There’s a mysticism about Mardi Gras that can often be forgotten in the manic yearly traditions of king cake scrounging, traffic dodging, and throw hoarding, one that Rod Serling clearly held a fascination with, as evidenced by the New Orleans set “The Twilight Zone” episode “The Masks”. An episode from the fifth and final season of the generation-defining science fiction/horror anthology series, this Serling-written and Ida Lupino-directed chamber drama chronicling a rich New Orleans man’s final act of vicious judgment upon his cloying and acidic relatives is a simple one, and all the more damning for its cool, clear conviction. While many of the show’s most iconic episodes found characters, and the audience, thrust into fantastical scenarios involving space-age exploration, the unfeeling hand of fate, and the unknowability of the darkness just beyond the horizon, “The Masks” instead features a small cast of characters made alien by their own selfish impulses; ex-patriots slumming their way through the waning hours of Carnival to sit by the bedside of a man whose wealth and influence they are giddy to inherit. The Mardi Gras season means nothing to them; they feel no reverence for the spirit of the city, let alone its art and music, merely a gluttonous need to consume, regurgitate, and consume the purged mush which was once something beautiful. But the universe, or New Orleans itself, has other plans for them as they venture into the French Quarter home of their dying patriarch, because as much as the masks of Carnival shield identity, they are just as potent at revealing the festering slime that slithers just beneath the skin that aches to be released into the open air, which is only fitting. Because, as Serling opines in his patented opening narration, “This is New Orleans, Mardi Gras time. It’s also the Twilight Zone.”
It’s Mardi Gras, and Jason Foster is dying. Amid his luxurious mansion and beside his dutiful servants, Jason is told by his friend and physician that he can count his life not in days but in moments. The frail, wealthy man is unbothered; he anticipated this and has contented himself with his iminent demise but for one final act. You see, his family will soon be arriving; his daughter Emily, her husband Wilfred, and grandchildren Paula and Wilfred Jr. He holds no love for his dear ones, and the sentiment is returned. Emily is a mewling hypochondriac, Wilfred is a money-grubbing leech, Paula is vanity personified, and Wilfred Jr. is a brutish dullard with a penchant for torturing small animals. They are here as vultures, leering over the weakened man who holds within his vast fortune a life of luxury they covet more than air, yet in their fine upper-class suits and bangles, they could be mistaken for a pleasant, affable group. But Jason knows better and wishes the world to know as well. Mardi Gras night, he tells them, will be spent in his house while the city descends into revelry just outside. They will sit in his parlor, basking in each other’s repugnant company, while wearing specially designed masks. These grotesque masks, designed by a Cajun, hold unique properties when worn on Mardi Gras Night. If the family wears them until the final stroke of midnight, they will attain all the worldly possessions Jason has to give. Blinded by their incessant greed, the family dons their masks dutifully: that of a wretched crone for Emily, that of a melting bore for Wilfred, that of a vainglorious abomination for Paula, and that of a troll-like monstrosity for Wilfred Jr. Jason, for his part, dons the mask of a skull as death looms in his not-so-distant future. As the night drags on, the family grows impatient and manic as they stare endlessly at the oblong faces thrust upon them. They beg Jason to repeal his offer, yet he remains steadfast. Finally, as midnight strikes, Jason releases his life to eternity, having committed his last act of defiant vengeance, and dies. Foaming at the mouth to rip into the fortune they have now inherited, the family removes their masks only to be faced with a yawning horror. Their faces are now the masks, their features stretched and warped beyond recognition; a permanent branding of their inner savagery that they will present to the world now and forever. As the family cowers against one another, realizing what they have sold over in return for riches unearned, Rod Serling returns for his final summation: “Mardi Gras incident. The dramatis personae being four people who came to celebrate and, in a sense, let themselves go. This they did with a vengeance. They now wear the faces of all that was inside them, and they’ll wear them for the rest of their lives. Said lives now to be spent in shadow. Tonight’s tale of men, the macabre, and masks on The Twilight Zone.”
There is a perverse glee inherent in witnessing the slow desecration of these ungrateful, untalented, and overall distasteful would-be masters of the universe. While “The Masks” does not feature the signature “big twist” of many “Twilight Zone” episodes, as most people could see the reveal coming a mile away, there is something comforting about the inevitability of the family’s plight. From the first moments we see them, we know them, or at least their modern counterparts. These lecherous, self-important rubes, talentless, imperceptive, and mean, are the very people who have taken over the world we live in; they are the AI executives, Senators, real estate magnates, businessmen, and Presidents whose entire veneer of opulence is a smokescreen for the pestilence they eagerly foster within themselves. Their masks are country clubs, fine suits, and the pretenses of divinity and grace, while behind closed doors, they skulk, grovel, and demean, lavishing in the pain of those without the good fortune of being born in the right skin color, zip code, and tax bracket. To this end, Mardi Gras, for all of its coalescence and good cheer, fosters its own demons, its own scourge beneath the thin plastic masks and bejeweled crowns of Krewes looming over the common folk from atop their trailer-drug chariots. Their masks are easily perceived as a reflection of self-importance, a secret let slip from the backrooms of influence where the ruling classes are allowed to present as they prefer; as an aristocracy given dominion by birth over a city that adores them. It’s not surprising that Serling found bountiful material in the contradictions of Mardi Gras, which makes the family’s karmic comeuppance all the sweeter. The audience’s joy emanates from luxuriating in their deserved suffering as the knife twists only to be yanked at the precise moment for optimum arterial spray. While they are successful in attaining the status inherited from their dead grandfather, the price paid is a lasting one and, perhaps even more importantly, one the world cannot help but witness. The rest of their lives, they will steep in the ooze of their own decadence, wearing their masks as their true faces for all to see. To live in the faces they forged is their sentence for a lifetime of moral obscenity and self-aggrandizement; a punishment befitting all those who wander into New Orleans looking to take what they have not earned, to defile something beautiful and ravage it unnatural and cold.
Mardi Gras is fantastical, aspirational, and cruel in equal measure; a collective experience where anyone can be whoever they wish to be, though that power can be easily corrupted beyond the bounds of Carnival. As with the best of Rod Serling’s writing, it is the defilement of human decency that damns the worst of us. It makes one wish that the scales of justice were as balanced and fair in our reality as they are in “The Twilight Zone”. Oh, what a world that would be.
You can rent episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and a wide selection of other New Orleans/Louisiana-set films from Future Shock Video.
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