Jul-21-2008
The Truth About “The X-Files”
Taki’s Magazine
Tom Piatak

[Original article here]

One of the most accurate assessments ever offered by a government official came when FCC chairman Newton Minow’s described television as a “vast wasteland,” a depiction that has, generally speaking, grown only more accurate since Minow spoke those words in 1961. Today, most programs on television are either vapid or subversive of traditional values—or sometimes both. Rare indeed have been programs of exceptional quality, rarer still those that dissented from the liberal consensus of the day.

One of the few programs in recent years that managed to offer quality entertainment while also suggesting that the Left might not be right was “The X-Files.” The series went off the air in 2002 after a nine-year run, but is still being rerun and might gain a new generation of fans through the release this Friday of the second “X-Files” movie, “I Want to Believe,” which I am eagerly looking forward to. I only regret that I will not be able to hear the thoughtful analysis of the film from a man I had the pleasure of discussing many of the show’s episodes with, and who would always ask to borrow the tape I made of any installment he happened to miss, the great conservative writer and thinker Sam Francis.

Sam was a knowledgeable fan of science fiction and horror, and he recognized “The X-Files” as a superior example of the genre. The show was consistently well acted, and featured intelligent, well-written stories, and production values equivalent to those of most feature films. The series’s central characters, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), were attractive, intelligent, enterprising, and likable, and the supporting cast was superb as well. These were the principal virtues of the series, which could be enjoyed by people of all political persuasions.

But there were hints in “The X-Files” of a worldview far closer to paleoconservatism than is generally found in anything emanating from Hollywood. Sam had in fact been put off by the liberal plot lines he found in other fine examples of television science fiction, such as the “Twilight Zone” or the original “Star Trek.” Unlike those series, “The X-Files” had a certain conservative sensibility, offering no vision of “utopia” or even progress in the human condition. It’s telling that the first “X-Files” movie bore the reactionary title “Fight the Future.”

Rather than guiding the way to a brighter tomorrow, Mulder and Scully face the same fundamental problems human beings have always faced, including the persistence of evil. The aliens and monsters who appeared in so many episodes were not benevolent or even misunderstood but implacable foes who needed to be stopped. There was no hint of moral relativism: The serial killer Donnie Pfaster is shown morphing into a demon or other serial killers as he goes about his work, and those who misunderstand the nature of evil get what they deserve. In the first season episode “Tooms,” a social worker accepts a serial killer’s claim that Mulder had brutalized him, and then attempts to befriend him, only to become the killer’s next victim. And almost every episode featured the tagline “The Truth Is Out There,” meaning not only that the truth might be found in unusual places but that there was in fact an objective truth that could be found, despite what the postmodernists want us to believe.

A recurrent theme of the show was that the government can not be trusted. Mulder and Scully weren’t just chasing dangerous aliens but aliens in league with a conspiracy in the federal government and United Nations. The conspiracy is willing to do anything to further its objectives, including killing, lying, and engaging in massive surveillance of the American people. “The X-Files” gave new meaning to the derisive slogan, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.” There were episodes devoted to government attempts at mind control, government use of bioweapons against its own citizens, and government medical experiments on unwitting Americans.

As Scott Richert put it in “Us vs. Them,” from Chronicles in ’97, “The X-Files” achieved success “not because of any popular fascination with aliens, but because, after Ruby Ridge, Waco, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Mena, NAFTA, and GATT, Americans have every reason to believe that their government is being run with a callous disregard for their rights and welfare and for the enrichment of an entrenched ruling class.” In fact, as Richert noted in that article, the show even featured an episode, “Unrequited,” that showed the members of a right-wing militia as being both heroic—they had rescued MIAs left behind in southeast Asia by the government—and truthful—the militia leader is the only one who tells Mulder and Scully about the assassin who’s killing the military officers who had signed off on the decision to abandon him and his comrades in Vietnam. How many other TV shows ever cast a militiaman in a positive light?

Bill Clinton once affirmed that you could not both love your country and hate your government, a remark Sam observed was worthy of Brezhnev. It’s obvious why Sam was such fan of “The X-Files.”

However distrustful Mulder and Scully were of the government for which they worked, they never lost faith in America. Scully was the dutiful daughter of a Navy officer, and the boss and protector of Mulder and Scully at the FBI, Walter Skinner, was a proud Marine veteran of Vietnam. (Sam thought it significant that Mulder and Scully worked for the FBI, a bastion of Middle America, rather than the far more elitist CIA). That there is no contradiction between distrusting the government and loving America was brought home in “Jump the Shark,” the final episode featuring the Lone Gunmen, three freelance conspiracy theorists who kept tabs on government misdeeds and often aided Mulder and Scully.

In “Jump the Shark,” the three freely sacrifice their lives to stop a terrorist intent on unleashing a biological weapon and killing thousands of innocent people, causing one of their former adversaries who had worked with the conspiracy to describe them as “patriots” and prompting Skinner to “pull some strings” and get the trio buried at Arlington. As Scully observes at the burial, “like everyone buried here, the world’s a better place for their having been in it.” The love for America evident in those lines is as genuine as the distrust of the government.

