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fmluder24 · 18 days ago

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Sticking it to the Government: “Drive,” Antisemitism, and the Antiauthoritarianism of Fools (3166 words)

Buckle up and put it into high gear, folks! This is a post analyzing Season 6 Episode 2 “Drive” and its current popularity on my dash as of writing this post. Spoiler alert: This is one of my least favorite episodes (up there with “First Person Shooter” and “En Ami”) and I am very skeptical of its resurgence right now. This post will include an analysis of the episode, placing it within the larger meta-textual context of the show’s treatment of conspiracy and how Mulder in particular is sopping wet with antisemitic tropes. Then I will move on to evaluate the current popularity of one line in particular on Tumblr (“You’ve got to stay alive if you want to stick it to the government”), what that line is responding to in the current American context, and why we should be critical of its application in this moment. Please don’t reply telling me that it’s my fault for reading into this and that it’s not that deep! It is.

The Episode (with Analysis)

Im going to only briefly mention pretty much every Scully scene, not because I don’t love our girl, but because the point of the episode and my problem with it lies entirely in Crump’s scenes. In fact, many of Scully’s scenes are wonderfully atmospheric and show off what a badass she is. They are the best parts of the episode and for that they will be sidelined. This post is already going to be way too long so I need to be economical where I can be.

We open on a broadcast chase scene, which is a very nice moment of realism. Thank you, Vince. Crump is driving with his wife (Vicky) in the backseat of a stolen car. They think she has been kidnapped and intercept him. He gets arrested. Vickys’s head explodes. Cut to Mulder and Scully are doing some grunt work following up on fertilizer purchases. Mulder is grumpy, Scully is very professional. Mulder’s interest is piqued by the news story playing in the background of the house they are at. He convinces Scully to take a detour to investigate the case.

Cut to Crump in his cell, with his head ringing, crying for help. The local law enforcement officer says that he is accusing them of killing his wife. Scully decides to look at Vickys body while Mulder says he will try to talk to Crump. The scene where Scully and the ME examine Vicky’s remains is very good, very atmospheric and viscerally gross. Mulder follows Crumps ambulance as they take him to the hospital. We notice that he does better the faster the ambulance driver drives. When they arrive at a stop sign, Crump jumps out with a gun and takes Mulder hostage. Scully calls Mulder and informs him that there may be a contagion at play, but Mulder is already trapped in close quarters with Crump. Scully tries to coordinate with local law enforcement to intercept them, but Crump threatens to kill Mulder if they don’t back off. Its at this point that we get the first crucial hint of Crumps animus for Mulder. He picks up Mulder’s badge, scoffs, and says, “It’s you people. Figures.”

Now this has some plausible deniability to it. Perhaps he is seeing that Mulder works for the federal government, and being that he evidently thinks government officials are out to get him, he must be reluctant to trust Mulder as he is an officer of the law. However, that is not the reason he tosses the badge aside in contempt.

The tension amps up when Mulder stops at a traffic light and Crump screams for him to go. Mulder puts together that he has to keep the car in motion to keep Crump alive. He then starts calling Mulder “boy” and yells that “you people put me here.” I think the decision to have Crump insist on calling Mulder “boy” is to me more indicative of how I’ve seen white people write anti-Black racism than it is indicative of how antisemitic interactions go, but your opinions may vary. Mulder and Crump avoid the roadblock that local law enforcement set up. Meanwhile Kersch contacts Scully and makes it apparent that the jig is up. They aren’t getting away with doing this under the radar.

Mulder tries to get more information from Crump, who insists Mulder address him as Mr. Crump. Crump then asks Mulder if his last name is Jewish. Mulder neither confirms nor denies this, only insisting that he also be addressed as Mr. Mulder. I think from Mulder’s reaction he is not particularly taken aback at Crump’s statement. We have seen him experience being profiled by antisemites before, which obviously happens during “Kaddish.” Less obvious but still relevant is when he gets tortured by a skinhead in “The Pine Bluff Variant,” but that episode is not the subject of this post.

Cut to Scully investigating the Crump residence, being a thorough badass as per usual. They find a dog who Scully thinks is exhibiting the same pathology, whose head also explodes. Cut back to Mulder and Crump. Mulder is trying to get more information out of Crump to figure out what has been done to him. Crump explains how his wife grew sick and how the faster he drove when taking her to the hospital, the better she seemed to do. Mulder expresses his condolences to which Crump replies “Sure you are. You and your Jew FBI.”

Ding a ling a ling. That’s a bell. There is an element of irony here. Mulder is not a part of some shadowy conspiracy to torture Crump, but he was born into the elite globalist cabal based in New York City. More on that later.

Crump then rants about how he knows what’s really going on and that he is a government guinea pig. He backs up this feeling by listing different negative reporting on real actions of the US government, such as Agent Orange exposure. He says he’s seen government agents sneaking around the woods near his house at night. It is here that Mulder gives us the immortal quip, “On behalf of the international Jewish conspiracy, I just need to inform you that we are almost out of gas.”

