there's our catastrophe

more on the X-files, the 90s, and conspiracy

itsinthetrees:

More than the ugly clothes, more than the overly coiffed hairstyles, I think my favorite random ‘period piece’ element of this show is when they reference things like (in this episode) the Jim Bakker scandal, or the Bosnian War, or the (recent, to them!!) fall of the Berlin Wall, because this stuff really does set the stage.  This is a political show — this is a show about politics more than it is a show about aliens or monsters, and what’s fascinating to me watching it now is how much the political landscape has been demonstrably altered in the last twenty years.

I mean, if she had not been a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show (which my parents have always loved)  in my childhood while pursuing her modeling and acting career, I would not have any idea who Jessica Hahn is.  I imagine a lot of these pop cultural references fly over the heads of people my age watching this show (including me), because they’re so specifically topical to the late 80s and early 90s.

In “E.B.E.” when they showed a scene set in Iraq in the teaser, I was struck by the fact that the Iraqis appeared to have a very functional air force operating — then I was like OH RIGHT because it’s 1993 and we haven’t destroyed their entire infrastructure yet.  Because the international political stage is in a state of rebuilding after the fall of the U.S.S.R., as opposed to a state of immediate and unrelenting chaos due to wars that won’t end.  The conspiracy plot itself relies overwhelmingly on the idea that the U.S. Government is a totally solidified superpower completely in control of everything going on within its borders — terrorism hasn’t even been mentioned yet, aside from a brief reference to the failed 1993 WTC bombing in “Squeeze”.

It’s just interesting because this show has been so often replicated — as Fringe, most recently — but never seems to hit quite the same successful note with critics or general audiences, and I wonder if that isn’t because this concept was so specific to the immediate post-Cold War era.

Just food for thought.

yeah, I think contemporary Western narratives about vast conspiracies are generally less zeitgeisty than they were in the 90s.  (does contemporary still mean post 9/11 or are we post-post-9/11 now?  discuss.)   the x-files in particular is also very informed by pre-90s shit from Chris Carter’s formative years — the Watergate hearings, for example, are a bit of a leitmotif.  so the Red Scare is no longer really a thing in the X-files, but you’ve still got that heightened paranoia, this time directed at the sole superpower.  (there are a couple of episodes about Russia but they are boring and confusing and I don’t remember what happens in them.)

the show’s about the enemy within — not in the sense of watching out for spies of foreign powers, but in the sense of there being vast structures you are inescapably embedded in that are corrupt.   this pops up thematically in a number of different ways.  most obviously, our protagonists are FBI agents struggling against their mysterious superiors, rather than independent truth-seekers.  the possibility of building an effective counter-power is not really considered in this narrative — you do get some sympathetic characters who are working outside the US government (the Lone Gunmen), but they’re largely support crew and they don’t generally drive their own stories.  on a more metaphorical level there’s the constant strand of storylines about the violation of bodily autonomy and implantation of disease or danger-causing objects — cancer, microchips implanted under the skin, forced pregnancy, and orifice-invading mind-controlling monsters.  even the aliens aren’t really played as alien — there’s a constant question over whether aliens exist, or whether the government is using their potential existence as a smokescreen, or whether the “aliens” might actually be from Earth. 

you can definitely do post 9/11 paranoia, of course, but you would have to do a significant retool and I just think the show was a bit creatively tapped out by 2001.  but I maintain that the slow collapse of the internal continuity of the show was an amazing mirror of the change in popular belief re: conspiracy vs. chaos as the driving force behind international and US domestic politics.