“The X-Files” was also largely (though not entirely) devoid of the leftist themes that regularly appear in so much popular entertainment, such as a focus on the glories of multiculturalism and the evils of discrimination. In fact, the show eschewed the de rigueur multiculturalism which dictates that every scene (except ones depicting villains) be carefully integrated and that minorities show up as computer geniuses and the like in vastly greater numbers than in the real world. In many, perhaps most, of the show’s episodes all the characters were white, the minority characters who appeared in the show, just like the white characters, ranged the gamut from the morally ambiguous (Deputy Director Kersh, Mulder’s informant “X”) to the heroic (Agent Reyes), and there were no anguished discussions about race or discrimination.

What the series showed in terms of encounters between the established American culture and immigrant cultures also deviated from the standard multiculturalist script in which Americans are either oppressing immigrants or being enriched by them. In “Hell Money,” a Chinese doctor exploits his fellow immigrants by running a rigged lottery in which no one ever wins, but the losers end up being operated on and eventually killed so that their organs can be sold for profit. Even when the lottery is exposed as a fraud, the doctor evades justice because none of the immigrants are willing to testify against him. And a very sympathetic immigrant who has participated in the lottery in the hopes of earning money to treat his daughter’s leukemia (and loses an eye for his efforts) asks his daughter, “Do our ancestors scorn us for leaving our home? Is that why you are sick now?”

Although the immigrant father in “Hell Money” stays in Chinatown, other “X-Files” immigrants do indeed defy standard Hollywood protocol and decide to return home. In “Fresh Bones,” the problem is caused by a Marine colonel overseeing a refugee camp for Haitians. The colonel fully embraces multiculturalism to the point of becoming a practitioner of voodoo and actually holds the Haitians in North Carolina against their will until the leading priest reveals all his secrets. The problem is solved when the Haitians return to Haiti, after the colonel loses a voodoo contest with the Haitians’ leader and ends up buried alive.

In “El Mundo Gira,” Eladio Buente, a Mexican farmworker in California is exposed to an extraterrestrial enzyme and begins to spread a disease that kills on contact. He is ostracized by his fellow illegal immigrants as “El Chupacabra,” a Mexican monster in which the immigrants fervently believe. For most of the episode, Buente is also being pursued by a brother seeking vengeance for Buente’s first victim, a woman loved by both men. None of his fellow immigrants is willing to protect him from his brother—even an ostensibly assimilated Mexican-American INS agent—because they all believe that “God curses a man who stands between two brothers.” Like the Haitians in “Fresh Bones,” Buente sees his salvation in returning to his homeland for good. “Diversity is strength,” as we all know, but it’s also clannishness and suspicion of outsiders, voodoo and superstition, and blood feuds.

“The X-Files” was largely silent on the hot button issues of the culture wars, but there were intriguing hints that once again the show’s sympathies were not with the Left. In “Colony,” Mulder and Scully investigate the deaths of abortionists who are not being killed by radical pro-lifers but by an alien bounty hunter. The aliens are using the fetal tissue gathered in this grisly trade to attempt to create an alien-human hybrid that will further their plans to colonize the Earth. The conspiracy, too, is working on creating transhuman hybrids, and for this reason one of its leading members is shown in “Redux II” watching with approval as Iowa Democratic Senator Tom Harkin describes as futile any effort to stop human cloning.

Then there’s the subject of sex, sex, sex—a topic to which much of our popular entertainment devotes endless hours and which “The X-Files” virtually ignored. The friendship between Mulder and Scully did not become a physical relationship until they had worked side by side with each other for many years, and even then the exact nature of their relationship was somewhat mysterious. It was as if each character was on a quest for the truth, and nothing else could take precedence—a chivalric ideal within a culture of “if it feels good, do it!”

This ideal was in fact realized in the case of the Lone Gunmen. In the episode “Three of a Kind,” their leader, John Fitzgerald Byers, is shown dreaming about what life would be like if he were married to Susanne Modeski, a woman he has fantasized about since meeting her nearly a decade before. At the end of the episode, Byers is given the chance to go off with Modeski but, fearing that he would endanger Modeski and not wanting to abandon his friends and their own quest for the truth, he declines to follow the woman he loves, a kind of choice that would have made perfect sense to a member of the Templars or the Hospitallers but that is exceedingly rare in today’s culture.

Perhaps the clearest conservative themes in “The X-Files” emerged in connection with religion. Scully’s Catholicism was the focus of several episodes, and she was depicted as a woman of sincere faith, if not a consistent churchgoer. Two episodes show Scully in the confessional, once after saving a boy who is a stigmatic from a man who was in league with the devil, and again after helping to thwart the devil from taking the souls of four teenage girls, whom Scully comes to believe had been sired by an angel. It’s doubtful a leftist show would ever feature the devil as a real character. It’s even less likely it would depict him occupying the professions he did when he appeared on “The X-Files”: a high school biology teacher (“Die Hand Die Verletzt”), a social worker (“All Souls”), and a liberal Protestant minister who advocates tolerance and opposes fundamentalism (“Signs & Wonders”).

