Truth Decay: Sleuths After Reagan

By Charles Taylor

Originally published in millennium pop, Volume I, Issue 1, Summer 1994

Subversive TV doesn't announce itself. Usually, it occupies its appointed time slot, hovering on the verge of cancellation, unnoticed except for the few critics and viewers who gradually spread the word, while managing only to convey that this show is "different." Tuning in, you're likely to be hooked by what's new or clever or entertaining. But the thrill and the shock of a truly subversive show hits you only after several viewings. I had been watching the X-Files (Fox, Fridays, 9 p.m. Eastern) for a couple of weeks when, during one episode, I turned to my wife and said, "Do you suppose the people who run the network know this is on?"

The X-Files is the most subversive show to hit American television since Wiseguy, and probably the most fun. Like Wiseguy, it combines a slick genre hook--in this case, a mixture of G-men and little green men--with a sharp take on current American political life. Wiseguy was canny enough to realize that, with Reagan and then Bush blurring the boundaries that separated political, criminal, and corporate life, American politics had become the stuff of genre fiction.

The X-Files kicks that idea to the next level. You can't say that the storylines resemble the realities of American political life, since the show is about two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who investigate paranormal phenomena that run to the likes of a genetic mutant serial killer who feeds on his victims' livers, man-eating prehistoric insects reactivated by volcanic radiation, UFOs trying to rescue shipmates who've crash-landed behind NATO lines, a dead businessman using telekinesis from beyond the grave to expose his partner's illegal arms trading, and, in the best episode, a killer on death row (Brad Dourif in a stunning performance) who claims he has the psychic ability to lead the agents to a serial killer and will do so if he's spared the gas chamber.

"You have the right to know more."
-- Legend on a billboard

"THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE."
-- Tag line for the X-Files

What links the show up to the zeitgeist is that Mulder and Scully are working to get out from under the most enduring legacy of the Reagan/Bush era: the way government, in the words of the Situationist philosopher Guy Debord, "[proclaims] that whatever it said was all there was." In other words, that the truth is irrelevant. There's a lot of talk about the truth on the X-Files. Each week, the credit sequence ends with the legend "THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE," and each week, Mulder and Scully try to ferret out that truth from the shifting veils of evasion and distortion and the seductive, reasonable-sounding lies their superiors toss in their path. And when they do manage to find out what the truth is, it's usually so outlandish no one believes them.

In one episode, Mulder, testifying to keep a suspected serial killer from getting out of prison, tells the parole board he has determined that the man is responsible for a series of murders stretching back a hundred years; that he comes alive every three decades to consume the five human livers that will allow him to go back into hibernation; that, if he's set free, he'll start killing again. Watching him, Scully, the skeptic of the pair, writhes in frustration and embarrassment. And you can see why; Mulder does sound crazy (that's what makes the scene so funny). But when Scully chastises him, the scene takes another turn. "I don't care how it sounded," he tells her, "as long as it was the truth." The truth is outlandish here. But Mulder's "craziness" is recognizable to anyone who, with the facts on their side, has ever tried to insist that something unthinkable is the truth.

The X-Files is about insisting on truth that runs counter to all ideas about how things are supposed to work, ideas so deeply ingrained that those in power can call them up to deny reality merely because it sounds crazy. Week after week, in the course of their investigations, Mulder and Scully find that behind their cases lies some secret government experiment or program kept from the public because it won't be able to "handle" the truth. (The Reagan years were scary because, though the facts were often out in the open, people "handled" the truth by denying it, rushing to defend Reagan as a nice guy the way this serial killer is championed by the doctor he later savages.) What makes Mulder and Scully so dangerous--and what makes them heroes--is that, having glimpsed a government that wants to reign them in, they choose to operate as if that government really worked the way it claims to. They're watching their backs as much as they're watching the skies. The show's great irony is that they're the real aliens in our midst. Plots verge on the baroque with a wit so deadpan it's almost subterranean. The scripts are as open to crazy ideas as Mulder is, and as aware of the outrageousness of the those ideas as Scully herself. Duchovny and Anderson are a dream team. Together they've got the sexiest understated rapport since Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg on The Avengers. Their wrangling over the limits of what's possible has a sensual familiarity; each one's response to the other tells you they've both thought about becoming lovers. All that's implicit, so when they carry that familiarity to the surface--when Mulder touches Scully's face in sympathy after her father dies, when she calls him "Fox" (the name he didn't allow even his parents to use)--it's a real turn-on.

Duchovny doesn't bother to separate Mulder's savvy from the passionate belief that leads him to keep putting his career (and, it's implied, his life) on the line. When he finds something to confirm his beliefs, he looks both clear-eyed and dazed. You fear for him because you know he won't quite be able to contain his excitement. That upsets the usual roles male and female partners play on TV, just as Anderson, with her Roman nose and petite but voluptuous build, upsets the usual standard of TV beauty. In show after show, Scully is the one protecting Mulder, and, as Anderson plays it, Scully appears to think there's not a better job in the world. The disapproving purse of her lips as she listens to one of his wiggy theories always looks as if it's about to turn to a kiss. Scully is so adept at keeping things under control that when her composure breaks, as it does in her scenes with Dourif as the psychic killer channeling her dead father (scenes that put the encounters between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs to shame), it feels as if the center isn't holding.

The truth may be out there, the reasons for it may not be.

 

The show has the look of a recognizable world gone slightly off. When sunlight appears, it looks fake. A negatively charged grayness hovers over everything; vast open spaces are capped by cloudy skies with heat lightning that pulses like tantalizing clues. What makes the show truly frightening is that it doesn't explain away any of its horror. The truth may be out there, but the reasons for it may not be. Watching each episode is like watching a photo that comes up in a chemical bath and suddenly goes bad; what seemed crystal clear clouds over, leaving us to grasp at what we thought we saw.

The most unsettling thing about the X-Files is how inviting, how lulling this slightly alien world looks. The curtain of what we accept as reality seems to have torn, allowing Mulder and Scully to search for meanings usually obscured. Week after week, this elegant twilight zone beckons like the land of the free and the home of the brave.