Cut to Scully doing her investigative science things and barging into the home of an old deaf woman. Again, this scene is very atmospheric and enjoyable. Mulder and Crump have to stop for gas. Things go wrong such that they eventually just steal another car and hit the road again. He leaves a message to call Dana Scully at the FBI. Scully is puzzling over why the deaf woman has been fine when everyone else is ill. She puts together that this isn’t a pathogen. Scully receives Mulder’s message that if they stop, Crump will die.

Mulder and Crump realize they need to go faster and faster to keep Crump well. Crump mumbles a very half assed apology about “the Jew stuff” stating that Mulder “cant help who he’s born to.” This is, and I cannot state this strongly enough, not an actual apology. Mulder even sarcastically jokes about how he can’t see the road because he is tearing up. Crump then asks what I wonder every time I watch this episode— why the fuck is Mulder helping him? (Because this is a fantasy written by a white Gentile of a minority helping their oppressor despite it compromising their safety but I digress.) Mulder replies that Crump shouldn’t make him question that right now. Crump expresses skepticism that Mulder is actually helping him, fearing that he may just be playing into the hands of the grand Jewish conspiracy. Crump wishes he were dead instead, to which Mulder replies “Hey, you gotta stay alive if you want to stick it to the government.” More on this line later.

Scully goes to investigate the Navy’s Project Seafarer. She pretends she is part of the FCC. Apparently there was a brief power surge in the ground conduction system. She gets little information. Cut to Crump and Mulder. He is still insisting on being called Mr. Crump, although we have now turned a corner and he has begun to call Mulder, Mr. Mulder. Cops on motorcycles hand Mulder a phone so he can talk to Scully. (Codependent besties cant go a day without talking lol). She fills Mulder in on the ground conduction from Project Seafarer going underneath Crump’s property and how that impacted Crump. Upon hanging up with Scully, Mulder says to Crump, “Whether they did this intentionally or not, you were right. They did it to you.” Here we have no actual condemnation of the antisemitism that Crump is espousing. In fact, Crump is pretty much spot on. Mulder is literally affirming that the government did this to him, with no clarification that this in no way reflects on Jewry.

Mulder relays the plan to Crump. The plan is for Scully to intercept them, using a large needle to relieve the pressure in Crumps ear without anesthetic. Mulder ultimately runs into Scully at the end of the highway, a dead Crump in his backseat, crushed at his failure. He looks pensively out at the ocean, removing his tie.

Cut to DC. Kersch bitches at them for going off without permission and for running up a giant bill that Scully, poor girl, is now responsible for. Scully stands by Mulder’s decisions and the fact that the DOD shut down Project Seafarer due to their work. Kersch is a dick about it. End of the episode.

Hopefully the next one isn’t also radically out of touch, with like, for instance, campy Nazis trying to kill a time traveling Mulder. That would form a concerning pattern!

The Problem with the Episode

The thing about this episode that really gets to me is there is no definitive condemnation of Crump’s version of events. We are meant to read from Mulder’s use of humor, and the truism that Mulder is Always Right, that the crimes of the government in this episode have nothing to do with the ethnoreligion of its suspected members. But the episode does not actively state this. Crump’s bias isn’t actually checked beyond the fact that he seems to think he has met One of The Good Ones in the form of Mulder. The X Files does not actively condemn the antisemitism that infects the show, aside from the episode “Kaddish,” which has its own problems, as do all of the Very Special Episodes of the show. Really, if you were watching this episode as a one off, without the context that we are typically supposed to agree with whatever social or political statement Mulder is making, you could walk away from this thinking that The Jews in fact did this to Crump!

But let’s go with the assumption that almost every episode asks us to go with— that Mulder is right. Mulder doesn’t seem to believe in any antisemitic characterizations of the government he is working from within to fight. At least part of the reason for this seems to be that he is actively, repeatedly under threat from these antisemitic bozos, regardless of his whatever his ethnic affiliation is supposed to be. He is a Jew in the eyes of the people who would do him harm because of that, and he, being aware of this, seems to take a dim view of antisemites.

Why did the writers bother to give him a personal stake in the fight? I think the writers knew they were playing with fire by writing a show about how conspiracy theories are true, and they wanted to distance themselves from the accusations of antisemitism that would inevitably follow. The significant thing to me, here, is that I am fairly certain this was a cynical attempt to distance themselves from allegations of how they were utilizing tropes around Jews in their conspiracy plotlines, rather than an attempt to actually distance themselves from the tropes in question. But why wouldn’t it be enough to just have Mulder condemn antisemitism, as he does by his lines in “Kaddish”?

My cynical interpretation that I have no evidence for beyond my gut feeling, is that they just couldn’t help themselves upon seeing David Duchovny. My more serious, text-based interpretation is that Mulder, while not canonically Jewish, is on a meta-textual level, representative of The Jew. What do I mean by this? I have written elsewhere about the mostly negative Jewish stereotypes embedded in Fox Mulder as a character.

Here is a quick rundown for people who didn’t see that post:

1. He is a rich cheapskate.

2. He is born into the elite globalist cabal based in New York City, which specifically

helped Nazis escape justice after the Holocaust.

