Long Live Walter Jameson

"Long Live Walter Jameson" is episode 24 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Opening narration

You're looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours of dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive.

The narration continues after the camera cuts to an elderly man seated among the students during Jameson's lecture.

In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn't come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.

Plot

Walter Jameson, a professor of history at an unnamed college, is engaged to one of his doctoral students, Susanna Kittridge. Susanna's father Sam, another professor at Jameson's college, becomes suspicious of Jameson because he does not appear to have aged in the twelve years they have known each other and seems to have unrealistically detailed knowledge of some pieces of history that do not appear in texts. Jameson at one point reads from an original Civil War diary in his possession. Later, Kittridge spots the diary's author, Major Hugh Skelton, in a Mathew Brady Civil War photograph and finds Jameson looks exactly like Skelton.

After Kittridge presents these pieces of evidence, Jameson admits he is indeed Skelton, but is far older, and implies he knew Plato personally. Fearing death as a young man, he offered himself to an alchemist seeking to devise a means of immortality. Jameson woke up to find the alchemist missing and at first believed that the experiments failed but then had to watch as his family and friends grew old and died while he remained young. He is now cynical and embittered after centuries of wandering the Earth and having to constantly forge new identities. Jameson tells Kittridge that the point of death is to make life meaningful and confesses that he purchased a revolver some time ago to commit suicide but has lost his nerve and now hides it in a desk drawer.

When questioned, Jameson admits that he loves Susanna, but that he's also loved many women before her, and that eventually, he will have to abandon her and move on. Horrified, Kittridge refuses to consent to the wedding. An unmoved Jameson then tells Susanna that they will elope and get married that evening. He dismisses her father by telling him that he has no actual proof of his immortality and threatens to have him declared insane if he persists.

Stopping to collect some things from his office, Jameson is confronted by Laurette Bowen, a widow who identifies him as her "late" husband Tom. Having found the gun in his desk, she shoots Jameson in the chest and leaves. Kittridge finds him and watches as Jameson, now at peace, rapidly ages and collapses on the floor. Susanna arrives and Kittridge tries to stop her, but by the time she forces her way past him, all that's left of Jameson is his clothes and shoes covered with dust. When Susanna asks what is on the floor, the professor replies, "Dust, only dust."

Closing narration

Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end.

Makeup effects

The scenes of Walter Jameson's aging were performed by using an old movie-making trick. Age lines were drawn on actor Kevin McCarthy's face in red make-up. During the beginning of the scene, red lighting was used, bathing the scene in red and hiding the age lines. As the scene progressed, the red lights were turned down and green lights were brought up. Under the green lights, the red age lines were prominent. The lighting changes were unseen by the audience because it was filmed in black-and-white. A subsequent episode, "Queen of the Nile", used a similar effect.

Home media

For the DVD release Kevin McCarthy returned to record an audio commentary for the episode, revealing that he never met Rod Serling and that, aside from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, his appearance in this episode generated the most fan mail he ever received.

See also

• Immortality in fiction
• The Man from Earth – a 2007 film with a similar premise

Further reading

• Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition). ISBN 1-879505-09-6.
• DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
• Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

External links

• "Long Live Walter Jameson" at IMDb