“Signs & Wonders” might be the most reactionary episode in the entire series. Mulder and Scully go to rural Tennessee to investigate a murder, and they immediately begin to suspect Enoch O’Connor, a snake-handling fundamentalist preacher who expelled his daughter and her boyfriend from his congregation when she became pregnant. (Interestingly, in addition to sharing the same last name as the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, Enoch has the same first name as a character in O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and wears old-fashioned glasses reminiscent of the type worn by the writer). When Scully complains to Mulder about O’Connor’s “intolerance,” he replies, “Sometimes a little intolerance can be a welcome thing. Clear cut right and wrong, hard and fast rules, no shades of gray.”

O’Connor’s opponent in the town is a liberal Protestant minister, whose church encourages members to “think for themselves” and “live [their lives] the way [they] want,” and which offers an “open and modern way . . .of looking at God.” Despite the attractiveness of the liberal minister and the rough edges of his fundamentalist counterpart, Mulder and Scully learn in the end that the murders have been committed by the liberal minister to discredit his fundamentalist rival, and the viewer learns that the liberal minister—who disappeared from Tennessee only to become the pastor of a church in liberal Connecticut—is the devil. Sam felt that no other series on TV would have produced an episode that so perfectly transgressed the norms of the liberal Zeitgeist, in which “tolerance” is the supreme good and any Christian who takes the traditions of his own faith too seriously is treated with suspicion at best or hostility at worse.

The religious theme became more explicit in “The Truth,” the final episode of the series. The series ends with Mulder and Scully on the run from the conspiracy and its friends in the government, hiding in a hotel room in New Mexico. These are the final lines spoken in the series:

Scully:  “You’ve always said that you want to believe.  But believe in what Mulder?  If this is the truth that you’ve been looking for, then what is there to believe in?
Mulder:  “I want to believe that the dead are not lost to us. That they speak to us as part of something greater than us—greater than any alien force.  And 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.”
Scully: “Then we believe the same thing.”
Mulder: “Maybe there’s hope.”

Lest the viewer have any doubt about what is being discussed, the camera zooms in on the tiny gold cross Scully has worn throughout the series. In discussing this ending with Sam, he told me that it contained the most pro-Christian sentiment he had seen in a mainstream television show in some years. “The X-Files” was hardly an apology for orthodox Christianity, and it explored many ways of believing, but its respect for belief certainly encompassed the Western traditions.

It appears that “I Want to Believe” may delve into some of these same themes. The tagline for the movie in its theatrical trailer is “To find the truth you must believe,” which is not that different from Anselm’s credo ut intelligam. But even if my guess about the movie is wrong, and Mulder and Scully end up embracing every leftist shibboleth imaginable, the original series will still continue rewarding intelligent viewers who give it a try, particularly those viewers who believe that the truth is out there, somewhere off to the right.

Tom Piatak is a contributing editor to Taki’s Magazine.

Jul-16-2008
Smithsonian Wants to Believe! National Museum of American History Acquires X-Files Collection

Original article available here.

During a special ceremony today, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History received a collection of objects from “The X-Files,” the television series and movie franchise. Twentieth Century Fox together with Chris Carter, series and film writer, director and producer, and Frank Spotnitz, series and film director and producer, presented an annotated script from the series’ pilot episode, FBI badges, posters and other objects to the museum’s entertainment collections.

“The X-Files” series quickly became one of the most popular science-fiction television series in entertainment history during its nine-year run on FOX Television (1993-2002). The series featured 202 episodes and led to two feature films; the newest film is slated to open July 25. The show earned acclaim and recognition: It was nominated for 141 awards and honored with 61, including a Peabody award in 1996 and several Emmys and Golden Globes in the acting, writing and technical categories.

“The series is a significant representation of science fiction in television drama,” said Dwight Blocker Bowers, museum curator. “‘The X-Files’ captured the genre’s penchant for the paranormal and cleverly used it to address such contemporary issues as governmental control, national and international conspiracy theories and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.”.

In the world created by Carter and Spotnitz, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are tasked with investigating the “X-Files”: marginalized, unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. Mulder plays the role of the “believer,” having faith in the existence of aliens and the paranormal, while Scully is a skeptic, initially paired with Mulder by her superiors to debunk his unconventional work. The “X-Files” main characters and key phrases, including “The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One” and “I Want to Believe,” became pop-culture touchstones.

Science fiction has been a vital narrative strand in nearly every aspect of popular culture, from comic books to radio, theater, television and movies, as evidenced in such wide-ranging works as “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Star Trek,” which also are represented in the museum’s collections.

The National Museum of American History collects, preserves and displays items of American heritage in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Documenting the American experience from Colonial times to the present, the museum looks at growth and change in the United States. The museum is closed for major renovations and will re-open in fall 2008. For information about the museum, please visit http://americanhistory.si.edu or call Smithsonian Information at (202) 633-1000, (202) 633-5285 (TTY).

