September / October 2002
Why Was The X-Files So Appealing?
Skeptical Inquirer Volume 26.5
Erich Goode

[Original article here]

The success of The X-Files was in large part due to its expression of a confluence of three powerful, ancient, and legend-like beliefs-paranormalism, conspiratorial thinking, and populism.

The demise of The X-Files series cries out for an assessment of its appeal. In the volatile world of big-time television, a decade-long run is no small potatoes. Clearly, the show said something to audiences that most programs don’t. What was The X-Files‘ special magic? What made it intriguing to tens of millions of viewers?

My sense is that the program’s appeal was confluence of two immensely attractive and primordial ideas: paranormalism and conspiratorial thinking-along with a strain of populism, which often comes with paranormalism, and nearly always accompanies conspiracy theories.

The X-Files was not a documentary, of course—it was fiction. (At the same time, or so the show’s producers claimed, it was “inspired” by “documented accounts.”) It didn’t lecture to us a paranormalist or a conspiratorial (or a populist) point of view. In fact, my guess is, its creators and producers adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the occult events it depicted. For most of us, the events it depicted were just a bit too fantastical to be taken seriously as fact. [See also ”The X-Files Meets the Skeptics,” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 1997.]

But the program did contrast a paranormal/conspiracy point of view (Agent Mulder’s) with a more scientific or skeptical perspective (Agent Scully’s)-and week after week, the skeptical perspective always lost. Moreover, viewers actually saw evidence of both paranormalism and conspiracies at work with their own eyes. We saw the aliens scuttling about in the shadows and we saw the Cigarette-Smoking Man and his cronies, also in shadowy places, conspiring to cover up evidence that the aliens are on our planet.

Spotting The X-Files‘ paranormal theme is a no-brainer. Not only were the words “paranormal activity” flashed on the screen in the program’s opening credits, but throughout, Mulder’s supernatural theories were always verified. When Scully told him that that the presence of aliens on Earth contradicts the laws of physics, Mulder replied, when it comes to aliens, “the laws of physics rarely apply.” At another point, Scully, who is trained as a doctor, said: “I’ve always held science as sacred. I’ve always put my trust in accepted facts.” Mulder had a different take on the matter: “Might we not,” he asked, “turn to the fantastic as a possibility?” Week after week, the show overturned Scully’s trust and validated Mulder’s “possibility.” No doubt about it: In The X-Files, traditional science was thrown out the window and paranormalism reigned supreme.

The X-Files was also a classic case of a conspiracy narrative. Conspiracy theories argue the following. First, treachery is afoot; somebody (or something) is trying to do harm. Second, not only do the conspirators want to do harm to others, they want to do harm to us- good, decent people. Third, the conspirators are organized; indeed, that’s what conspiracies are all about. Fourth, their actions are secret and clandestine; the conspirators are very good at covering their tracks. And fifth, they are powerful; in fact, all conspiracy theories are centrally about the distribution of power, about monopolizing and withholding it (Fenster 1999).

Conspiracy theories are nearly always populist theories as well: They support and trust the common man and woman, especially, first, their view of things, and second, their right to power. Conspiracy theories and populism share a strong distrust of the elite, people in high places, the rich, the powerful, the well-connected-including scientists and other well-educated, pompous pundits. And, crucial for our understanding of The X-Files, most varieties of populism see science as symbolizing or representing elitism-that is, as contrary to the views and the interests of the common man and woman. Science is complicated and difficult to learn and superficially it seems to be monopolized by, and to support the interest of, the powers that be. Turning the tables on what most scientists think, the populist strain of conspiracy theories sees science as traditional rather than revolutionary, conventional rather than going against the grain.

In conspiracy theories, the conspirators control public life by controlling access to valuable information. To fight against a conspiracy, we must first believe in it. And the central idea of conspiracy theories is that we must uncover the truth, which is what The X-Files is all about. As usual, Mulder said it best: “The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.” In principle, by telling the truth, we can undermine the control that the powerful have over us. One of the things that makes The X-Files interesting is its ironic twist on this age-old theme. More on this momentarily.

