There’s this thing called the “Twenty Year Rule” that pertains to collective cultural nostalgia, and if one is to give credence to this idea, then the recent resurgence of interest in The X-Files comes as no surprise. IDW Publishing has been running a well-received comic adaptation over the last several years, and just a few weeks ago Fox confirmed that they’re in talks to reboot the series, original cast and everything. And the nerdosphere rejoiced! Are you excited? I’m kind of excited! Kind of.
Okay, “mixed feelings” is more the appropriate descriptor.
I was one of those 7th graders that experienced The X-Files as a springboard into the world of media for grown-ups. The X-Files walked hand-in-hand with the likes of Independence Day and Men in Black, the more intellectual alternative to Independence Day’s mindless bombast. It crossed all the right wires at the right time—it was about a fun, timely topic, but not too topical. It was science fiction, but not too science fiction. But most of all it had that wonderful will-they-or-won’t-they tense chemistry between its two leads—topical premise or no, the show would neither have lasted as long as it did nor have remained in the popular consciousness without the Mulder/Scully dynamic. But the whole show would not exist but for the bedrock premise that is the romantic, tortured conspiracy theorist.
Conspiracy narratives are nothing new, and moreover, they’re fun. The “man who knew too much” narrative certainly didn’t start with The X-Files—that template was one of Hitchcock’s favorites. The “romantic conspiracy theorist” is an offshoot from the “man who knew too much,” perhaps an inevitable one considering how popular American conspiracy theories became in the wake of the Watergate Scandal and the nascent fascination with Roswell in the early ’70s.
And maybe we loved The X-Files growing up, but when the subject of the show comes up in conversations with my fellow children of the ’90s, it is often accompanied with the question: “Do you think conspiracy theories have become so mainstream and pervasive because of, you know, The X-Files?”
Well, maybe. But if so, who cares?
Obviously, there is no way to tell exactly how much The X-Files influenced our tendency to believe every vast conspiracy theory we hear, but we can see that the pervasiveness of conspiracy theory is increasing, and we can see how the proportion of American voters that believe in conspiracy theories is changing. We know, for instance, that 21% of American voters believe in the whole Roswell thing. That’s a lot when you consider the number of registered American voters—even at 21%, that’s still about 31 million people. Like most of the conspiracy theories on The X-Files, this one’s pretty harmless—but then there is the increase in belief in the harmful ones to take into account, as well. Nearly 40% of American voters believe that global warming is a hoax, and nearly 30% believe in the formation of a “secretive power elite with a globalist agenda,” or a New World Order, is in the works. That’s way more than the 9/11 truthers, a mere 11%, or about 16 million people. A drop in the bucket!
This is to say nothing of the unsettling chunk of Congressmen that continue to insist that the President of the United States fabricated his own birth certificate. These aren’t doomsday preppers, camping out on their inherited farmland somewhere on the prairie—these are US Congressmen elected to the most powerful legislative body in the world. On a more intimate level, many of us have anti-vaccination people in our lives, and on a charitable day you may find yourself feeling a bit like Scully trying to explain that, no, Mulder, vaccines don’t cause autism.
Big name conspiracy theorists also have a much bigger platform than they’ve ever had before. Blowhards like Alex Jones and David Icke have massive followings. Anti-vaccination advocates like Jenny McCarthy have become influential enough that we’re beginning to see resurgences in disease that were nearly wiped out in the United States. Some anti-government movements such as “Sovereign Citizens” have exploded in the last two decades, directly resulting in multiple deaths. Nearly every major event in the news media, from Sandy Hook to the Boston Marathon bombing, is met in some corners with the presumption that there is a nefarious, usually government-backed conspiracy behind it.
These beliefs are cut from the same cloth of what we saw on The X-Files, the same cultural roots, and they do have far-reaching negative consequences. And thanks to social media, information and ideas are traveling faster and wider than ever. This information does not need peer review, but belief by the reader, and it is accepted as gospel. Distrust in authority structures such as government and scientific peer review makes conspiracy even more believable.
Since The X-Files was partially inspired by the increasing mainstream-ification of conspiracy Americana, inevitably there is a real link between Fox Mulder and the type of person that inspired his character. Despite jokes the show would make at Mulder’s expense, The X-Files ultimately plays his quest straight—the conspiracy is real, and everything is, indeed, against Fox Mulder. By the end of the show, the vast majority of his paranoid delusions are vindicated. But the show also tended to ignore the very real pernicious aspects, as well. Conspiracy theorists in the real world are reactionary; observe the terror at the prospect of a Stalinesque “New World Order.” Conspiracy theories are anti-science; there is no place for peer review. Conspiracy theories often have horrific racist undertones; one need look no further than how “ancient aliens” theories belittle the accomplishments of ancient, non-white civilizations.
