At last year's BAFTA Awards, when the public was invited to vote for their favourite TV programme, the 'X-Files' beat 'Pride and Prejudice' into second place!
As a cultural phenomenon this TV show should raise questions for us. What is its significance? Why is there this tremendous interest in what was never really intended to be a massive series? It was a very low-key enterprise using some B-movie ideas and was meant to be fairly short-lived, but it has become enormously popular.
The X-Files seems to be sustained by public interest and public opinion. This is not just being created by the media. In fact, Newsweek conducted a poll and discovered that 29% of Americans believe that there has already been contact with aliens.
The phenomenon
For those of you who haven't watched it, you may be wondering what on earth it is about. 'Strange things happen every day, events which demand investigation, some defy logic, others are too fantastic to believe, but most disturbing are those incidents too dangerous to be revealed.' That is The X-Files scenario. Then we are introduced to agents Mulder and Scully. Mulder had an experience as a young boy. He is the 'believer'. The woman, Scully, is a sceptic. A trained scientist, she is constantly playing off against him as they try to interpret what is going on in the unopened X-Files that they are investigating.
All of this is done against a backdrop of conspiracy, cover-up, and various shadowy government agents that seem to be thwarting what they are doing and hence 'though the truth is out there, you can trust no-one' because the government is denying everything.
The plot has innumerable twists but four major themes come through clearly. The first is UFOs, aliens and the whole paranormal. The second is the area of conspiracy which is a major, major theme. The third, which is perhaps not explicit, is the constant presence of violence. Then fourthly, there is the theme of the interplay of scepticism and belief. Mulder has a poster on the back wall of his office that says: 'I want to believe'. You constantly see them playing off against each other and the question is: Who can know the truth? The sceptic or the believer? And if we are to be a believer, in what do we believe? What should we make of these programmes?
Cultural continuity
There is continuity with what is already going on in society. Interest in the paranormal is not particularly new. You can go back to people like Yuri Gellar, people supposedly demonstrating various paranormal powers. Similarly with unidentified flying objects - remember Eric Von Danlken and his book The Chariots of the Gods back in the 1970s, looking at the possibility of aliens having visited and built the pyramids.
More recently in the 1980s, the New Age movement arrived and with it also a fascination for the psychic and occultic. That comes through in this series. The conspiracy theme is not new either. Particularly in America perhaps, since the shooting of JFK and Watergate, there are tremendously widespread feelings about conspiracies. Even in this country, the Guildford Four and other cases that come up for question brought a growing suspicion about government. So there is a continuity with some of these recent trends but I think the major continuity is with an underlying shift to-wards what we call a post-modern culture.
Science to pseudo-science
We see a shift from the scientific system of modernism towards a greater openness. In one interaction between Mulder and Scully, Mulder says: 'Now, when convention and science can offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic?'. Scully retorts: 'What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.' So for Scully, it is a question of science catching up with the reality of nature and for Mulder the idea that perhaps we need to go beyond science into what many would see as the fantastic.
There is a clear blurring of the distinctions between science and pseudo-science - so much so that a number of heavyweight scientists are very concerned about this. Francis Crick put out his book The Astonishing Hypothesis which was a kind of effort to re-educate people in that basic principle of science which is reductionism. Carl Sagan published The demon-haunted world - science is a candle in the dark and he bemoans the incredible popularity of all this pseudo-science and calls it nonsense. What he does not really reflect on adequately is why, given the tremendous push in the educational systems of the 20th century in favour of the sciences, there should be this sudden reversion. He sees us as going back towards a demon-haunted world.
Certainty to uncertainty
Along with that shift is one from certainty to uncertainty. How do we know the truth? Can we be sure of anything? The fragmentation of truth, language and meaning, is very much a by-product of our post-modernism leading to greater and greater degrees of confusion.
You see this reflected in a recent Church of England report, The Search for faith in the witness of the Church. Some 70% of people in Britain believe in God but only 14% attend church. This report was commissioned to explore this, and found that even practising Christians held unorthodox New Age-style beliefs. While most people still have spiritual beliefs, Britain is seeing the upsurge of a form of folk religion. Dr. Nazair Ali, who headed this, says: 'This 'pick 'n mix' spirituality reflected the confusion in our society.' Chris Carter, who directs and produces The X-Files, is producing a new series called 'Millennium'. He says: 'This series is all about the collapse of things, the chaos, the randomness, the uncertainty. These are all big, big ideas that we live with every day yet we live in denial of them. I am going to put them in people's faces.'
