Erasure: Alienation, Paranoia, and the Loss of Memory in The X-Files

I would say that the paranoiac is someone who, paradoxically, is threatened with losing his own limits. That is why he needs to provoke the other into becoming his persecutor. The other will thus protect him from the threat of dissipating like a liquid; he will set a border which the paranoiac must constantly confront in order to reestablish the certainty of his existence in a circumscribed physical or psychic space.

--François Roustang, "How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh?"

Wait a minute! Someone's crawling out of the hollow top . . . someone or . . . something. Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and glistening like wet leather. But that face . . . it . . . it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it.

--Orson Welles, War of the Worlds

America has always been a land of uncertain boundaries. Even with two oceans abutting either coast, its initial status as a colony--and later internal colonizer of Native Americans, African slaves, Chinese and Mexican slave labor--has marked it as a nation of perforated borders and mixed ethnic identities. How little surprising then that its paranoid tendencies should oscillate between distrust of centralized government power and fear of an "alien" breach of national security. ¹ US cultural constructs of the alien repeatedly link illegal or unassimilated aliens and their mythological counterparts--aliens who descend from outer space, with, to use Orson Welles's fictional account, gray snaking bodies and faces so unfamiliar that they inspire sheer horror. I am suggesting here that American anxiety about aliens follows a paranoid structure, manifest in radical reifications of identity that purify the paranoid subject as "good" and externalize all internal instabilities (failures, "evil" and maladaptive intent) onto some other. This paranoid scenario involves repeated dissolution of boundaries and disruption of identity consolidation, so that attempts to differentiate self from other are launched with increasing agitation. In the 1990s in the US, gestures of aggression against historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups accelerated. Jasper, Texas, became the media's exemplar of racial hatred in June 1998, with the murder and mutilation of an African American man receiving national scrutiny amid a culminating rise of white supremacist actions, through which the multiculturation of American society was being stringently resisted. ²

Curiously synchronic with the decade's swell in violence against internally perceived "aliens," the Fox television network ignited unexpected fervor with The X-Files (which debuted in 1993) and its stories of externally perceived aliens invading from outer space. A film noir, paranoid detective scenario centered on reports of UFO sightings and paranormal events, the program garnered a global following, closing its first season with 5 million households viewing, eventually attracting a full 13.7 million. ³ Under Chris Carter's tutelage, the show unfolded a series of classic American paranoid scenarios, linking cultural anxiety alternately to governmental erasure of evidence of UFOs and to fear of those aliens themselves. Interestingly, the series shifts between scapegoating and advocating for aliens, with the show's two main characters, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) functioning as rebel FBI agents repeatedly accused of operating outside the bureau's regulations. Mulder and Scully determinedly pursue traces of evidence supposedly erased by the US government and, in consequence, face repeated career- and life-threatening suppressions, while their conspiracy theories appear to oscillate between government- (center) and alien- (other) focused suspicions. In fact, in a paranoid gesture, any radical externalization of alienation suffices to salve momentarily the discomfort with identity instability, and so the alien may be found conspiratorially within (in governmental, supposedly protective structures) and without (in outer space or outside the boundaries of the normative culture).

Aliens may tacitly be...