Monsters Due on Maple Street

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

We as humans all have our own flaws, and those flaws can ultimately lead to our own destruction. The teleplay, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, by Rod Sterling illustrates this theme throughout the whole storyline. The story takes place in Maple Street, “a quiet, tree-lined, small town American street”, until a “meteor” from outer space landed really close to the area. If that wasn’t strange enough, the power went out almost right after that happened. Because of the peoples’ mistakes and flawed nature, this small event brought down the whole entire street down to nothing. In the story, Rod Sterling reveals that after an emotional and inexplicable event, it is human nature to become a mob, make scapegoats of each other, and to act without thinking, only to destroy their own community and civil behavior in the end.

One of our worst flaws that is illustrated in the story is our mob mentality. When the power outage first occurred and nothing until Goodman’s car started was working, everyone blamed Goodman as being an alien. As a result, everyone charged him as a mob. Even Steve knew what was right and said, “Let’s not be a mob.” (76) This means that the people on Maple Street didn’t care whether or not they were a mob, as long as it ends a reign of terror, even if what they are doing is unjust. This is important because this flaw is the reason that Les Goodman was attacked by his neighbors in the first place and this claim led to the claims that everyone else was guilty of being the “monster of Maple Street.” Another example of mob mentality is shown in the death of Pete Van Horn. Pete Van Horn was one of the people on Maple Street and after the power outage, went to check on a neighboring street to see if their power was off as well. He came back with news, but because the people were all on a “monster kick” as Steve called it, they thought like a mob and Charlie was quick to kill the figure in the dark that turned out to be Van Horn. This means that the mob mentality, “the monster kick” in all of them, drove them to do things that made no reasonable sense to do at that time. The mob mentality brought them to react quicker to things that they themselves know that they shouldn’t have done.

A different flaw that is equally, if not more crucial in this story is the scapegoating that occurred. There was a lot of scapegoating that happened throughout the whole entire story. My first piece of evidence against scapegoating is shown again when Les Goodman’s car is the only electronic on the whole street to actually work. Because of this and the crazy theory from Tommy that there were aliens on Maple Street, everyone began to believe that Goodman was the monster. The whole street ranted on and on about how “nothing’s working… nothing except one car- yours(Les