If you think about it, this urban way of living is more natural..." While he argued that the transition from "primitive" society to a modern industrial one may be chaotic, in the end (industrial, urban) organic solidarity offered a much better way to live.

But this was debated back and forth in social science from its emergence well into the 1930's and 40's. Some would examine no, there really are these communities in the city and what looks disordered is really ordered (as in the Chicago school in the U.S.). Some were worried about industrial society bringing "anomie" (Durkheim's term) and "alienation" (Marx's). But this debate, this discussion of how living in a city, how living a life filled with anonymous relationships and weak social ties changed us, was really the core of early sociology.

And out of this comes what I want to talk about: 1950's The Lonely Crowd mainly by David Reisman (Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney are also credited). This book was a hit. I believe it's still the best selling sociological book ever. It was one of those books that all the thinkers at the time talked about and everyone at Upper West Side cocktail parties at least had to pretend to have read. Think a book like Freakonomics or Thinking, Fast and Slow or something by Malcolm Gladwell. If there were airport bookstores back then, this would have been prominently displayed in their non-fiction section. And I want you to understand, I find this book to be incredibly boring and unempirical, and I really had to trust my professors that there was something interesting and worthwhile in it, which I think shows how much the book spoke to the era-–it's a boring, repetitive book and it still became a phenomenon because it spoke to real anxieties or conceptions of the period.

The book's subtitled "a study of the changing American character". I introduced Tönnies, and Durkheim, and them for a reason: if I'm allowed to put my own analysis on Riesman's argument, he's essentially arguing, "You know those big changes we saw with the industrial revolution and urbanization and all of that? We're going through a social change that big again, right now." Now, we don't tend to think of the 1950's as a time of great change but they seemed to. And, in many ways, they were–we're starting to see a white collar work force, and the other main books of this era seem concerned with that, these changing labor relations leading more specifically to changing social relations.

Riesman's book is not about patterns of social relations like Durkheim or Tönnies, or changing economic relations like Marx or Adam Smith, but fundamentally about changing "character", by which he means how individuals are "oriented". He identifies three types of characters, chronologically "tradition-directed", "inner-directed", and "other-directed". This character, for Riesman, is at the core of social interactions. "Tradition-direction" seems already so distant, like he's talking about the feudal era. This, he says, is entirely dependent on external rules and is more suitable for static societies. If I remember, he doesn't spend much time talking about this so that's about all I'll say about that. For Riesman, the big, important change is the one happening now, from "inner-direction" to "other-direction".

"Inner-direction" is the mode that was in decline by 1950. For Reisman, the the "inner-directed" mode was one where one learned one's values in childhood and these guides one for the rest of one's life. His operative metaphor for this was the gyroscope: it was set during childhood, and kept a balance the rest of your life. Think of the classic WASP orientation, where one learned Puritan values and all of that as a child, and then was set out in the world where one lived that (to me, this mode was very reminiscent of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism from several decades before, which in some ways could be seen as a study of one part of the emergence of this inner-direction). The inner-directed person wants to be respected.

But, in the 1950's, inner-direction, Reisman argued, was giving way to other-direction. Instead of a gyroscope keeping balance, you now had a RADAR always on the look out, always willing to change bearing. Values and tastes and the like are now more plastic. People change to fit their environment more. They want to be loved, not esteemed, they want to relate to other, not to control others (or be controlled by others). They want to fit in with the crowd, not follow their own True and Right path. The ever-shifting peer group and the whims of truly mass media suddenly are hugely elevated, rather than the instruction from proper, moral role models as a child. And, as you can tell from the title–-the Lonely Crowd--in Reisman's estimation this lead to feelings of anxiety. By being other directed, one was forever worried that the crowd would lead you behind. There were advantages to this: this let people fit well into ever shifting communities like the suburbs or the modern office. However, like Tönnies two or three generations before him, Reisman as the first to identify this actually thought this kind of bad--that we'd be lacking great leaders, for example. They were less likely to really know themselves. They were less autonomy, less able to function on their own if forced into isolation. What is the modern individual And above all, as the title indicates, it leads to loneliness, anomie, and alienation, even in a crowd of your peers. I mean, isn't' that also one of the great themes of the 1950's classic The Catcher in Rye? Feeling alone in a crowd? The struggle about what to do when you feel like you can't properly conform to your peer group norms, but you have limited inner-direction that assures you that you are on the right path? Yet he does have some inner-direction, some sense that the world is full of "phoneys". I feel like this struggle between inner-direction and other-direction is a common theme in Salinger's writings: I have in mind Franny and Seymour Glass. The influence of the peer group can also be seen in movies like Rebel without a Cause and more broadly in the moral panic over "juvenile delinquency" (a term that comes directly out of sociology).

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