Watch through The Twilight Zone, and you’ll find yourself spotting no end of familiar faces: Julie Newmar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Elizabeth Montgomery, William Shatner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode “He’s Alive” is at least doubly notable in that respect, featuring as it does a young (but in acting sensibility, almost fully formed) Dennis Hopper as Peter Vollmer, a ne’er-do-well made into an aspiring dictator by none other than Adolf Hitler. Played by Curt Conway, a specialist in doctors, judges, and other authority figures, the undead Führer offers his young disciple instructions like the above, from an early scene before his identity is revealed.
“How do you move a mob, Mr. Vollmer? How do you excite them? How do you make them feel as one with you?” Hitler asks. The answer, which he then provides, is first to join them: “When you speak to them, speak to them as if you were a member of the mob. Speak to them in their language, on their level. Make their hate your hate. If they are poor, talk to them of poverty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fears. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer… if they are angry, give them objects for their anger. But most of all, the thing that is most of the essence, Mr. Vollmer, is that you make this mob an extension of yourself.”
If accused of scapegoating minorities, he should address the throng thus: “Should I tell you who are the minorities? Should I tell you? We! We are the minorities.” Soon, we see Peter in full neo-Nazi gear delivering just such a harangue, thoroughly Hopper-ized in diction, to a modestly attended rally. How could these ordinary-looking attendees be a minority? “Because patriotism is a minority. Because love of country is the minority. Because to live in a free, white America seems to be of a minority opinion!” Though hardly artful, this rhetoric eventually makes him into a popular figure, albeit one whose rise is cut short when he turns to conspiracy to accelerate his rise to power.
And what of the spirit of Hitler? “Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare?” Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling asks in his episode-closing monologue. “Any place, every place where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry.” It was against such broad social phenomena that Serling so often used his scripts to argue, and with “He’s Alive,” he made use of an unusually vivid ideological example. A veteran of the Second World War, which had ended less than twenty years earlier, Serling surely had even fresher memories of the threat of Hitler than did the general American public — and understood even more clearly what could happen if those memories were to fade away.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
