Comments on: X-Files A Distraction?

By: Rev max

Rev max — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 03:02:15 +0000

Was the X-Files a positive, negative, or somewhere in between? Did it have much an impact on you?

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.

By: channel null

channel null — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:19:36 +0000

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.

By: james

james — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:37:20 +0000

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.

By: hebrides

hebrides — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:48:19 +0000

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?

By: Tim Boucher

Tim Boucher — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:16:29 +0000

Hell, I think that delivery vehicle fiction may even be a more powerful way to reach people

By: Elizabeth Anne Ensley

Elizabeth Anne Ensley — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 22:39:17 +0000

“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.