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. 

more re: conspiracy, with added geek

the main reason I was thinking about conspiracy to begin with is that I’ve been watching shitloads of the x-files lately — possibly the most paranoid tv show of all time.  one thing I really love about the x-files — and this may surprise you — is how utterly incoherent the conspiracy/mytharc/whatever becomes over the course of the series.  I started watching it when it was already incoherent so I was never disappointed, which may be a factor.  anyway, it’s just thing piled on top of contradictory thing.   often it doesn’t even gel on a thematic/emotional level.  the only way continuity is tenuously held together is by the explanation that there are competing interests within the bodies behind the grand conspiracy.  there’s never really any clear or consistent reason given for what exactly they’re doing or why they’re so keen to hide the truth of paranormal happenings.  

but the slogan flashed at the start of every episode is still “the truth is out there” and the characters are still searching for absolute truth and talking about truth and lies all the time with passionate sincerity.  so it’s not really postmodern.  it’s more like, failed modernism.  it turns out that the conspiracy isn’t a well-oiled machine at all.  it’s messy and chaotic and full of shifting, competing allegiances and its ultimate goal and nature is massively unclear.  but it wasn’t intended to come out that way by the writers (mostly).  and I kind of dig that on a meta level.  that the cabal of writers in control of the show’s narrative couldn’t fucking get their shit together any better than the conspirators they were writing, and even the grand narrative about the grand narrative splintered and fell apart. 

I am really really into failure, especially failed art and communication.  lately I’ve been thinking a lot about derrida and iragaray (I know, and I swore up and down blind that I would never be seduced by those flightly continental theorists).  chiefly the idea that the trace, the lack, the flaw in communication carries its own meaning, an underground subaltern kinda meaning which is sometimes more revealing than the surface meaning.   like how kitsch is most effective when it’s unintentional — sure, there’s an element of hipster snobbery in finding something authentically kitsch (and probably vintage too), but what we’re reacting to in kitsch really is much more than the manifest content.  there are few things more dire than those retro-style magnets with 50s illustrations of women coupled with snarky slogans about housewives on valium.  there is no polysemy, no room to move there.  it’s all laid out for you.  when you see something that seems intended to evoke one feeling and instead evokes something different — that’s a much more interesting experience.  it’s unsettling.  it makes you question your culture and yourself.  (this is one of many reasons why I would argue that the post-modern prometheus is actually a terrible episode.)

like I said, I’m into failure.  but the only way you can truly fail is if you were having a sincere crack at it to start with.  that’s why hipster irony is so boring.  it’s safe.  you’re not allowed to be horrified by it.  if you are you just don’t get the joke (the old “I was making fun of racism by being intentionally outrageously racist!” defense).  under the guise of a paralysing self-consciousness it deadens your ability to be truly reflexive.  

at the end of the series, mulder and scully fail by any reasonable yardstick.  they try, sincerely, to uncover the truth and avert catastrophe, but instead they’re powerless, on the run, with no hope in anything but vague aphorisms and one another.  it’s fitting.  in fact, it’s the only part of the ending that makes any kind of sense, and I sincerely love that incoherence. 

I remember that early on in this War on Terror stuff,

when I was fourteen or so, I confidently declared that they couldn’t possibly go to war in Iraq, it was way too unpopular, and Bush et al might be bastards but surely they knew this was against their electoral self-interest.  look at the polls, look at the protests.  naturally I was totally wrong.  and that started me thinking a little more about the efficacy of electoral democracy, of course, and street demonstration too, but also about what self-interest really is, what it is that motivates and controls the operation of power. 

last night over dinner my friends were speculating as to the hidden motivations and plans of the US empire, why it was that Osama bin Laden was killed now, what it was that they might have been trying to cover up or achieve, how this advances US interests.  in short, what the grand plan is.  

it’s a fairly ubiquitous modernist leftist orthodoxy, this search for hidden motives.  and it’s good to be paranoid about these things, I think.  but who is the “they” that is making the decisions here?  is it Obama?  he’s only one man, surrounded by advisors and constrained by many factors. the Obama administration, the executive?  the legislature?  US corporate interests?  the Pentecostal movement?  conservatives?  Big Oil? rich white dudes?  the media?  because these are all groups with very different goals, often at odds with one another.  and a lot of them are incompetent or ill-informed.  and a lot of them are motivated by ideology rather than strictly by self-interest.  and they do not gel into one coherent body.  and they do not control everything. 

I’ve been called naive for expressing this opinion, which I think is a bit of a misunderstanding.  I’m not saying “they can’t be that evil”.  they can and they are and they’ll continue to be.  it’s just that to me, it’s the faith that someone is in control that’s naive.  the terrifying thing is that it doesn’t take someone sitting down to think “rightio, how can I best expand and consolidate the power of this fairly evil empire?” for that to happen.  empires aren’t like machines.  they’re like organisms.  they’re not designed, they adapt themselves to circumstances, needing no consciousness behind the adaption. 

like, a lot of people in the USA really and truly believe that their own nation-state has a manifest destiny to bring democracy to the world.  and then they go and do things that simply advance US interests at the expense of everyone else.  but that doesn’t mean that’s ultimately why they chose to do those things, simple selfishness, and the belief in democracy was a lie.  for one thing, they often don’t benefit as individuals (see: soldiers, poor conservatives).  but mostly, I think people don’t really act out of rational self-interest.  that’s an economist’s fantasy.  nobody acts like that, not even economists.  and it’s not a case of us naturally being rationally self-interested but rising above it thanks to moral impulses. even when people are being fucking assholes, that doesn’t mean they’re acting out of rational self-interest.  usually, they want to feel powerful, or they want to get revenge, or they’re angry…such motivations aren’t particularly conducive to improved material circumstances. 

on the flip side: I doubt anyone is consciously thinking “let’s brainwash poor people into a politically convenient ideology so we can use them to advance US national/corporate interests”.  but that doesn’t mean that’s not, on some level, what happened.  Foucault calls this kinda thing instrument-effects — like side-effects, but without the low importance that term implies.  things that weren’t necessarily intended by anyone, but were useful to particular power-holders, or didn’t challenge them.  so they survived, and then coalesced into a system that has a recognisable function — which is not the same as a purpose.  a purpose implies intent.  function is just about what’s useful. 

I don’t think we need to search for secret motives to understand oppressive systems and I actually reckon that’s a bit of a distraction, a romantic spy fantasy.  reality is more boring and also more complicated and challenging.  some specifics may be hidden, yes, but I think the unsavoury motives we really need to understand are pretty apparent to those who are open to perceiving them.  social marginalisation, history, apathy: this is enough.  oppression doesn’t have to be consciously planned by anyone.  that’s the problem.  it just accumulates, like mould, like rust, like wear.  that’s why it’s more resilient than any elaborate conspiracy could possibly be, that’s why it has to be consciously resisted.