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X-Files A Distraction?
Hebrides left some really great comments on my post about military plans being drawn up for US soil. Since I’ve been watching and thinking about the X-Files a lot lately, I thought this would be a nice topic of discussion. Hebrides calls the X-Files:
conspiracy theory as mere entertainment-fantasy, thus impotent and completely innoculated against
I can definitely see how this might be the case. But the other half of me wonders, how much did the X-Files do to make conspiracy theory and alternative thinking an acceptable thing, and a vital part of modern culture? For me, I know it fueled and developed an existing interest and mindset that I had growing up. It gave me a whole cultural language and frame of reference and social context that I can share and explore these ideas with other people. I tend not to see it so much as an innoculation but a crash-course in the pitfalls and possibilities of not only conspiracy theory, but the approach to life that such things engender.
The episode I saw Saturday night was the one where it’s a flashback to 1989 and it describes the formation of that group of useful nerds, the Lone Gunmen, and shows how Mulder first became involved with them. The episode’s particularly awesome because the one guy with the beard (I forget his name) starts the episode working proudly for the FCC. By the end of the episode, he comes to believe that the government not only doesn’t serve him, but is actually against him and everyone else. And the last scene of the episode consists of them telling Mulder that there is a “shadow faction” of the government bent on world domination at any cost. It might just sound like an entertaining distraction, but to me it encapsulated one of the cultural functions of the whole show. It broke people out of a fantasy of everything’s okay into a world where people could say, shit, what if this stuff really is possible?
So, what do you think? Was the X-Files a positive, negative, or somewhere in between? Did it have much an impact on you? I know for me watching it lately, I’ve realized just how influential it was on me. And I also marvel at Chris Carter’s ability to capture the essence of themes almost ten years ago which are as current and important now as ever.
September 5th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
“The Truth is Out There.”
Even delivered via a vehicle of fiction, there was always something very powerful about that message at the beginning of each episode. It also made conspiracy theorism quite acceptable To The People, By The People, and For The People.
It’s too bad that we have no message that positive and popular in today’s media.
September 5th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Hell, I think that delivery vehicle fiction may even be a more powerful way to reach people
September 6th, 2005 at 10:48 am
I loved the X-Files while it was on and definitely it made it “okay” in some sense to talk about stuff that I’d been into for quite some time with people who might otherwise see all that as just bullshit. For me, though, beyond giving people some exposure to some of these ideas about how government really works and how reality might be different than what we think, it didn’t seem to lead anywhere beyond conversation. And the show itself I feel just became one more way to pooh-pooh any talk about the dirty deeds done behind the scenes, same way that a zillion shows and “skeptical” pundits can reduce alien abduction encounters to mass fantasies based upon pre-digested pop culture like Close Encounters or the latest Whitley Strieber book. Certainly it works in other ways than this for different people, positive ways, too, but I’m pretty ambivalent…who gnose?
September 6th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
I dug the “X-Files” but, ironically, the conspiracy-mythology episodes were what turned me off from the series. I am not one for episodic TV: anything that has to be resolved in the next episode usually leaves me in the dust. I liked the shows that were self-contained.
I am a bigger fan of the original Rod Serling “Twilight Zone”, to which “X-Files” owes a debt. I think TZ was far more influential and wide-reaching. “X-Files” did make it okay to entertain certain concepts but its impact seems to have waned in the Post-9/11 days, interestingly enough. I think it’s because 9/11 is an emotional reaction that most Americans are still smarting over.
September 6th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
As far as Chris Carter and the X-Files, don’t forget the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, from May 2001, where a fifth column in the gov’t attempts to fly a passenger plane into the World Trade Center. Carter very much had his creative fingers on the pulse of the collective unconscious, at the time. I liked his Millenium series more, as it tended to deal more with the metaphyscial–demons stealing kidneys from serial killers, etc.
I suspect that the X-Files indicated a sort of introspection on the part of a relatively secure America, one that felt like it could address ecological problems and maybe get its foreign affairs in order, versus today’s “Fear-Terror-Free Trade” world. I’m agnostic on the issue of whether the X-Files had an effect that worked towards exposing real “conspiracy” or not… Its effect either way really has seemed to have waned, a lot; now Americans want to watch Law and Order and feel frightened about terrorists. That was before the Battle of Seattle, before 9/11/2001, before the “Red State Blue State” (to date one of my least favorite sigils) crap got invented… The X-Files does bring me back to those Halycon days of the late ’90s, kind of like that study on Disinfo that Tim printed a couple days ago.
September 6th, 2005 at 11:02 pm
I quit doing speed after watching that episode about the govt. engineered parasite that lived in this guy’s chest and crawled out of his mouth and sucked his victims dry and then crawled back in. It was a striking visual metaphor (at least for me) of the effects of that particular drug.
When I changed the channel to PBS and they were talking about the way that stimulants carve out new neural pathways, and then back to the X-man and the alien facehugger was crawling back in the dudes mouth, that was it.
Aside from that I think all the govt. UFO stuff is interesting and funny but ultimately a distraction from things that are actually empowering.