There are many varieties of conspiracy theories. One major type is the paranormal conspiracy theory. What paranormal conspiracy theories share with conspiracy theories in general is the view that nothing is as it seems. There are evil, shadowy figures who hide valuable information from the public. In The X-Files, the conspirators constituted a multinational “consortium” that “represents certain global interests,” which kept the truth from the rest of us. It was a conspiracy so vast that even the FBI was kind of a pawn, a puppet, a middleman between these powerful forces and the public. The valuable information in this case was of a paranormal nature-that extraterrestrials are here, they are here as a result of violating the laws of physics, and they mean to do harm to us by colonizing our bodies.

In the paranormal conspiracy theory, the underdog tries to reveal the truth about scientifically unexplainable phenomena and undermine, and ultimately defeat, the dominant, establishment view, thereby empowering the public. The underdog is opposed to a “rigid scientific view of the world.” In place of this rigid view, the anti-conspiracy theory favors intuition, what feels right, what seems right, experience, memory-in short, what contradicts or can’t be explained by science.

In such paranormal narratives, there is usually a believer and a skeptic, and the tension of the narrative is introduced in the debate between them. We want to be there to witness its resolution, that is, the manifestation of the truth of paranormal powers. The believer has usually seen evidence of paranormal powers with his or her own eyes, but either can’t get his or her hands on hard, physical evidence, or the evidence keeps being stolen or destroyed by others, usually the conspirators. In contrast, the skeptic has faith in traditional science, trusts hard evidence, and thus debunks the paranormal point of view. One fascinating feature of The X-Files is that week after week, Agent Scully, a physician, an extremely intelligent woman, never quite comes to accept Mulder’s paranormal and conspiracy beliefs.

Most commonly, the believer is a powerless, marginal person and often a woman; the skeptic is almost always a man (Hess 1993). In The X-Files these sex roles are reversed because the screenwriter and creator, Chris Carter, explicitly stated that he wanted to “flip” traditional sex stereotypes and make Mulder the believer and Scully the skeptic.

So, the populist, paranormalist, and conspiracy elements in The X-Files are expressed by: first, an anti-scientific viewpoint, that is, the view that traditional, established science is wrong, the laws of physics can be overturned, and the intuition of the common man and woman is right; second, a condemnation of government secrecy-it is opposed to the fact that the powers that be are withholding valuable information from the public and are harming us; and third, the hero, the outsider, the paranormal believer, discovers evidence that contradicts the official, dominant view, and attempts to unmask the conspiracy and empower the powerless, the common man and woman, by giving us this valuable information.

Of course, in The X-Files, the conspiracy couldn’t really be unmasked and the treachery couldn’t be defeated because it was an ongoing series and hence the same evil forces had to continue to do their machinations in episode after episode. There was no triumph, no resolution. The only triumph was the reality of the evidence that Mulder and Scully gathered. But, again, because the conspirators were so powerful and commanded such a huge arsenal of resources, that evidence had to be destroyed or taken away; hence, the triumph of getting their hands on the evidence was negated. The only true victory in The X-Files was the viewers’ knowledge of what really happened.

As a result, the triumph of the paranormal and conspiratorial views in The X-Files was only an intellectual and cognitive victory-not a political one. At the end of each show, the evil remained; only our view of the world changed. We know the truth, but the evil in our midst, it seems, will always abide.

References

• Fenster, Mark. 1999. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hess, David J. 1993. Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Erich Goode

Erich Goode is Visiting Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-8235, and the author of Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction.

Feb-16-2002
Cinescape
Underneath Too Painful To Air?
Daniel Wood

For those who have been following the upcoming episodes calendar closely, you will have noticed something curious about the forthcoming episode Underneath. It was originally slated to air in December (before 4-D, and then it was pushed back to air before Lord Of The Flies before being pulled altogether). It was rescheduled to January, then to February, then it was pulled from the calendar again and it is now set to air in the final week of March.

