The Twonky (1953)

A professor's wife buys him a television set to keep him company while she is away. It stands up, walks across the floor, and lights his cigarette.

The set does favors. It shaves him, washes the dishes, cures a hangover. It also blanks his mind when he tries to prepare a lecture on free will, swaps his music for what it prefers, and knocks out anyone who tries to remove it.

A friend names the thing a "twonky," a word for something you cannot explain, and floats a theory: it is a machine sent back from a totalitarian future to manage the professor's every thought.

THE TWONKY (1953), written and directed by radio veteran Arch Oboler, may be the strangest science fiction film of the decade. Oboler adapted the screenplay from a 1942 short story by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. In the original text, the "twonky" was a console radio.

It is a clumsy film. But the idea underneath is uncannily prescient: a screen that arrives as a gift, makes life easier, and slowly does your thinking for you.

In the early 1950s, the television was a brand-new presence in American living rooms. This long-forgotten film played as farce at the time. Now it feels like prophecy.

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Arch Oboler secured funding outside of the studio system, convincing a wealthy manufacturer named Buddy Nast to invest the bulk of the film's $300,000 budget. It was distributed by United Artists.