Headscratchers / The Twilight Zone (1959) S3E17: "One More Pallbearer"

• Maybe it's just me, and this is rather meta, but why do so many people seem intent on feeling sorry for Radin? The man is clearly and bluntly shown to be a narcissistic, selfish, remorseless, petty creep whose existence revolved around destroying the lives of everyone he knew for his own profit and amusement. What is there to sympathize with?
  • Radin isn't sympathetic, no. However modern understandings of how mental illnesses work probably have garnered some realizations that Radin might have needed specialized counseling that wouldn't be recognized as necessary when the episode was written. Of course, no one has so far said they like Radin. Every statement that includes showing some sympathy for Radin also makes sure to include that he's still a vain and ultimately worthless little man that could never win because of himself.
  • This troper has to admit that he was sucked in by Joseph Wiseman's performance. He was so charismatic that for a while I was hoping he had in fact been wrongly accused by all three of his victims and they'd all turn out to be self-righteous hypocrites, deserving of their humiliation. I suppose an accidental aesop for this episode could be don't let yourself be fooled by superficial charm.
  • There's also the fact that our sympathies for Radin are at least a little governed by our sympathies for the other characters. And they do come across as being incredibly cold and almost entirely disinterested in what Radin's beef with them all is. Granted, his reasons for hating them are certainly weak at best, but the fact that they're all so unrelentingly sanctimonious about their own behaviour - whether or not their condemnations of Radin were as harsh or supposedly undeserved as he makes them out to be, it's clear that they had a profound and almost traumatising affect on him and one that they're completely unwilling to acknowledge or accept - combined with (as the first answer said) an improved understanding surrounding mental health issues (of which it definitely seems Radin might be suffering from some kind and it's at least implied that said mental health issues have been exacerbated by their behaviour towards him) makes them seem more than a little unsympathetic, thus causing at least some sympathy lie with Radin since he is their opposing force within the story. But again, no one ever seems to really say they like Radin or even fully sympathise with him; it's more a case of Values Dissonance leading to the other three being seen as Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
• Building on the above (and, perhaps, the natural counterpoint to the first question raised on this page): this troper personally doesn't understand the Unintentionally Unsympathetic view of Mrs. Langsford, Colonel Hawthorne, and Reverend Hughes. Even if the incidents they caused in Radin's past did cause him trauma, they were reactions to Radin's own terrible behavior and choices. Radin was the one who did something unspeakable (most likely rape) to a young woman that drove her to suicide, prompting Hughes to generate a public scandal. Radin was the one who cowardly abandoned his fellow soldiers and nearly got them killed, prompting Hawthorne to justifiably court-martial and dishonorably discharge him (although I can see how outright telling Radin that he'd have killed him if given the chance is an extreme reaction). And Radin was the one who cheated on a test as a child and tried to frame another student for it, prompting Mrs. Langsford to flunk and shame him in front of the whole class. Mrs. Langsford also makes it clear that it wasn't her public punishment of Radin that caused him to become twisted and self-serving—he was already twisted and self-serving, as evidenced by the fact that he was willing to frame another kid: he clearly didn't mind someone else getting humiliated in front of his classmates. Plus as the previous troper said, I think their disinterest in the situation is more a reflection of Radin's own pettiness: they genuinely can't believe that someone as rich, powerful, and successful as him is still hung up on incidents that, in their minds, were settled a long time ago, and that he's gone to such incredible lengths just to squeeze an apology out of them. Of course, Unintentionally Unsympathetic is a YMMV trope on purpose, but that's my mileage, so to speak.
  • As stated above, it's got quite a lot to do with how times have changed and the quite heavy implication that Radin had some sort of mental health issue that was either caused or exacerbated by the way he had been treated. It also doesn't help that they seem to insist on seeing themselves and their interactions with Radin as existing in a vacuum with no acknowledgement how they each (to Radin) are bricks in a wall with each subsequent bad experience building on a previous one, all of which help to mould him into the petty and vindictive man he becomes. To put it simply, modern audiences can increasingly understand why Radin ends up the way he does; the trio's treatment of him, on the other hand, is seen as increasingly harsh and less understandable. Nowadays, we know that a teacher publicly shaming (and thus humiliating) a child in front of their peers can potentially have a traumatising effect on said child and is in many cases more likely to worsen discipline problems than solve them; regardless of whether the child was cheating and trying to blame another for it, especially as that's relatively typical behaviour children tend to engage in within a scholastic environment, it's bad behaviour and should be dealt with but not by public humiliation. With regards to the "something unspeakable" Radin did to the girl, I will say that it wasn't necessarily rape; it could have been that he strung her along, got her pregnant and then refused to take responsibility. That would still have potentially been enough to ruin a woman's reputation and thus drive her to suicide. As to Hawthorne, while his may have been the correct course of action, again it would have undoubtedly exacerbated what issues the man already had. And while that's not Hawthorne's fault by any means, telling Radin that he'd rather have killed him was unnecessarily cruel. It's just a somewhat unfortunate case of this particular aspect of the episode feeling incredibly dated and rooted in the attitudes of the times; it's obvious that the viewers are meant to agree that Radin is an irredeemably awful person (and the vast majority do; no one is trying to claim Radin to be a secret Jerk with a Heart of Gold), but the antagonist trio do come across as painfully sanctimonious in their abject refusal to budge even a little. It just makes them somewhat hard for some modern audiences to side with as wholeheartedly as was presumably intended.

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