Escape into the Future: Cultural Pessimism and its Religious Dimension in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Chapter 2 Do We Still Want to Believe? The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action

25 Chapter 2 Do We Still Want to Believe? The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action The X-Files television serial dominated the conspiracy-oriented viewership of the FOX network during the 1990s, further developing the themes of imprisonment, confusion, rage, and ironic escape noted earlier. But there was another dimension: although the protagonists knew they were being hybridized , colonized, and subjugated by alien forces, they still struggled for a means to make sense of it all, to square it with traditional notions of a benevolent universe and an accountable government, even to locate a means of escape both temporally and transcendentally along a path to something resembling salvation. The X-Files advances us, in other words, past the paranoia, shock, and celebration of the human collision with modernity found previously and attempts to make peace with modernity. In so doing, it endlessly meditates on the threat of human submission to a higher power that is biologically alien, technologically-mediated, and implacable in its demands. These are the themes of The X-Files, the themes we explore in this chapter—whether contemporary humans can mount an effective campaign of activism, whether they can find salvation, and whether they can find real escape. For in The XFiles the question recurs: is there any possible escape into stable and tolerable conditions for a humanity triply menaced by alien captors, equally threatening human bureaucracies and human institutions—and the collaboration between all of the above? 26 Escape into the Future Entering The X-Files You turn on the television and there they are, a decade or so after their first television appearances in 1993. Even in syndication, FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully—two very familiar faces—continue to pursue the elusive truth of government cover-ups, alien conspiracies, clandestine elites, and bureaucracies. Even now, relegated to the nether spaces of cable television and the finely pitted surfaces of digital discs, they appear not much closer to the final truth of genetic experimentation and alien cover-ups than when they began their primetime run a decade ago. Even reruns of the episodes from season nine (2001–2002), which seem to provide some hard data, fail to answer the hottest of questions, whether inexorable alien takeover will or will not take place. Thus a myriad of other questions remains unanswered; in the shows final episodes, Mulder and Scully are still very distant indeed from the Truth.1 Ever searching but never quite able to find the truth, agents Mulder and Scully continue to address the demands of an audience thirsty for meaning in their dull workaday worlds—no matter how bizarre or menacing that meaning might appear. Whether stalking after the truth in the DVD racks at the local Blockbuster, or questing after it in the minds of overzealous fans weaving their own online conclusions regarding the series’ enigmatic plots, Mulder and Scully—paradoxically enough—continue to answer a basic human need for awe and mystery, along with meaning and purpose, even if they never, ultimately, answer or settle anything at all. If, as a sign from The Prisoner suggests , “questions are a burden to others and answers a prison [to oneself?],” Mulder and Scully at least shoulder the burden in every episode, but without ever providing actual release from the iron cage of rational bureaucracy that ensnares them, as well as their deeply concerned viewers.2 The truth is out there, as viewers want to believe when they echo the sentiments of the series, but palpable deliverance—whether understood mythically as freedom from the evil gray aliens, or from the equally faceless and unresponsive bureaucracies that mark modernity—always lies, for both protagonists and viewers, just beyond the visible screen. Ultimately satisfying or not, the show has had staying power. The movie spin-off released in 1998, and the primetime weekly series endured until 2002. Agents Scully and Mulder for a time seemed to be everywhere and were not to be missed—even if you had no taste for science fiction (though the series usually reeked more of noir film and a cancer clinic than of robots and rockets), no liking for conspiracy theory (of which the series was definitely a prime example), and no special sympathy with the theme of persistent betrayal Do We Still Want to Believe? 27 by key institutions, another recurrent topic in the series.3 By the midpoint in the series...