Nico Israel

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United Nations. There the hyperintelligent giant, speaking perfect English (though without moving his lips) offers Earthlings freedom from war, hunger, and disease—problems that the Kanamits themselves, he says, long ago overcame.[[{"fid":"2967","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","class":"media-element file-default","data-delta":"1"}}]] Argentinian, French, and Soviet UN delegates are initially somewhat suspicious of the colossally-brained Kanamit, and pepper him politely but forcefully with questions in accented English, but after he passes a lie detector test, they (and, it seems, the entire UN General Assembly) are placated. The story focuses on Michael Chambers, an American “decoding specialist” whose initial responsibility it is to decipher the large book that the eloquent Kanamit leaves at the UN, the title of which Chambers’s assistant Patty soon renders as To Serve Man. But as the Kanamit’s promises have been borne out in a short time––there is no longer disease, hunger, or war anywhere in the world—Chambers’s task seems less and less necessary. Like many other Earthlings, he is planning to visit the plentiful, peaceful planet of the Kanamits, who have now established embassies in every major country on Earth. Just as Chambers is preparing to enter the Kanamits’ spaceship for his interplanetary journey, Patty, who has, off-screen, apparently been working assiduously on the translation, rushes toward the boarding ramp and, held back by a dapper Kanamit security guard, frantically cries out, “Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man: it’s . . . it’s a cookbook!” But she is too late: the ramp is quickly closed and the spaceship lifts off in spectacularly low-tech fashion. The episode ends with Chambers on board the vessel being offered food gesturally by a Kanamit and verbally by his sinisterly unctuous voice: “Enjoy! Eat Hearty!”

In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre- Star Trek William Shatner, with characteristic avidity, plays the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water (fig. 1). While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail, but suffice it to say, in Hollywood-speak, that the film is an arena where Twilight meets The Twilight Zone meets Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. The director of Incubus, Leslie Stevens, creator of the recently cancelled Outer Limits television series, was seeking a way to make the low-budget black-and-white film distinctively eerie and to market it to the burgeoning art house cinema circuit. He settled on a clever strategy: Incubus’s dialogue would be in the constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto. Asserting his newly found auteur status, Stevens would not allow the film to be dubbed into any single national language; it would thus always require subtitles. In this case, Esperanto was viewed not as a means of communicating across national borders and promoting universal brotherhood, but of preserving those boundaries, of maintaining an uncanny and succubus-like kernel of foreignness in language itself. [[{"fid":"1502","view_mode":"wysiwyg","fields":{"format":"wysiwyg"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"wysiwyg"}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-wysiwyg","data-delta":"1"}}]]Fig. 1. Incubus (1965), Esperanto scene.