The show was never interested in these aspects of conspiracy culture, nor was it obliged to explore them; however, it is impossible to ignore how The X-Files drew from what popular culture, and the show’s topics du jour weren’t just about aliens. For instance Mulder’s co-conspiracy nuts, who went by the moniker “The Lone Gunmen,” were themselves named in reference to theories that challenged the idea that the assassination of JFK was at the hands of a single man. It’s also really hard to ignore that the pilot for The Lone Gunmen, the short-lived X-Files spinoff which aired in March of 2001, featured the US Government plotting to frame some terrorists for flying an aircraft into the World Trade Center. Yeeaahh.
Mulder was inexorably a product of his time, but times have changed. Our relationship to conspiracy theories and the people who purport them have changed, and the potential entertainment value for the 90s-style “truth seeker” conspiracy theorist has dwindled. I’ve heard it argued that, “We aren’t supposed to sympathize with Mulder’s crazy,” and, well, no, we really rather are. Mulder is constantly vindicated. It is he who wins Scully to his side by the end of the series, not the other way around. And I don’t think that conspiracy theory narratives are going to go away—nor should they go away—but I want to think that we’re reaching a level of sophistication in both our fiction and our relationship to conspiracy theorists that we need to more thoughtful about these kinds of narratives. The X-Files did absolutely romanticize Mulder’s quest for truth far more often than it played it for comedy or sexual tension, and that approach does, on some level, help to prop up this increasing proportion of the population who do believe in vast conspiracies.
Conspiracy theorists are no longer so fringe, no longer safely in the realm of “harmless wacko” or a “tortured lone wolf” like Mulder. And with that in mind, for a rebooted X-Files to have any relevance to a modern audience, the character of Mulder and his relationship to the world of conspiracy should evolve into a more complicated and problematic figure. This isn’t to say the show should dispose of its basic conceit that “The Truth is Out There,” but allow itself to look inward at the subculture it draws so heavily from, as well. The portrayal of characters like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen as, at worst, misguided eccentrics rings hollow in today’s atmosphere.
The most contradictory facet of conspiracy theorists with a platform is that they are the enemies of truth far more often than their adversaries, real or imagined. Jenny McCarthy has done far more damage to public education about vaccination than has “Big Pharma” in recent decades. Sometimes the person with a paranoid agenda is just as liable to obscure the truth as the government agent who does so intentionally. But need one jump to and marry themselves to extreme conclusions in order to question everything the Powers That Be tell them? In this era, in which figures like Edward Snowden exist alongside people like Alex Jones, how can we explore the idea of responsible skepticism in our fiction more thoughtfully? An X-Files reboot could well be the perfect place to do just that.
The show dealt with a wide variety of conspiracies during its run, but towards the end it was mostly tied up with the evil US government and their evil pro-alien agenda. The truth was out there, but after 9/11 the “truth” as per the show got pretty squirrelly—which was honestly probably a good call. No one wanted real-world terrorism theories dragged into their primetime sci-fi romance. The X-Files was always pulp drama, but it was pulp that appealed to a smarter, more sensitive crowd, the kind of crowd who could see themselves in both Mulder and Scully.
An X-Files reboot can’t be just the same thing over again. Nothing would doom this premise to failure more completely than keeping it locked in the time it was originally conceived, because the world has changed. And if the show’s attitude towards conspiracy theorists doesn’t evolve with the times, I have a feeling that this reboot is going to be short-lived and not well-remembered. And that would be a shame.
Lindsay talks movies, nostalgia and tropes on YouTube, co-hosts the book review series “Booze Your Own Adventure”, and is co-founder of ChezApocalypse.com. If you want your timeline flooded with tweets about old cartoons, feminism, dog pictures and Michael Bay, you can follow her on Twitter.
I completely agree. X-Files was of its time. To re-launch such a show today would require a massive overhaul and rethinking about what the show would be about. I have no idea what that would look like.
But, if Mulder and Skully were in it, I’d watch it.
I wish people would stop calling this a “reboot”. A reboot would mean they were casting new actors in the roles of Mulder and Scully, or resetting the timeline or something. If they are just continuing the story from where it left off, it’s not a reboot. I’m not blaming tor here, as they’re just repeating what I’ve seen reported everywhere else.
Words mean things, people.