Sep-02-2007
The X-Files: A Delicate Modernism
Culture Magazine
Kevin Johns

[Original article here]

More than any other series, The X-Files epitomized 1990s television. Over the course of its run the show won 16 Emmys, dozens of additional industry awards, and made superstars out of its leads David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. Though their careers may have tapered off recently, there was a time when Duchovny and Anderson were two of the most recognizable faces in popular culture. The show influenced dozens of other series, spawned toys, comic books, video games, and novels, and was the focus of several fan conventions. It was the first television series ever to be released on DVD, and it was a big part of my identity throughout my teenage years.

Every single Sunday night I would curl up under a blanket on the couch, turn off the lights, and fall in love with the show over and over again. When the film X-Files: Fight the Future came out, I made myself an FBI badge, pinned it to my only black suit, hand-cuffed a three foot tall blow-up alien to my wrist, and headed to the movies. Needless to say, I was an unabashed X-Phile.

Perhaps the best example of my devotion to the show is the ouroboros tattooed to my calf, which is based on the tattoo that Scully got in the brilliant Glen Morgan and James Wong scripted and Rob Bowman directed Season Four episode, “Never Again.” It was a subtle, quiet episode, and one of the few that explicitly explored Agent Scully’s personal life. The skin on my leg, where the ink of the tattoo seeped into my flesh, feels different than the rest of my body. As Scully notes in the episode, you know that a tattoo is there even when you can’t see it. That tattoo will be with me for the rest of my life, and so The X-Files will always be with me as well. Some little part of me, even if it’s just a patch of colour on my leg, will always be tethered to Mulder and Scully.

And yet, the show seems so distant to me now, like a dusty memory stored in the attic of my mind. The X-Files is a relic from before those towers came crashing down in New York City and the entire world changed for the worse. It is a work of art from a simpler age.

When the Republicans are in power, North America’s popular consciousness has to spend its sleepless nights fretting over war, racism, imperialism and genocide. When the Democrats are in charge — when the President is a silly saxophone-playing liberal whose worst transgression is cheating on his wife — the people do other things at night. They stare into the stars and they dream about worlds other than their own and enemies who threaten a united humanity, not any one nation state.

Suggesting, however, that The X-Files was simply a television series about aliens pigeon-holes the show into a box that it is far too expansive to ever fit inside. The X-Files often failed as an extended science fiction narrative, but it excelled as a filter through which explorations in genre fiction of all kinds could be presented. Its conceptual format was significantly more important than its overarching story. The unwavering presence of the disbelieving and sceptical muggle, Scully, validated genre fiction and geek culture in a way that allowed it to transgress beyond the segregating walls that traditionally demarcate the borders between the cult and the mainstream. The X-Files was able to move so far into the centre of pop culture that it was able to actively define it for much of the 1990s. The feminism presented through Scully’s powerful presence, and the metrosexual feminization of the metaphysically sensitive heroic male lead, Mulder, engaged and moulded a culture where conservatism had been pushed to the margins – at least for a time.

The surprisingly sustained hipness of the show’s cultural positioning gave the impression to many that North America had entered a new era of television. Some went so far as to describe the show as post-modern. These commentators, however, were mistaken in their choice of post-modern harbinger. By the mid-nineties post-modernism had most certainly made its way onto television, but it was in the form of Joss Whedon’s seminal series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not The X-Files. In fact, when compared to BTVS, The X-Files is revealed as downright modernist.

The show’s tagline, “The Truth is Out There,” had been fully absorbed into the cultural lexicon a few seasons in, and it was a clear marker that what we were dealing with was modernism. The very notion of “truth” being a stable, graspable concept, “out there” just waiting to be discovered by Mulder and Scully, is utterly rejected by post-modern thought. Through the lens of post-modernism, “truth,” like all language, is a construct that is easily destabilized and extremely vulnerable to slippages in meaning. The post-modern intellectual framework constantly questions notions such as truth with a depth of interrogation that the modernists had not yet developed.

The atrocities of WWI had thrown “Truth” into question for the survivors of the war, the early modernists. The concept of a clear, knowable and unifying “Truth” had been fractured by the bombs of war and drowned in the mud of the trenches. “Truth” had become “truth,” something broken and lost, scattered throughout culture. It was difficult to find, but, for people such Woolf and Jung, it was still there if you just looked hard enough, or if you were able to recognize the invisible strands of consciousness that connects all things. These were people for whom truth still had metaphysical implications despite the destruction of a World War.

As The X-Files entered its later seasons, the metaphysical implications of the word “truth” slowly but surely came to the forefront of its storytelling. In “Existence,” the final episode of Season Eight, Scully says to Mulder, “From the moment I became pregnant, I feared the truth about how and why. And I know that you feared it too.” Mulder replies, “I think what we feared were the possibilities. The truth we both know.” “Which is what?” asks Scully. Mulder leans forward and kisses her, finally solidifying their romantic relationship. In this case, “truth” serves as a signifier for the romantic feelings for each other that have always bubbled just below the surface of the two characters.

