Great Old TV Episodes...from The Twilight Zone

 

THE MIND AND THE MATTER, a second-season Twilight Zone episode that first aired in May of 1961 (I was four at the time and most definitely sound asleep that evening), stars legendary comedian Shelley Berman playing cranky, harassed office worker Archibald Beechcroft, who lives in the big city (presumably New York) and endures the daily oppression of...as he puts it..."people, people, people" crowding and jostling him about everywhere: the subway, elevators, cafeteria, office.  Finally reaching his work desk one morning, Beechcroft is greeted by his ever-ebullient young co-worker, who then proceeds to spill coffee all over him.  Later, at lunch in that crowded cafeteria, he gets his foiled meal from a vending machine and is hailed to a table with this same individual...who spills his drink all over him again, naturally.  But he has a book for him, titled The Mind and the Matter, and claims that a friend was able to mentally influence a store's customer into buying a specific piece of clothing after reading it.  "Chapter Three", he stresses to Beechcroft, and our stressed-out hero reluctantly accepts it.  Later, he gets deep into the book (see above) and tries its claim that mental concentration can change the world.  After successfully making his annoying landlady disappear, the next morning he completely empties the subway and his office of people.  Eventually becoming bored at that, he decides to make the world full of exact duplicates of himself, his cynical and complaining personality included.  When he gets a big dose of what he's really like, Beechcroft repents and, resigned, returns the world to its original state, after which his colleague comes into the office and spills more coffee on him...

Aside from the fact that to an extent I felt a certain kinship and sympathy to Archibald Beechcroft's antipathy about crowds, I thought his final decision to just give up and try to adapt to the world as it really is was a bit shortsighted.  When one learns to do something the first day, they don't take that limited time span and evaluate their effectiveness and then just quit if the early outcome doesn't measure up to expectations.  Instead they evaluate what went right and what went wrong, and adjust accordingly.  Had Archibald Beechcroft really been able to create his own universe simply by concentrating hard, he could have made it simply a bit less crowded and populated by those folks who, from his own experiences with them, he liked and respected.  But then again, the show's writers might have been making the point that he was a bit of a shallow thinker, anyway.  The Mind and the Matter was one of a handful of Twilight Zone episodes specifically designed to be funny and light-hearted.  Others that come to mind starred Carol Burnett, Orson Bean and Buster Keaton...