#conspiracy files

[chrismoet]

Mugs, tees, prints, cozy sweaters. Big ‘ol bargains to be had RedBubble!

[xf-cases-solved]

one of my favorite things about xfiles episodes where the killer is a human with supernatural powers of some sort is that they're always like, "lol, it's not like anyone is ever gonna catch me. who would ever believe that the horrible accident in my backstory made it so that i can now control dung beetles with my mind and make them eat the brains of my enemies on my command" or whatever, and then ol' spooky Rolls Up and just goes, "i know about the beetle army, john, so why don't you just confess?"

[faintng-spellss]

the x files/ tumblr quotes I relate to bc for the past four months i’ve been obsessed with the show

[starlightseraph]

i really want someone who’s never seen the x files to look at these promotional photos and then try to guess what the show is about

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Been thinking about the X-Files recently. A show I have a hazy, but fond memory of.

[toomanywatchers]

(blank one for y’all to make your own version!)

[tiny-tf-faces]

[cecilysass]

Why I Think The X-Files Isn’t Really As Much About Watergate and Governmental Conspiracy As Everyone Claims, Maybe Including CC

This one’s really nerdy, get ready.

Media covering the X-Files has always emphasized how much the show capitalizes on a post-Watergate worldview, a paranoia about government and belief in high-level conspiracy. I think CC signed on to this interpretation entirely. So much so that he sure kept on feeding those conspiracy plot lines in the mytharc—even when every other plot line was going hungry. 

So much so that in the revival, he really created a problem for himself, which the media picked up on. Government conspiracy nuts in 2016 no longer were hot sensitive 90s guy outcasts like Mulder or quirky cuddly little nerds like the Gunmen. Government conspiracy nuts in 2016 were media savvy right wing commentators manipulating the masses, getting presidents elected through willful misinformation.  The revival series tried to address this head on with Tad O’Malley, a character who represented this new development. But it was definitely a sticky issue: the sociopolitical context of the original show was gone. Was the show relevant any more?

I would argue yes, or at least it could have been. I would argue that the interpretation of the XF as a show primarily about conspiracy at high levels of power and governmental manipulation is a flawed one to begin with. I think this take makes the show way too thematically narrow, limits it, and obscures the show’s more important appeals.

In the 1990s, media coverage of the show almost always mentioned Watergate the historical event. Sometimes coverage discussed how Watergate was directly referenced on the show (Deep Throat, meetings in parking deck, CSM and Diana both living in the actual Watergate), but also Watergate’s specific effect on creator Chris Carter, who specifically cited it as a formative event. Often it was claimed that the show’s popularity with audiences was rooted in post-Watergate suspicion of government.

I think this could have been true generally speaking, although I always thought it somewhat overestimated the impact of Watergate on the XF’s target audience. Consider that in 1997 many in the key 18-49 demographic would not even remember Watergate especially well, or at all. If you were 30 in 1997, you were 6 when the story broke in 1973. I’m sure that could have left a mark on you, but I also think it might have been something that simply left a much bigger impression on Boomers the age of Chris Carter himself.

Me? I was in college in 1997, and I was nonexistent / unborn during Watergate. So I didn’t remember it, and it held no personal significance in my worldview regarding the United States. I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to trust that the government was telling me the truth all the time, and I wouldn’t ever be shocked to learn I was being intentionally misled. As a late Gen Xer growing up in the Reagan administration with post-Watergate ideas floating in the air, I just assumed the worst from the get-go.

So I admit: sometimes the earnest speeches from Mulder and Scully about the Truth and being lied to from men in power and a government we purport to trust seemed a little repetitive and obvious to me. It’s taken me a while to realize that these speeches are voicing something very specific and historically real, the furious indignation of Boomers that we can’t trust our institutions. I think I felt like, yeah, okay, okay, I get it. I never had the same kind of trust in institutions to lose in this respect, but this was a major betrayal for people my parents’ age.

All of this to say, I don’t think that the conspiracy worldview and the appeal of the paranoia about government was a big part of the draw for me. I’m not saying it wasn’t for many or even most others. But my instinct about storytelling is that that is a little too abstract or bloodless of an appeal to really hook most viewers anyway. Like, you might be interested in conspiracy to get you to watch initially, sure, but that’s probably not going to keep you watching for years. And it’s really not going to be enough to motivate you to tune in to a revival series in the 2010s.