A year later, in the last scene of the series finale (titled, of course, “The Truth”), the preternatural implications of “truth” were made even more apparent. Mulder and Scully are huddled together in a motel room, sharing an intimate moment that recalls aspects of a similar scene in the show’s pilot, nine years earlier, when Mulder first told Scully about his sister’s abduction. In this final episode, Mulder tells Scully that, “The truth is still out there,” while gently holding her crucifix pendant. The sub-textual truth/god conflation that the show had always assumed was finally made blatant in these closing moments.

The omnipotent God of Christianity outlined in the Bible may have been declared DOA by Nietzsche, but a certain optimistic spirituality (perhaps best characterized by the New Age movement) remained dominant. Throughout the 20th century, growing numbers of people stopped going to church, but still considered themselves spiritual beings. WWI had ushered in a break from the regimented doctrines of the church, but many people had not yet abandoned their personal relationship with god and spiritualism. The X-Files creator and executive producer, Chris Carter, can certainly be considered one of these individuals, a practitioner of a delicate modernism.

Carter’s ideological leanings, while clearly imbedded in the superstructure of The X-Files from the beginning, were more directly on display in the second television series that he created for the Fox network, Millennium, which ran concurrent with its sister show for three seasons. Millennium presented a world where good and evil were tangible forces, constantly at battle. It was a universe where demons and angels made regular appearances. The protagonist, Frank Black, lived in a giant yellow house that served as both a symbol of goodness and a bunker — an ad hoc middle-class barricade — against the increasing tide of evil spreading through society. While BTVS was exploring the ambiguity of good and evil through complex stories that refused to offer Buffy (or the audience) any easy truths, Frank Black was functioning in a universe where morality was still a black and white issue. While Buffy was discovering new definitions of family and sexuality, Frank Black was desperately clinging to the dream of a stable heterosexual nuclear family, a norm that was falling ever further from his reach.Millennium served as a desperate cry for old-fashioned goodness in the face of coming evil that would culminate with the turn of the century. Like a parent trying to prepare a child for the strife of adulthood, the show explicitly told its audience, “This world of ours is going to change significantly in the next few years, and the changes will be for the worse.” Of course, Chris Carter’s warning soon proved absolutely prophetic.

As the twin towers crumbled, so did a culture where modernist television shows like Millennium and The X-Files could exist. What is the truth about September 11, 2001? What is the truth about the war in Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction? These questions cannot be answered with any singular truth because we now live in a world where truth is undeniably a construct. The X-Files functioned under the premise that the men in power were withholding the truth from the American public. Television viewers in the new millennium know that the men in power don’t hide the truth, they construct it. At a time when America could go to war based on a “truth” that is universally acknowledged as strategically manufactured, no one had time for a show like The X-Files. By 2002, the show, now in its 9th and final season, had become a stale cultural artefact that characterized everything about a decade that – only a few years later – had already become a distant memory.

More and more, The X-Files is taking on a new role in my identity formation. When I look at my DVD shelf, and I see all those seasons lined up next to each other, I am reminded of a time when I was more naïve and the world seemed a much better place. I now think of Mulder and Scully’s quest for the truth, and I yearn for a time when my deepest fears were characterized by green-grey men with big eyes, not an increasingly disintegrating world stage where incomprehensible conflicts are waged using unthinkable methods. When the windows of the two towers shattered that September morning, so too did the delicate modernism upon which The X-Files had balanced for nearly a decade. Chris Carter’s admirable belief in the beauty and power of truth led to the production of a work of art that defined a decade that I will never forget, but that I can also never return to.

Image Manipulation By Alain Poirier

This article belongs to the Identity Issue.
This article belongs to the Best of Issue.

March / April 2004
Development of Beliefs in Paranormal and Supernatural Phenomena
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 28.2
Christopher H. Whittle

[Original article here]

A new study found high levels of fictional paranormal beliefs derived from broadcasts of The X-Files in viewers who had never watched The X-Files. An examination of the origins of paranormal and supernatural beliefs leads to the creation of two models for their development. We are taught such beliefs virtually from infancy. Some are secular, some religious, and some cross over between the two. This synergy of cultural indoctrination has implications for science and skeptics.

Two important findings emerged from a recent study I conducted on learning scientific information from prime-time television programming (Whittle 2003). The study used an Internet-based survey questionnaire posted to Internet chat groups for three popular television programs, The X-Files, ER, and Friends. Scientific (and pseudoscientific) dialogue from ER and The X-Files collected in a nine-month-long content analysis created two scales, ER science content and The X-Files pseudoscience content. Respondents were asked to agree or disagree with statements from each program (such as, “Rene Laennec used a rolled-up newspaper as the first stethoscope” [ER], and “The Wanshang Dhole, an Asian dog thought to be extinct, has pre-evolutionary features including a fifth toe pad, a dew claw, and a prehensile thumb” [The X-Files].

