Warning: Simply reading this might be dangerous. Check over your shoulder. Pull the shades. Dim the lights. Together we can inch toward the shadowy truth, one frustratingly enigmatic revelation after another. It's not going to be simple. And it's not going to be safe. But it must be done.
Okay, is everyone in the right frame of mind? Then let's start a return trip to
The X-Files, by any reckoning one of the most iconic shows of the 1990s and by most reckonings–well, mine at least–one of the best. For all-too-obvious reasons, the '90s have become a source for golden-hued reflection before their time. Remember in Dazed And Confused when Marissa Ribisi speculates that the '80s will be "radical" because the '70s obviously suck? It's a bit like that in reverse. The decade we're in now, by any measure I can think of, obviously does suck making the recent past look all the better. But it wasn't all Hanson singles and Rachel 'dos. The X-Files tapped into a rich vein of paranoia and pre-millennium tension.
There's a particular kind of American madness rooted in the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination and Watergate. It's a sense that everything we know is wrong and everything we're told is a lie. The government never has your interests in mind, there's a hidden agenda behind everything, and the game is rigged to benefit the privileged few at the expense of the many. Sometimes, often even, the madness is justified.
There's another sort of American madness rooted in UFO lore. Its year zero is 1947, the year of the Roswell… something or other. Some say it was a flying saucer crash. Others a weather balloon. Its branches include abduction lore, Area 51, and the men in black who keep it all quiet. X-Files creator Chris Carter was hardly the first to weave these two strands together. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is just one of many obvious sources. But from the beginning of The X-Files he wove them so tightly that the association became permanent. Government opacity and the possibility of visitors from another planet were no longer separate narratives, with the exploitation and victimization of ordinary people like you and me serving as a key component in that narrative. "Trust No One" was more than just a catchy tagline for the show.
But it's not all death and dread. "The Truth Is Out There," the credits claimed (almost) every week. And Mulder worked beneath a sign reading "I Want To Believe." Because believing, after all, gave everything he'd been through, beginning with the unexplained disappearance of his sister, some sort of meaning. And, in my opinion, that search for a higher meaning in the face of apparent meaningless was just as much as key to the show's success as the aliens and the flukemen.
And, of course, there's also the relationship between Mulder and Scully their contentious, respectful, and erotically ambiguous partnership–had its appeal as well. For some it was the primary appeal, creating a virtually new breed of viewer called "shipper" whose primary investment was in the romantic possibilities of that pairing. And the show provided them with plenty of hints and suggestions to fuel their discussion, an approach subsequent shows would take to heart.
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I plan to cover two or three episodes per post, usually two. This week, however, I'm just taking on one since I have some throat-clearing to do and I'm guessing you don't want to be on this page all day.
Before we dig into this week's slate, here's a brief history of my own fandom, similar to the one I provided way back when we were talking about Twin Peaks. I missed the first season of the show because I was studying abroad during my junior year of college. (Go University of Lancaster.) By the end of the second season I was hooked and spent the summer after the second season finale catching up with the show via Fox's generous repeat schedule. That I was living with my parents and had nothing else to do, apart from a short-term job as manual labor converting a Hook's drug store into a Revco while waiting to go to grad school probably didn't hurt. But for whatever reason it was that summer that The X-Files really grabbed my imagination. My fandom would only grow more intense during the following year, providing a much-needed distraction from a grad school stint that wasn't the intellectual utopia I'd imagined going in. Embarrassing moment at the time: When one of my grad school colleague saw my using an X-Files trading card as a bookmark.
Yeah, I said trading card. I had a little folder of press clippings, too. That obsessiveness pretty much ended with grad school, but I kept watching religiously, at least for a while. Like a lot of fans, the episodes produced after the show moved production to L.A. in the sixth season, the first after the pretty good spin-off movie X-Files: Fight The Future, left me a little cold. By season seven I was watching only sporadically. I think the only episode I watched in the last year was the series finale, which did little to restore my faith.
But I'm ready to believe again, and the show's first few episodes have done a lot to remind me why I started watching.