No confidence in authority
Post-modernism has also brought with it a loss of confidence in structures, particularly structures of authority. The modernist approach placed a great deal of confidence in a sort of hierarchy that could be established rationally, truth could be discerned, discovered scientifically and this could be the way we could hold our institutions accountable. But in post-modernism, we have no standards, no grounds to exercise this kind of regulation.
There is a very interesting comment on The X-Files by Andrew Rawnsley from The Observer: 'Most science fiction has nothing to do with creatures from outer space. It is about what lurks inside our inner space. The War of the Worlds projected man's fear of machines onto the Martians, The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers played to 1950s America's terror of communist infiltration. 'The X-Files' plugs into a very 1990s paranoia - someone is after us. That someone is not green and slimy with bad breath and bad teeth, the extra-terrestrials are the least threatening characters in this series. They are almost incidental to it, they appear infrequently and when they do it is a skeleton in a secret burial dump or in dream sequences. The real threat to humankind, truth, justice and the American way is intro-terrestrial. It is a home-grown enemy, our old friend, an international conspiracy - welcome to Paranoiaville, USA.'
Nick Pope became something of a celebrity in UFO circles in that until 1994 he was head of a branch of the Ministry of Defence devoted specifically to research of UFOs. After resigning from the post, he declared that war is imminent between alien forces and people on earth. The claim is made in his best-selling book about alien abduction called Open Skies, Closed Minds. Chris Carter says 'Exposure is the only moral absolute', which is very much a post-modernist kind of approach.
Discontinuity with culture
All of this reflects the way in which The X-Files thus reflect what is going on in our culture. But there is discontinuity too. Modernism had a very optimistic belief in science and the human ability to surmount these difficulties. Post-modernism, as it is being sold, is very optimistic about the wonderful world we are going to have, free from dogma. The New Age Movement is certainly optimistic about how we are going to come into deeper awareness about all sorts of hidden powers. Yet what we have in The X-Files is something that is very much darker, more negative, and very much more pessimistic.
Claiming that the truth is out there may appear to be a positive statement. But the inability ever to find answers is much more than a technical device to keep the series running. I think that it is also intrinsic to the whole atmosphere of the series. You think you are there but then it is gone through your fingers. The more you look, the more complicated it gets.
I think that what we have here is pessimism and cynicism. Chris Carter reflecting on his upbringing said that his parents worked together whenever he was naughty. When he was a little boy, they would always point it out and discipline him and so on but they always kept their stories together. He said: 'My parents never broke ranks. Even when they were wrong, they would back each other up.' Confronted with an unassailable power that he knew was wrong, sometimes Chris lost faith in all authority figures - 'trust no-one' is an X-Files slogan, and it is also Chris's personal philosophy.
Superstition
What I would like to put up for your thoughts is a more negative spiralling downward in the culture represented in The X-Files. We have a move from suspicion to the superstitious. We have a move from fascination to fear. I think that the suspicious world that the epistemology leaves us with is only liberating for a short length of time, and then eventually we begin to believe in everything and anything.
Our fascination with the eclectic diversity that scientific openness offers, very quickly begins to turn to fear. I believe that what The X-Files represents is the shift away from the optimism of modernism. Some of that more positive post-modern rhetoric is certainly a shift from the optimism and New Age movement to a decidedly dark future.
There is an interesting scene in one episode where Scully's sister, Jessica, is portrayed as typical New Age, with crystals and laying on hands, and it is very interesting to see the interaction between Mulder and Jessica. He absolutely scorns her when Scully is ill and she is talking about healing her and just believing. He says: 'Don't give me all that harmonic convergence nonsense.' She replies: 'Don't be so sceptical.' He is supposed to be the believer, but here when he is interacting with someone who symbolises the New Age movement he just trashes her.
Recently, I came across a quote by Arthur C. Clark: 'Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the universe or we are not, both are equally terrifying.' This is something rather paradoxical that Clark has hit on it here. We are afraid of what might be out there but we are also afraid to be alone, and so we see in The X-Files not just an elaboration of our pre-millennial paranoia but also, paradoxically, a hunger for belief.
Again, to quote Chris Carter: 'I am a non-religious person looking for a religious experience. I think The X-Files is looking for meaning for what is for me tantamount to a religious experience, a paranormal experience. I was raised a Baptist, I am a lapsed religious person who would like to find something that tested my beliefs, tested my faith'. Along with this search, this hunger for belief, there is of course the hunger for significance. 'Paranoia is OK, for it keeps life interesting and implies that the world involves us.' At least if there is a conspiracy theory, we have this feeling that somehow there is meaning and significance to anything else going on, it's not just a random chaos.
