Wordful Wednesday: Button, Button
I can’t claim to have ever been a huge fan of The Twilight Zone, but there are several episodes of the show that I really enjoyed. One in particular I’ve always remembered was called Button, Button, and it’s now being expanded from the original source into a new movie titled The Box, starring James Marsden and Cameron Diaz.
When I investigated the new movie, that’s when I discovered that both the Twilight Zone episode and the film are based on a Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) short story titled, as you might expect, Button, Button.
And the Library had a collection of Matheson’s short work. Button, Button: Uncanny Stories is a decent collection of some very different stories. Some are quite short (indeed, the titular one isn’t even ten pages long), while others are closer 
to novella size. And the topics aren’t at all similar, either, though they probably all fall under a loose science-fiction/fantasy umbrella.
Button, Button is a great story and the short length is perfect. It asks a simple question: How much is a human life worth?
In the story, a mysterious package arrives at a home of a husband and wife. In the package is a box with a button on it. A mysterious man shows up and instructs the couple that if they push the button, they’ll receive $50,000 (quite a sum back in 1970), and someone they don’t know will die.
As I said, the story is short, so the deliberations between the two characters are brief, and the ending is a classic twist. I’m not sure how it’ll be expanded into a feature-length movie, although I’m almost certain the punch line will be changed (as it was in the Twilight Zone episode).
The other stories I enjoyed most were Mute, about a boy brought up to be telepathic being thrust into a world of talkers, and A Flourish of Strumpets, about a door-to-door service pedaling female companionship, with an absolutely poetic twist at the end. There’s also a hilarious one called The Creeping Terror about Los Angeles taking over the country like a weed and infecting people with “Ellieitis.” As you might imagine, there’s a bit of anti-Hollywood subtext there.
There were also a couple of stories that left me scratching my head. But short stories are almost always a grab bag (well, Philip K. Dick’s stories are pretty uniformly awesome).
Ahh…the Internet. I found a YouTube of the Twilight Zone episode (it’s a multi-part one, so you’ll have to click more than once to see the whole thing). Check it out:
Oh, and if you’re curious about the other episode I fondly remembered, it’s The Man in the Bottle.