3. He dislikes his own appearance, to the point of wanting a nose job, specifically.

4, He knows some Yiddish.

5. He inexplicably hits it off well with sketchy Jewish-coded characters like Saperstein.

6. He died in the Holocaust. (Deep sigh)

7. He consistently faces antisemitism, often to the point of violence being done to him or at the very least threatened.

Bonus round: He is anti-Christianity specifically, and “Revelations” implies that God does not show up in Mulder’s life as a test of Scully’s faith.

In essence, he is a fetishized, and in these cases helpless, victim of antisemitism, while being simultaneously from a very malevolent and powerful background. He stands in opposition to the canonically existing Christian God of the show, and is peppered with these little tiny culturally Jewish moments. All this amounts to him taking the role that is attributed to The Jew as a figure in the non-Jewish imagination, with the various contradictions that that role entails around power, victimhood and privilege. He is not canonically Jewish, yet he’s pretty much beat for beat how these writers would have written a Jewish character, sans some obligatory circumcision jokes.

The show’s treatment of conspiracy cannot be pulled apart from the fact that a character laden with negative tropes around Judaism is explicitly born into the group pulling the strings of this elaborate global conspiracy. Judaism would already be associated with that group given the broader context of how virtually all conspiracy theories around globalist cabals eventually get to an antisemitic place in mainstream American culture. This association is just all the more apparent in the context of The X Files having a character connected to the cabal who has these tropes and experiences attached to him.

The Antiauthoritarianism of Fools

The fact that this goes largely unaddressed within the show and within the fandom leads me to characterize this as “the antiauthoritarianism of fools.” This is a play on the concept of “the socialism of fools,” which is basically the idea that people who have criticisms of capitalism fall for antisemitic conspiracy theories instead of actually thinking critically about capitalism and arriving at a more principled criticism that doesn’t target Jewish people. The antiauthoritarianism of fools, then, would be an antiauthoritarianism that falls into convenient and lazy beliefs around antisemitic conspiracy theories, rather than a principled antiauthoritarianism that targets the actual powers that be.

The government that Crump is trying to to survive to stick it to is, in his head, The Jews. Mulder, in all his Jew-coded glory, is the emissary of that government, simultaneously canonically complicit in what has been done to Crump, and working against the powers that are trying to harm him. Mulder is as paradoxical in the episode as is The Jew is in the non-Jewish imagination. I don’t think Mulder is literally endorsing Crump’s antisemitic worldview when he encourages Crump to stay alive. Mulder is pretty canonically An Ally, if not straight up One of Us depending on your interpretation. But in the narrative of the episode, we are never actually refuting Crump’s assertion that the government he needs to stick it to are The Jews. For all we know, he dies believing that, and believing that he just happened to run into a Good Jew, who couldn’t help the fact that he was born Jewish. This does not actually lessen his antisemitism. He is a very sympathetic villain despite the values dissonance I think the episode is trying and failing to lead us towards. It isn’t enough to lightly imply that he is wrong about what he believes about Jewish people by having Mulder disagree with him; we needed the writers to actually, unequivocally condemn him like they did the Nazis in “Kaddish.” Leaving this open to interpretation just reinforces the tropes they are playing with. Really the entirety of The X Files has a superficial politics, a kind of reflexive paranoia that falls very easily into the antiauthoritarianism of fools.

Why This Matters Here and Now

Okay, so some people are reblogging a gifset on Tumblr with a line I don’t like. Whomp whomp. Who cares?

This matters because this is a popularization of a moment that is the antiauthoritarianism of fools. We are in a context where many, many people in the United States live in terror and rage due to the recent election of Donald Trump. I am one of these people. In that sense, the sentiment that one should stay alive out of spite to such an evil government can be empowering.

We also live in a moment where the richest man in the world did two Nazi Salutes back to back at the presidential inauguration. If you disagree with that characterization of his gesture, block me please. And the ADL, ostensibly made for the protection of Jews in the United States, failed to condemn him. This is a moment of a radical mainstreaming of antisemitism along with every other hateful -ism under the sun. In this moment, we should not promote an uncritical antiauthoritarianism of fools, because that uncritical thinking will bite us all in the collective ass. When people reblog that gifset or images, they are promoting a moment where the context is that The Jews are the evil government that one should resist. Thinking critically about art is essential when fascism is on the rise.

Am I going to block people who post that quote? No. Because I also believe in freedom of speech. I get why the vibe of that quotation is something people are going for when shit is so rough and scary right now, but I think we need to be critical of the context of the quotation if we are going to build communities and spaces strong enough to resist.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. If you need me, I’ll be writing Tu B’Shvat MSR fluff, because Jewish fans deserve a celebration of Judaism, not whatever the hell Carter and Co. wrote. If you want more of a Jewish perspective on this episode, I wrote a fic a while back where Mulder is actually Jewish and processes with Scully what that experience of being kidnapped by an antisemite would have been like for him. Here’s the link:

#txf #fox mulder #the x files #fandom #david duchovny #i could talk about this forever #tw antisemitism #jumblr #jewblr #brian cranston #txf drive #txf meta #art is political #it is that deep

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