I just started rewatching The X-Files recently after a decade or so, so timing of this article is almost paranormal. I mean, I was just thinking about how differently would The X-Files have to look now and how much did the world change since the 90’s. And this is also the first time I hear about possible
reboot– Yay!OK, @2, not a reboot then, you’re right. Renewed X-Files then? X-Files reopened?
@@@@@#3: I love the idea of “X-Files Reopened”!
Not a “reboot.” I’d call it a sequel series.
But yeah, “X-Files Reopened” is a good enough title.
I’d probably not watch it, I love the original series a lot and have rewatched it on DVD several times now.
As far as setting goes, the mythology was all messed up as they seemed to only have a general direction in mind, it was not well plotted by a great writer, so a reboot could improve I suppose, but I don’t have much faith in Hollywood for movies, nor in everywhere else for smart tv shows though.
I think the Mulder / Scully dynamic is why I latched onto Castle in the end.
I, too, have started re-watching The X-Files again after many years. There’s the Mulder/Scully relationship, which is sheer joy to bask in, but what is really refreshing is the acknowledgement that evil men exist, that they occupy positions of authority and power, that they are not answerable to the people — whom they despise — and that they can subvert the purposes of government for their own ends. Conspiracies exist. Not stupid, 9/11 truther conspiracies, but the far more insidious ones that brought on events like 9/11 and everything that came afterward.
We could do with a lot more Fox Mulders, frankly.
Wasn’t the whole world going to be colonized by aliens in December 2012, according to the Smoking Man (in The X Files universe at least)? Are they gonna start the show after the colonization, or will it be a kind of silent infiltration that they will have to unravel?
Yeah, I’ve been rewatching the show on Netflix and this seems spot-on. While the show doesn’t directly engage conspiracy culture but uses it as a springboard, the traces of some of the more “um…” conspiracy theories that we’ve all run into Facebook can occasionally be found (see, whatever that plot thread about smallpox vaccinations was).
I think the other big problem is that, post-9/11, there’s been a big push towards “victim complicity” in conspiracy theory culture. Where Mulder would keep pushing if people didn’t see the truth, assuming he was a poor messenger, the modern brunt lies on the listener – if you don’t Get It, you’re either an easily-led sheep or, worse, part of the conspiracy. This is especially noxious when you have national tragedies with a high body count (9/11, Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing), because then you have some blowhard in the corner proclaiming that nobody actually got hurt/killed, and anyone pretending as such is in on the whole thing. I remember after the Boston bombing, there was a New Hampshire state legislator who argued the guy who lost his legs in the bombing was obviously an actor, because he didn’t seem to be reacting in the way she thought somebody in shock would.
“Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself, who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on Earth, not entirely dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?”
“Because… all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.”
We’re post-conspiracy in a way now though. Aren’t we? We’re living in a world that has mass surveillance on a global scale with leaders using 1984 as an instruction manual, despite that story being woefully unambitious compared to what we’ve got. Turns out that the tinfoil hat wearers better suited to the 90s x-files weren’t crazy afterall, they were just paying attention.
@politeruin
I don’t think I would go so far as to say that were living under 1984 style governments outside of a few countries like North Korea. In any case, the tinfoil hat wearers weren’t paying attention. As Lindsay said, conspiracy theorists are generally reactionary. Rather than actually searching for the truth, they merely react out of paranoia, often giving vague predictions of some oncoming danger.
Otherwise, I like the idea of a more intelligent X-Files. I think if they made it so that often Mulder (or his equivalent) was partially or completely wrong, they could add a sense of realism by showing that most supernatural occurences aren’t real. Even when I first saw reruns as a preteen, I thought the fact that supernatural and paranormal were happening all the time all over America was a little hard to by.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that either but as cory doctorow says we’re being “huxleyed into the full orwell” when we voluntarily carry around with us gps tracking devices. Like i say – an instruction manual. I think you’re doing the tinfoil hat wearers a disservice though, a lot of it might be outlandish and reactionary but it starts with a grain of truth. This is in no way to excuse the 9/11 truthers or anti-vaxers or any other toxic crusaders.
(tl;dr at end)
20-25-30 percent of the American public has always been prone to believe in Roswell, in Biblical dinosaurs, in dictatorial solutions to democratic problems, in being able to turn water into gasoline, in the non-existence of evolution; have been anti-vaccination, anti-alcohol, anti-metric system, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, anti-Mason; to which we can now add such items as Presidential birth certificates.