My first finding, that ER viewers learned specific ER science content, is an indicator that entertainment television viewers can learn facts and concepts from their favorite television programs. The second finding was spooky. There was no significant difference in the level of pseudoscientific or paranormal belief between viewers of ER and The X-Files. This finding does not seem surprising in light of Gallup and Harris polls demonstrating high levels of paranormal belief in the United States, but the beliefs assessed in the study were fictional paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs created by the writers of The X-Files. Paranormal researchers ask questions such as, “Do you believe in astral projection, or the leaving of the body by one’s spirit?” My research asked, [Do you believe] “[d]uring astral projection, or the leaving of the body for short periods of time, a person could commit a murder?” A homicidal astral projector was the plot of an X-Files episode, but ER viewers were just as likely to acknowledge belief in that paraparanormal (a concept beyond the traditional paranormal) belief as were viewers of The X-Files!

Perhaps it is as Anderson (1998) pointed out in his Skeptical Inquirer article “Why Would People Not Believe Weird Things,” that “almost everything [science] tells us we do not want to hear.” We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay; we are the result of random mutations and genetic accidents.

Anderson cited quantum mechanics as a realm of science so fantastic as to have supernatural connotations to the average individual. Quantum physicists distinguish virtual particles from real particles, blame the collapse of the wave function on their inability to tell us where the matter of our universe is at any time, and tell us that in parallel universes we may have actually dated the most popular cheerleader or football quarterback in high school, whereas in this mundane universe, we did not. It is all relative. Ghosts are a fairly predictable phenomenon compared to the we-calculated-it-but-you-cannot-sense-it world of quantum physics. Most people will agree that ghosts are the souls of the departed, but quantum physicists cannot agree on where antimatter goes. It is there but it is not. Pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs provide a sense of order and comfort to those who hold them, giving us control over the unknown. It is not surprising that such beliefs continue to flourish in a world as utterly fantastic as ours.

After researching the paranormal in an effort to discover why ER viewers might have the extraordinary paranormal beliefs indicated on their survey questionnaires, I constructed two models of paranormal belief from my research notes (heavily drawn from Goode 2000, Johnston et al. 1995, Irwin 1993, Vikan and Stein 1993, and Tobacyk and Milford 1983). Figure 1 shows the interrelationship between the natural environment, human culture, and the individual. The culture and the individual maintain General Paranormal Beliefs, which consist of at least four relatively independent dimensions: Traditional Religious Belief, Paranormal Belief (psi), Parabiological Beings, and Folk Paranormal Beliefs (superstitions). Individuals have cognitive, affective, and behavioral schema in which these beliefs are organized. Society creates and maintains paranormal beliefs through cultural knowledge, cultural artifacts (including rituals), and expected cultural behaviors. The “Need for control, order, and meaning” domain is speculative on the culture side, but supported by research on the individual side. The demographic correlates of traditional religious paranormal belief and nonreligious paranormal belief (see Rice 2003, Goode 2000, Irwin 1995, and Maller and Lundeen 1933) are highly variable and generally reveal low levels of association. It seems that almost everyone has some level of paranormal belief but scientists find few reliable predictors of these levels. [See “What Does Education Really Do?” by Susan Carol Losh, et al., Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2003.]

A first step in future work is to identify the nonbelievers in paranormal phenomena and then explore why they are nonbelievers. Belief in the paranormal begins almost from infancy. We need to expand the research on the developmental stages of belief in the paranormal, and to do that we must study young children.

I have developed a linear model for the development of paranormal and supernatural beliefs at the individual level (figure 2). As children we are taught by parents and other adults (indoctrination by authority) about our culture’s beliefs and practices. Our elders’ teachings are filtered through hard-wired psychological processes. These include: control (magical) thinking, which allows a helpless infant to believe that he controls the actions of those around him (“Mother fed me because I pointed at her and smiled”), reducing his frustration level; psychological needs and desires, including making order and sense out of one’s environment, having an understanding of one’s place in the cosmos, feeling in control of one’s destiny, and having a fantasy outlet; and the desire to please and imitate adults.

Figure 2: Cultural and biological origins model of paranormal beliefs and experiences in the individual.

We are taught about angels, witches, devils, spirits, monsters, gods, etc. virtually in the cradle. Some of these paranormal beliefs are secular, some are religious, and the most pernicious are crossover beliefs, beliefs that are at times secular and at other times religious. Santa Claus, angels and vampires, ghosts and souls, and the Easter Bunny are examples of cross-over beliefs. Crossover beliefs are attractive to children (free candy and presents), and on that basis they are readily accepted. The devils, ghosts, and monsters are reinforced through Halloween rituals and the mass media. As the child matures, some crossover beliefs, called “teaser” paranormal beliefs, are exposed as false. Traditional religious concepts are reinforced as “true and real.” They give us Santa Claus and we believe in an omniscient, beneficent old elf and then they replace Santa with God, who is typically not as generous as Santa Claus and whose disapproval has more serious consequences than a lump of coal. We learn about God and Santa Claus simultaneously; only later are we told that Santa Claus is just a fairy tale and God is real.

