The X-Files Analyzed

A couple of things that you mentioned prompted me to think through the X-Files a little more deeply, which will help me if I teach it this fall. As a cultural critic I'm not always as interested in plausibility or even axiology, the study of what makes something good or bad, as in what sort of cultural issues a fairly popular show tries to work through--what kind of conditions does it respond to, and what cultural contradictions does it highlight?

At some point someone asked why Mulder and Scully stay in the FBI in spite of all the trouble they run into and the compromising things they see parts of the government doing. I didn't think of it at the time, but on reflection, one of the things that makes the show work for me is that its protagonists are engaged in criticizing something they are implicated in, rather than trying to attain a kind of purity before mounting their critique. I see that partially as a "gen X" thing (to the extent that's a useful label for what comes after boomers): a sense that you are inevitably benefiting from historical and power relations you don't like, but that action of some sort is preferable to apathy on the one hand, or a straining to be so at odds with the system that you are more invested in posturing and ideological purity than with change. Integrity then depends on a lack of illusion about the ways you benefit from what you're critiquing, but also a willingness to act on your convictions nonetheless. In the best scripts, Mulder seems to exemplify that.

Some of the discussion also left me wondering about how the paranoia in the show is different from what I call libertarian paranoia like Timothy McVeigh's (an acre and an arsenal) and/or apocalyptic paranoia like Koresch, Farakhan, and others. (Incidentally, there have been some good articles on McVeigh recently in the Atlantic and--can you believe it--Details.) I've been thinking and writing a little about how paranoia is a basic response to postmodernity. Faced with an overwhelming amount of often contradictory information, compounded by an increasing cultural diversity (especially in terms of different groups' ability to represent themselves as they wish) and a larger number of marketing niches (cable and the Internet instead of Walter Cronkite), paranoia serves as both a means of integrating confusing information into one huge schema (there is only one truth and the rest is Satanic pandemonium) and affirming one's own importance (they're out to get me, but it's me they're out to get).

What struck me later is that I'm not sure Mulder is paranoid in this sense. First, as Liz pointed out to me the next day, on the X-Files "there is no government." What she meant is that there isn't any one coordinated effort, or even one conspiracy. No one knows everything, and there's a real question about whether there is an "everything" to know. Maybe another way to put it is that all the files are x-files. Mulder's world is fragmentary; he lacks the grand theory--he wants to believe there's something, but he's too honest to paper over the contradictions he encounters to fit them into a grand delusion.

In The X Files, you're always plugged in, affected by historical and social forces you can't quite see. But its response is at odds with Libertarian nostalgia for Nineteenth Century notions of the subjectivity and economics. This distinguishes Mulder from the militias and the Cato Institute. He doesn't yearn for an idyllic past that never was. Instead of the good fight during W.W.II, you get the original cover-up of alien contact. Instead of idealizing the homesteader or the cowboy as an example of rugged independence and self-sufficiency, you get frequent appearances by Native Americans to remind us that the West was settled by displacing its inhabitants, and that the westward expansion, made possible by the homestead act, was possibly the largest example of social engineering in history.

It's also a world where nation states may not have as much power as multinationals, but even multinationals are too diversified to be engaged in any one coordinated strategy and different factions within a company may operate without each other's knowledge. The cultural moment of centralization, from mass marketing to vertical integration, is over, and the new, non-hierarchical corporations make centralized control and surveillance difficult. Yes, that's how I'd want to put it: the age of totalizing explanations, from second wave feminism to the domino theory, is over, and the X-Files reflects that complexity. [note to myself--"Life After the PanOpticon"].

If you want to read a good account of Americans born between 1960 and 1980, see Geoffrey T. Holtz's Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind "Generation X." When I have time, I'd also like to write about what popular discourse about alien abduction means. Why is it happening now? What work does it do for viewers? I think part of the answer is that it helps them to figure ways that our consciousness is explicitly shaped by representations, things that seem to bridge the gap between outside and inside, a sense of being invaded on the deepest levels of self. ]

 Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 5/96