Conspiratorial arguments have never convinced vast numbers of people save those already willing/wanting to believe (the JFK assassination is, undoubtedly the first major event what probably resulted in more members of the general public to perceive what might be behind the door; and, certainly, Watergate).
The X-Files was the first mainstream TV show to begin really infusing elements of *extreme* late 20th century woo-woo (religious, scientific, political, much lingering from the 19th century) into a traditional TV dramatic framework. The central characters were both appealing. Fluke men were as likely to show up as Kinbote, the alien. The plots were often inventive and the look good, even when the mountain ranges of Iowa were a bit too apparent. The Lone Gunmen were always presented as useful associates of Mulder; but they themselves came off exactly as they should have, as *real* believers: isolated, pretty unsocialized, obsessive — one of the most affecting moments in the entire series was the that opened with the beared Gunman standing in the desert, imagining for himself the normal non-conspiratorial life he wanted, then sighing and thinking oh well.
All of which helped the X-Files to stand out on Friday night, but I am fairly sure such things as The Turner Diaries and the like provided far richer fodder in recent decades for those already prone to be drawn into those circles. And those circles were there before the X-Files and will always be there.
The genuinely disturbing change during the post-JFK years in conspiracy theory has not been the (reasonably static) number of regular citizens believing in such nonsense, but the (much larger) number of politicians brought up with such beliefs (or using such beliefs for their own purposes) now holding public office and making major decisions, causing me to feel every day that my library has somehow come to life, and filled the House of Representatives and much of the Senate. Trust me, you wouldn’t want the (male) author of We Never Went to the Moon! to be your congressman.
And, the fact that the Internet has enabled enormous circulation of lunacy once found only under rocks. You used to see conspiracy theories written out by hand, photocopied, and glued to mailboxes, or available only if you sent off a self-addressed stamped envelope and a buck or two to cover expenses. Nowdays: just turn on America’s Favorite News Network and let it wash over you. (And then go to your window and scream…)
If more Americans really do believe in conspiracy theory these days, they’ve been given far more reason to do so by our Modern World, which as unromantic as it comes. I cannot understand how they could do a contemporary X-Files but I don’t understand how they’re going to pick up Twin Peaks again, either (I suspect that will prove more entertaining, somehow).
I think the only *lasting* effects of the X-Files on anything has been to improve the resumes for both Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, provide a basis for fanfic of uncertain quality involving Mulder being spanked by Cigarette Smoking Man etc., and demonstrating once and for all that TV dramas can indeed be lit using only flashlights.
tl;dr: US conspiracy theory didn’t start with the X-Files and was not remotely romanticized by it.
The Kennedy & King assassinations started conspiracy theories, not the X-Files. The US Government is on the record making utterly ludicrous claims any HS science teacher can disprove in seconds on whole string of recent events. Gulf War Syndrome caused Americans to distrust government vaccinations, not Jenny McCarthy.
I’m as liberal as liberal gets, but I don’t trust the curent US government either. I understand progressives in government usually aren’t the people committing evil deeds, but Democrats utterly refused to try to get any answers anymore themselves. Convinced themselves if a Democrats ever admit the Federal Govermment did something wrong, Western way of life will somehow all collapse… or something.
Bullets don’t alter trajectory in mid-air. Democrats need to quit continuing to try prove all those crazy right wing lies about their evil deeds are true.
I’d like to see more of a move back to the self-contained mysteries that don’t necessarily play into the overarching “the goverment is in the league with aliens” I mean the Devil appeared more than once, is he working with the aliens? against them? Or is it best not to overthink it?
#11 Gives us the perfect example of the full-Orwell is so easily accepted. People are so desperate to believe that they aren’t being suckered by the “tinfoil hat wearers” that they’ll join straight in on the govt.’s side. Worse, they are so desperate to prove they are smarter
than the average bearthe ordinary person in the street, they’ll scream black is white that something isn’t happening because if it were that would mean they were dumb enough to fall for it and they ain’t for being a dumberairian like them cospiracists says like wut they’s be.Sorry dude. We’re living the conspiracy now, and complicit in it by shouting down people who disagree.
A big problem with the X Files (in a way that caters to the worst tendencies of real conspiracy theorists, rather than encouraging the more useful and agnostic forms of paranoia and doubt) is that Mulder is almost always right. It’s not so much that there’s almost always something hidden and interesting (although certainly that’s also an issue — there were a handful of episodes wherein what was happening was totally mundane, but they were rare), but that Mulder’s first or second guess about the nature of the situation was often correct. There’s now a greater level of complexity in episodes of CSI (and CSI doesn’t even bother to get second-grade science correct anymore).