In a synergy of cultural indoctrination and the individual’s cognitive and affective development, a general belief in the paranormal and the supernatural forms. Once we have knowledge of the paranormal, we can then experience it. One cannot have Bigfoot’s baby until one is aware that there is a Bigfoot, or aliens, or ghosts. In other words, you cannot see a ghost until someone has taught you about ghosts. Countervailing influences, experiential knowledge, and knowledge of realistic influence have little effect on paranormal beliefs because they are applied after the belief is established through cultural and familial authority.

The dismal statistics presented on the science literacy level of scientists and science educators by Showers (1993) argued against a rapid increase in science literacy. Scientists and science educators (1) have high levels of paranormal and pseudoscientific belief, (2) do not use their scientific knowledge when voting, (3) use nonscientific approaches in personal and social decision-making, and (4) do not have high levels of science content knowledge outside of their specific disciplines. How can we expect nonscientists to think and act scientifically if scientists and science educators do not? If we decide to mount a concerted program to disabuse the public of paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs, we must first ask if cultures can survive without paranormal beliefs.

The media may provide fodder for pseudoscientific beliefs and create new monsters and demons for us to believe in, but each individual’s culture is responsible for laying the groundwork for pseudoscientific and paranormal belief to take root. We can inform the public through dialogue in entertainment television programming about important scientific facts and concepts. We can inform the public in formal and informal science education environments, but we probably cannot greatly reduce paranormal belief without somehow fulfilling the needs currently fulfilled by it. Science educators must focus on what changes we can make and how to best make those changes. We must involve all stakeholders in the discussion of what is an appropriate level of science literacy. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, then we shall all, science educators, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that pseudoscientific beliefs exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.

References

• Anderson, Wayne R. 1998. Why would people not believe weird things? Skeptical Inquirer 22(5): 42-45, 62.
• Goode, Erich. 2000. Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.
• Irwin, Harvey J. 1993. Belief in the paranormal: A review of the empirical literature. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87(1): 1-39.
• Johnston, Joseph C., Hans P. De Groot, and Nicholas P. Spanos. 1995. The structure of paranormal belief: A factor-analytic investigation. Imagination, Cognition, & Personality 14(2): 165-174.
• Maller, J., and G. Lundeen. 1933. Sources of superstitious beliefs. Journal of Educational Research 26(5): 321-343.
• Rice, Tom W. 2003. Believe it or not: Religious and other paranormal beliefs in the United States. Journal for Scientific Study of Religion 42(1): 95-106.
• Showers, Dennis. 1993. An Examination of the Science Literacy of Scientists and Science Educators. ERIC Document ED 362 393. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. Atlanta, Georgia.
• Tobacyk, Jerome J., and Gary Milford. 1983. Belief in paranormal phenomena: Assessment instrument development and implications for personality functioning. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(5): 1029-1037.
• Vikan, Arne, and Erik Sten. 1993. Freud, Piaget, or neither? Beliefs in controlling others by wishful thinking and magical behavior in young children. Journal of Genetic Psychology 154(3): 297-315.
• Whittle, Christopher H. 2003. On learning science and pseudoscience from prime-time television programming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico.

Christopher H. Whittle

Christopher H. Whittle holds a B.S. degree in Earth Sciences from the University of Massachusetts, an Ed.M. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.

Mar-21-2003
Edinburgh News
Final chance to find out if truth is out there
Miranda Fettes

IT became one of the greatest cult phenomena of the 1990s, re-defining science-fiction and bringing the bizarre world of the supernatural to mainstream television.

For many loyal followers, trailers for the series, warning that “exposure means addiction”, lived up to their promise, and it has even been dubbed television’s “existential adrenaline rush”.

And, whether you are a phile or a phobe, few people would deny that in the nine years and nine series since September 19, 1994, when it first hit our television screens, THE X-FILES has enjoyed a remarkable degree of success.

With enigmatic allure, the series broadened the boundaries of sci-fi appeal to a new dimension, successfully straddling different viewer groups.

Now with the final episode of the final series being broadcast on BBC2 this Sunday night, the series has eventually exhausted itself and will be consigned to televisual history. And, whether or not the formula simply became a touch tired and stale, it will likely survive as essential cult viewing when the repeats are screened for decades to come.

But just what made The X-Files boldly go where no sci-fi programme had before — and survive? And is the truth really out there?

From the start The X-Files was more than just green Martians, robots and flying saucers — and more, indeed, than simply the sexual chemistry between FBI agents Mulder and Scully — the pair who investigated the cases other Bureau agents couldn’t solve — although that, as Alistair McCleery, a professor of literature and culture at Napier University, admits, was one of the principal drawing factors.

“David Duchovny was a new handsome actor and he extended the normal audience for a science-fiction programme. It’s generally males between the ages of 16 and 35, but David Duchovny attracted a larger representation of female viewers. The X-Files had the same kind of audience profile as were watching Friends and Sex and the City,” he explains.