So what was the big hook for viewers? You’re probably expecting me to say MSR, and if so, I’m going to surprise you a little. I do think that was part of it for some percentage of viewers, but I think it is more complex than that.

I think the show tapped into a late 20th century urge for individuals to become part of something greater than ourselves. Something we might think of as numinous or transcendent. Maybe something meaningful and good (like a quest for truth) — or maybe something that will look down and judge us, for good or ill. Something that means that we are not lonely in the universe. This puts X-Files squarely in an overall 1990s angels and aliens otherworldly trend. 

(Personally, and this could be an only me thing, but I can never quite separate out Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and The X-Files in my mind; Angels debuted on Broadway the same year X-Files first aired, and I was exposed to both at about the same time. They’re both about apocalypse and personal crisis and the end of the millennium and the transformative power of authentic relationships with others. I could do a whole thing on this.)

The desire for transcendence is the part of the show that is summed up by Mulder and Scully watching lights together in the sky, by Mulder’s wonder at seeing ships or aliens, by the entire notion of “I Want To Believe,” by the idea expressed in the last episode of the original series that both Mulder and Scully share—that the dead aren’t lost to us, that “they speak to us as part of something greater than us - greater than any alien force.” Mulder says to Scully that if “you and I are powerless now, I want to believe that if we listen to what’s speaking, it can give us the power to save ourselves.” There’s definitely a part of the show that is about little lonely human beings finding how they fit in a big, unfeeling universe.

The show's interest in conspiracy figures into this. Because after all, what are conspiracy theories but reassurance that there is some meaning behind everything after all? That there is some powerful system running the show, even if that system might be kind of evil. A grand organized secret an individual can actually uncover, rather than a bunch of random haphazard incompetence and chaos. I think this is part of the show's interest in transcendence, but only one part.

And there’s also part of the show that’s about a hero who is wracked with loneliness and alienation — and then two heroes who are wracked with loneliness and alienation—finding a kind of salvation in Truth, in Justice, in Trust, in Partnership, and, ambiguously, Love. (Sometimes Mulder sounds more like a 19th century Romantic hero than anything else.) This makes it a little allegory about late 20th century individualism and alienation and desire for meaning and authenticity and connection with others. 

I think what appeals to people emotionally in the show is that part of us that wonders: is there a universe that pays attention to me? Is there anyone who listens to me and who really, really knows me? Does anyone besides me care what is true and what is a lie? Will I find those who are lost to me and repair the parts of me that are broken? Is there anyone who would give up their life for mine?

I think that the desire to connect with others is a really basic human drive, and it’s most obviously foregrounded in the show the Mulder-Scully partnership. Even romance aside, we see from the first episode that these are two people with distinct worldviews who want to communicate, who see something in one another, who are hungry to be understood by one another. They ultimately see the other person as someone who reflects and affirms who they are. The partnership is definitely the emotional hook of the show, whether you see that as a romantic ship or not, and it thematically echoes the show’s overall themes of wanting there to be more in the universe. 

When the show was at its most emotionally devastating, it was one or both of its protagonists losing a relationship or connection that was important to them, or it was their frustration that their efforts were not meaningful on a larger scale: grief over a loss, a coverup that meant Justice wasn’t served or Truth was concealed.

When the show’s moments were most emotionally triumphant, they were always moments of overt connection, usually between Mulder and Scully, both more dramatic (“you’re my touchstone”) and subtle (reaching out to take a partner’s hand in Pusher or Field Trip). When there were moments of triumph concerning the government conspiracy, it felt more allegorical, like information (Truth) getting free, not progress made in specific governmental reform or anything. 

(And honestly, the moments of triumph against the conspiracy were pretty few and far between. We left the original run of show with the protagonists on the run, pretty sure there was going to be an alien invasion in coming years that had been facilitated by complicit human conspirators, so this conspiracy thread of the plot apparently didn’t even seem like the most important and emotionally satisfying story to resolve.)     

CC wrote a NY Times piece addressing the changing landscape on conspiracies in 2021, discussing why he was skeptical of a new UFO report. He was perceived as having the authority to write this because he created a show that quintessentially addressed government conspiracies about visitors from space.

But for me, the question of whether the government was hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life was really not the main takeaway from TXF. At least no more than the question of whether there needed to be an investigation into the undue influence of witchcraft in Scotland was my main takeaway of Macbeth.

I do acknowledge that I may have been in the minority. Maybe this is not how most people felt. But I also wonder if sometimes the urge to make the show primarily about political paranoia became a distraction from what it did best—these larger, more universal themes. I wonder if that is partly what was so frustrating about the storytelling of the revival.