For every situation wherein Mulder’s crazy theory is right, there should be two or three episodes where Mulder’s crazy theory is crazy and the reality of the situation is either more mundane or crazier (but nevertheless unexpected by both our protagonists and the audience). We almost hit this ratio in the first and second season, but primary-arc episodes skewed everything away from the fortean and toward JFK-style Grand Conspiracy.
A fortean attitude is, if not productive, at least relatively healthy. There are things about the world that we do not yet know, and there are other things about the world that point to gaps or contradictions in what we think we know. An attitude of grand conspiracy, on the other hand, is not healthy — large scale conspiracies are rare, and quickly devolve into in-fighting like any other organization; while they make for convenient storytelling, they fundamentally misrepresent reality in a way that encourages bigotry and systematic mistrust of whole groups.
The very best thing that an X-Files reboot could do, to be responsible in a modern media environment, is to drop or de-emphasize the CSM and the government role in a main arc and favor a monster-of-the-week format (which the success of purely-episodic police procedurals has shown is perfectly acceptable).
I always sorted X Files plots into one of three categories (like a good folklorist): “there’s something in the woods,” “there’s something in the house,” and “there’s something in the House.” I always preferred the lower-case plot lines, but it was the upper-case conspiracy that came to overwhelm the show.
As #17 points out, The X Files had the potential to (and often did, especially in the early seasons) point to a fortean worldview, that the world is weirder and much more incompletely understood than we generally care to realize. That’s a frightening realization for many people, but it’s also a liberating one–it opens up infinite possibilities and offers the prospect of change. Conspiracy theories move in the opposite direction: everything is completely explained (at least to those who are in the know), but we the masses are being lied to because that knowledge is power and those who have power hoard it; no change, no new understanding is ever possible because everything is always already known–there’s nowhere to go from here. I don’t know that I could bear more faceless, unbeatable conspiracies, but it would be marvelous to have a truly fortean X Files at last.
It’s regretable that conspiracy-mode X-Files will probably be the one that comes back. The 90s were a good time for a conspiracy based show with creators who grew up around the time of dark 70s conspiracy thrillers, Watergate, the Church Committee, and they could mine the recently declassified documents for plot ideas. Unfortunately since then everything has been declared a conspiracy robbing the whole trope of its punch.
Personally I would like to see the mutants, wierdness, and religious stuff come back. But I don’t see how they could hang an eight or thirteen episode mini series around it with turning into hour after hour of Mulder and Scully fight the Devil.
I loved this show. It was a family-night show back when it was on, both before and after college. The last two seasons were terrible. The last episode was probably the worst two hours of television I’ve ever seen, not even exaggerating. (I still hold a grudge against it for screwing up my favorite character in the series, the CSM.) The second movie was genuinely terrible. I’m not sure how I feel about a renewal as a result. I do think it was at its best when they were dealing with a monster-of-the-week, but we’ve got a dozen shows since then that aped the X-Files formula in one way or another.
At the end of the day I credit it with creating or at least popularizing an entire sub-genre (yeah, Kolchak was first, but not quite the same), and its conspiracy theories were relevant at the time, but I feel like it’s already done its work. We’ve already got Supernatural, Fringe, etc., and a new X-Files series would be kind of like a new Seinfeld series at this point. It’s been so completely absorbed into pop culture that it would no longer be unique.
I think Mulder’s romantic appeal came more from his Don Quixote-ish quest for the truth. He was often shown to be right, but never really ended up with any proof. For me, the show was an enjoyable “what if” scenario, Mulder was delightfully hangdog, and Scully was a smart, capable woman who could her own. Mulder appreciated her hard-headedness, and she had respect for him even as she disagreed with some of his more outrageous assertions. I ‘shipped them back in the day (even tho’ we were treated like parriah), and I’d love to see them together again.
I love how the comments to this post prove the point of the post. Yeah we are not living in the world of the conspiracy. Yes “Some Things” people have warned about have possibly come true (globalization, increase in survalience) but this is not from a conspiracy but from unrelated natural movement. (increased connectedness of the world from technology, increase in danger after 9/11, realization that due to changes in technology one person can make/use a weapon of mass destruction).
It is hard and scary to ralize but no one is in control.
I have difficulty taking an article seriously that decries the X-Files for its promotion of conspiracy theory when the United States government ran a kidnapping ring, had its own private prison camp, legalized torture, and has murder-robots at the President’s beck and call. The X-files is in the hands less of birthers than Anonymous, Snowden, and those suspicious of unchecked government power–such as myself.