Travis Hedge Coke
But, what if they promise you, really promise you there’s a good America, too?
Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part XIX: The X-Files Are a Record
by Travis Hedge Coke
The X-Files is a post-Twin Peaks Kolchak: The Night Stalker, brought to you by the network which produced Cops for thirty-three seasons of manipulatively-edited propaganda. The X-Files cemented the terms shipping and shipper, gave us the phrase, mytharc, and probably taught more people a wider variety of conspiracy theories, cryptid names, and paranormal jargon than any other single entertainment property. More people get their cryptozoology and parapsychology news from The X-Files than probably should.
X-Files looked like this.
The X-Files is a record (you thought I was going to wait the entire chapter to say that?), a record of ideas, stories, and fears shared by generations, subcultures, communities, some of them an undercurrent to entire national identities and dawning global awareness.
The members of the task force called the X-Files are not generally present to make arrests or solve crimes or track down sources. The members of the X-Files, make files. They make records of inexplicable, mysterious, of difficult events.
I promise you, it looked like this.
In The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat, an episode in the television series’ second revival and final season, a previously unknown member of the X-Files team is introduced as having been present throughout the series’ original run, by forcibly erased from our memory and the memory of the traditional X-Files task members, Agents Scully and Mulder. And, many of us, at least for awhile, bought into that, at least in their world, they had been made to forget him. It was possible. It was silly – the episode is a deliberate and clear comedy, a loud farce which sometimes makes Mel Brooks look subtle – but it was still in the realm of possibility because, especially after twenty-five years, in that world anything was possible.
The X-Files presents tulpas, for example, as both a real, tactile, measurable thing with a classical history, and as a miscomprehension leading to an idea that is untrue despite/regardless of us and the characters having already encountered it in measured reality. Like the helping hand which passes a stake to vampire-slaying drugged up Mulder or Mulder’s trip on placebos into the realms of the speaking dead and prophesy, reality and irreality are not counteractive but inductive.
The X-Files world lives in italics.
Exactly like this.
The recurrent mytharc villains of The X-Files are of truth, technology, of possibility. They are humanoid representations of our corporate owners and generational governors. The sons of important men of yore important for being the sons of important men of yore. The young promisings in suits and ties and conservative hairstyles who bought their way in or allowed themselves to be bought into. The Cigarette-Smoking Man is the manifestation of one of the biggest controlling entities of America, the cigarette, the tobacco industry. The United States has always been in the business of an elite task force of white men corralling, controlling, and abusing alien populations, often for their offsite and over-there allies or bosses.
Mulder’s mission is not to prove one thing true or another, it is to be allowed to believe, to have reason and range to believe in anything, a mission which Scully and later X-Files members also, in their various ways, come to embrace. The record, the archive they create, is not to conquer the unknown or make claim of ownership, but to produce a body of evidence for the potential beyond what they have recorded. Ghosts, telepathy, big oil and big tobacco, prognostication, performance enhancers, temporal elasticity, UFOs, little grey men, Nazis, hate crimes, ghetto protectors, distraught fathers, expectant mothers, lizard-men who turn at the full moon, a prop handler passing a wooden stake onto a pile of broken lumber in a motel room in Texas so Mulder can give appropriate vampire chase. Gotta believe everything, even placebos.
Maybe it didn’t.
Maybe, maybe maybe, especially placebos.
We have to believe, because the flip side to all of this is that the agents tasked to the X-Files are agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are not fair weather for a presidential administration that is good and counter to one that is not. They are not adjacent to police or above or beyond police.
If we believe in enough other things, impossible things, if we gain that kind of latitude, that breadth of hope, we can believe that Mulder and Scully, if not their direct colleagues and other recurrent FBI agents of the franchise, that Mulder and Scully are independent of the Bureau. That the Bureau and American law enforcement do not represent them and they do not represent it.
This, in defiance of them both appearing on an episode of Cops, which is also an episode their show.
None of them are especially good FBI agents; Mulder, Scully, Reyes, Doggett. Like their direct supervisor, Assistant Director Skinner, they are consistently short of what others expect from them, they do not meet their perceived potential, and they do not do as their superiors and colleagues feel they ought to. Fox Mulder is an Oxford graduate. Sergeant Doggett has a Masters from Syracuse University. Dr Scully attended Stanford. Reyes, Brown. They are well-educated. They are motivated. They are knowledgable. The most common frustration experienced by their colleagues is that they do not seem to understand the basic parameters with which everyone else is dealing.
It is not that, as psychological profilers, medical doctors, as administrators or academics, these are incompetent people. They are not good TV cops. Not even John Doggett, who was a New York police officer for several years prior to joining the FBI. They are specifically not good at being police or being Bureau members. They are good speculators, good recorders, good archivists. Not as much great investigators are excellent cross-referencers.
This and heat signatures seemed very scifi back then.
Both revivals enthuse on an angle of America, Good America besieged by root rot Bad America. The first revival as a television serial avoided the current President in favor of a bogeyman version of the previous, admittedly terrifying, American President. Both television revivals trade on 1970s arguments and anxieties, in a well-meant way, but because Richard Nixon is scary in a safe way. The second revival made a frightening cartoon of Donald Trump and other political figures, while simultaneously naming four different episodes after Adolf Hitler’s memoir, while fighting in remembrance and metaphor the Vietnam War and the fallout on American combatants (the ones who count), despite being set in the Twenty-First Century. An episode is based around a script for and homages from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, because America is its most America in 1974, and edges near during Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump.
We do not talk – especially on television – about the warhawking of Democrat politicos.
An episode of The X-Files is dedicated to segregated baseball leagues, minority existence in the United States, and the tethering of the American Dream to the Great American Pastime. Safe racism. Safe time. Safe sport.
The enemies of our agents are not only metaphors for America, they are often the administrators and police forces of the United States of America. The X-Files strives to catalogue the Devil in Georgia, so to speak, to demonstrate the Devil went down to Georgia, not to apprehend the Devil while he is mid-fiddle contest.
Are you going to believe your eyes or an official record?
Our enemies are the safeness concocted of illusion and lies for profit.
What the X-Files archives is Americana. They are not preserving an American truth, but American possibility. That is, for financial purposes, largely shot in Canada with Canadian extras.