[quietbreeze97]

This is going to be corny as hell, but I've just started binging The X-Files for the first time, and my god, this show is so good??!! Where has it been all my life??

[vintage-tigre]

[thursdayinspace]

So many things that grab you by the heart to squeeze it like a lemon into the emotional devastation cocktail that is the cancer arc, but one that never fails to squeeze extra hard is

Mulder: I need to know who did this to Scully!

Kritschgau: What you can have, what you may find, is so much more than that.

Mulder: What?

Kritschgau: What you want most desperately of all.

Mulder: The cure for Scully's cancer?

What he wants most desperately of all. Is. The cure for Scully's cancer.

This is the man who has built his entire life and his entire career around trying to find his sister. Uncover the truth behind her abduction. It's been the one thing that's been driving him, defining him, for his entire life. Telling Scully about it in the pilot, he says "Nothing else matters to me."

And here he is, naming the cure for Scully as the one thing in the world he wants above all else. One thing matters more to him than the truth he's been searching for this whole time. And that's the woman he loves. She has become the most important thing in his life. He needs her. More than anything. And even more than that, he wants her to get another chance at life.

We saw him self-destruct during her abduction. We see him doing everything in his power to find a cure for her now. When she's in danger, anything else fades into the background. He loves her so much that even the life-long quest he's been on pales in comparison.

I need to go sit in the dark and stare at the wall about this for a moment

[lifewithaview]

The X Files (1993) Memento Mori

S4E14

The horrible truth behind Scully's illness is revealed: she has cancer and may die. Such has been the fate of a dozen other women who, last year, introduced themselves as abductees and made claims of being with Dana on an alien space ship. Mulder must find a cure, and fast.

*This is the episode for which Gillian Anderson won the Best Actress Emmy.

[xf-cases-solved]

guys, alex krycek is the Most Character of All Time

he's a bright young fbi agent. just kidding, he's secretly working for the shadow government syndicate. the syndicate hates him. so does everyone else. he killed mulder's father. he's a great assassin. he and his accomplice killed scully's sister on accident. he's a terrible assassin. he survived a car bombing. the bomb was put in the car to kill him specifically bc he's so bad at his job. he cannot have a single interaction with mulder that is not intensely homoerotic. mulder once beat the shit out of him in a chinese airport and then the wife of a french diver gave him the black oil virus in the bathroom. like that's not even a euphemism for anything, that's literally what happens. he's working for the syndicate again. he purges the black oil violently from his face and then gets abandoned behind a door underground. he is no longer working for the syndicate. he once beat the shit out of skinner in a stairwell. in retaliation, skinner later shirtlessly beats the shit out of him and handcuffs him to his balcony where he almost dies. it is just as homoerotic as it sounds. his parents were cold war immigrants and he's fluent in russian. we only learn this right before mulder is going to abandon him handcuffed to a car to go to russia. he and mulder go to russia. bad things are happening, but they're in it together. just kidding, krycek is working for the russian government. just kidding, now he is being held prone on the ground while people saw his left arm off. now he has a prosthetic arm. he's working for the russian government. he and marita are enemies. he and marita are fucking. it's probable that krycek doesn't know how to have relationships that aren't both erotic and filled with hate. he's on mulder's team now, he even kissed him about it. just kidding, he's working for the syndicate again. he has a remote that controls nanobots(???) inside skinner's body, allowing him to harm and/or kill him at will. it is just as homoerotic as it sounds. it's all going to hell and the only person he's going to save is himself. he helps get nearly the entire syndicate slaughtered. he throws cigarette smoking man down a flight of stairs to his death. he's a great assassin. he can save mulder's life. he's not going to save mulder's life. scully's child cannot be born. he will help them get her somewhere safe so the child can be born. he's going to take mulder's life. skinner takes his life instead. now he's a ghost. his ghost is on mulder's side. the cigarette smoking man outlives him. he's a terrible assassin

[curiositysavesthecat]

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[mylittleredgirl]

every time i see one of those posts about how fans can’t send their headcanons or fics to professional writers because then they can never use those ideas, i think about going back in time just long enough to tell teen me to fold up my “scully gets pregnant with a magical baby and it might be mulder’s baby or it might be an alien and we just don’t know” fic, put it in an envelope, and address it to chris carter. could have saved us all a lot of trouble

[scullysaurus]