“Secondly, the teasing relationship between Mulder and Scully attracted a lot of people who wouldn’t have watched something that was purely a science-fiction programme. The ‘will they/won’t they?’ relationship between the two eventually ended up in a song by Catatonia.

“Thirdly, Christopher Carter gave the audience little bits of fragments with the constant suggestion that behind those fragments was the complete picture. In that, there was an implicit promise that one day we would know the truth; that all these little teasing fragments that he gave would somehow come together in a final solution to the whole thing.

“Fourthly, it had very high production values, partly because they filmed it in Canada and had much lower charges than if they had filmed it in Hollywood. There was a slickness about it which made it attractive to a wider audience who demand that high production value in their programmes, whereas science-fiction fans are perhaps more willing to tolerate lower production values in exchange for stimulating ideas. It wasn’t full of creaking sets like an old Dr Who adventure.”

As for its cult status, he explains: “It keyed into a widespread distrust of government and a sense that there were all sorts of things going on behind the scenes that they weren’t being told about; when the nature of government was secrecy rather than transparency.”

Mark Percival, a lecturer in media and communication at Queen Margaret University College (QMUC), agrees that the series crossed previously uncharted territory. “That was what was fascinating about it,” he says. “The scripts were uniformly intelligent, very sharp, very engaging and noticeably better than most contemporary science-fiction shows. Chris Carter was something of a genius in that respect. It owed a lot to cinematic scripting, it was that sharp.

“The unusualness of the casting helped. Gillian Anderson was unusual in that she wasn’t the typical blonde bombshell female lead; she was smaller, slimmer, more intellectual, and definitely not blonde.

“It was very much of its time: the conspiracy theory fed into a collective paranoia that everyone had about authority through the 90s and I think that was very important in making it work.

“Unlike the fantasy shows like Star Trek, it quite often didn’t resolve the story at the end of the show. The viewer was left to make their own mind up and that doesn’t happen very often in American fantasy TV shows.

“It used some of the conventions of science-fiction but it recombined the elements in a completely novel way. It broke some of the format rules and the characters were immediately engaging and slightly eccentric.”

Yet Prof McCleery says the four reasons for the show’s success are the same four reasons behind its demise. “The series had become stale, repetitive and no longer offered people the eye-opening challenges that it did,” he says.

“You lost Duchovny, you lost the relationship between Mulder and Scully and people became aware that all the clues that Chris Carter was giving didn’t add up to anything.

“David Duchovny got fed up working in Canada when he lived in California and New York, so the very fact that they were able to produce such a good programme because of the relative cheapness of Canada eventually led to the star leaving.”

Duchovny himself says he grew tired of the show after the fifth series, by which time he felt the formula had worn a bit thin. “You cannot say it died anything but a natural death,” he has said.

And Gillian Anderson is similarly relieved to see the show drawing to a close. “I think it’s good to finish now,” she says. “We had a great run, but we’re getting out at the right time when the show is still a hit. It would have been terrible to overstay our welcome.”

According to Prof McCleery though, the gaping void left when Mulder quit the show was never filled.

“Once David Duchovny left, the writers found themselves in all sorts of difficulties and the audience figures began tailing off dramatically,” he says. “They tried to replace him with Robert Patrick as Agent Doggett but it didn’t seem right that he had the same kind of relationship with Scully as Mulder had.

“So they introduced a new woman character to provide a Mulder-Scully relationship for Doggett, but then there was the awkwardness of having two women protagonists in the programme. When the film came out, rather than giving us the answers, all we got was more fragments and no solution, and people began getting a bit cheesed off with the programme.

“All these things have a shelf-life and you do after a while get a sense that the writers, the cast and the production crew maybe feel they’ve been doing it a bit too long and it has to come to an end — and that feeling of it going on too long maybe communicates itself to the audience as well.”

He adds: “The programme traded on the idea that if we watched long enough, we’d get the full picture, but there was no full picture — and maybe that is the irony that Chris Carter is laughing at: that we have all been watching, waiting for the truth, and I suspect the last programme will end without any real resolution of all the elements that have been in it over the years.”

Percival is a step ahead of the rest of us though, as he was in Canada last year when the last episode aired there.

So is the truth really out there? “The double last episode doesn’t really resolve everything,” he says. “It leaves a certain number of things hanging, which leaves it wide open for a possible movie.

“There are a number of flashbacks in the last episode where you see some classic moments from early on in the show’s history.

“Even if you’d lost interest in the series in the last couple of years, watch the last one because Duchovny figures throughout.”

While he is not giving anything away, Percival says the last episode throws up some big surprises. “There will definitely be a couple of things that you will not expect to happen,” he confides, with a secretive — and knowing — smile.

And, says Prof McCleery: “The X-Files has a core audience who will be devoted to it for the rest of their days. Just as there are men in their 50s who are devoted to DR WHO, so too in 20 years’ time there will be people who talk about The X-Files with great passion.”

“The Truth”, the last ever episode of the X-Files, will be shown on BBC2 at 10.45pm, Sunday