An anonymous source has seen a rough cut of the episode and has this to say of it:

“[Underneath] was pulled from the schedule because FOX had a lot of problems with it — quality problems. It was bad. I mean B-A-D, really bad, like Lord Of The Flies bad. This was a solo John Shiban script and word is that he was pretty much left to his own devices for it. He directed it too. But it was written at the time in between season nine preparations and Chris Carter’s re-arrival, so Carter wasn’t on the scene when it was written and even though he did a rough re-write it was pretty much left of the scrap heap. The first cut was reportedly incomprehensible. I think I saw the second or third cut, and it was a little better. Not really insulting or bad — just boring. It was like a season one Millennium episode, except for the fact that that show was comparatively Oscar material. Underneath is just plain silly. Parts of it reminded me of your basic run of the mill B-grade slasher horror flick. Like Valentine or Urban Legends, minus the mask. They try to give us some insight into Doggett’s past as a NYC cop but it just falls flat — there’s no real meat there. It’s all just facts and figures and no emotional involvement. The killer is boring, we’ve seen the “escaped killer goes after his captor” routine before. But aside from Shiban’s typically poor writing (he did have some good eps like SR 819 and yeah I liked Badlaa — but the bad far outweigh the good) his directing is shocking. I mean really bad. They had to order more re-shoot time than is usually allocated because there were a lot of shots and set-ups that Shiban just didn’t get. Like I said, the cut that I saw was hard to follow…you’d see poorly set-up shots of Doggett walking around a corner and then he’d walk around again…you know, really bad continuity between shots. The lighting was very good, though, except for the confrontation with the killer where it lost something. But I will tell you that it was so hard to follow and so badly directed that the network ordered for it to be re-worked into something a little different, more ‘basic’ and streamlined. We’ll see how it turns out. But that might give you some idea as to why there have been so many scheduling problems with it.”

You’ll have to judge for yourself when the episode airs on March 31.

May-16-2000
Hollywood Reporter

“X-Files” creator Chris Carter closed a deal late Monday with 20th Century Fox TV to return as executive producer of the Fox mainstay drama for one more season. “My preference is to shoot the show in Los Angeles, and I am currently working with the studio on that arrangement,” said Carter. With Carter now on board for an eighth season, contract renewal and lawsuit settlement negotiations with star David Duchovny are expected to go down to the wire, prior to Fox’s Thursday fall schedule unveiling in New York. In addition to settling his profit participation lawsuit against the studio, sources said Duchovny is negotiating for a big-bucks deal that would allow him to appear in six to nine episodes over the season. Co-star Gillian Anderson will return for a full season.

??-??-2000
The Cave’s X-Files Commentary Archives:  Encounters with the show
Title: Set report for the filming of the episode Fight Club
Author: bardsmaid

[Original article here]

Friday

I arrived about 9:30, assuming safe was better than sorry (the ‘event’ was to start about 11) and waited in line with some other fans. Luckily the arena where the filming is taking place is only four blocks or so from Globe Bearing (a time-warp, walk-into-the-past factory I occasionally have work-related reasons to visit… and with which I am in love for its rich, dark atmosphere, as those of you who know me well are already aware), so I had my route down cold before I ever started, a handy thing when I got around to leaving at 11 p.m.

Actually I parked in a big parking structure designated for XF parking and when I got on the elevator, a man got on with me and he asked me if I was going to the filming. I said yes and he said he’d gotten a last minute call; he appeared to be working security. So when we got to the street he herded me over to a waiting van for the two-block ride. I tried to explain I was just a fan, but he wasn’t particularly listening, so I got in and went with them. The interesting thing is that we were dropped off past security in the area where all the trailers are. Then, of course, I had to get out of there because I wasn’t about to go poking around and bugging people. So I found my way around to where fans were supposed to wait. Met a nice ‘Phile in line–Lia–and it turns out she’s heard of the Cave. So we stayed together. As it turns out, neither David or Gillian was there Friday, though they were both in attendance on Monday.

Anyway, finally we went in and were given little packets with release forms, a few basic instructions and a couple of little candy bars and we went inside to our seats. It’s set up as a WWF-style boxing arena, so the ring was in the middle and there were chairs around it in the lower area for the paid extras (stunt-type people.) We were in the bleachers, so to speak. We had a very nice crewperson assigned to us, Allison, who was our official guide and babysitter and even a ‘host’, as you might have on a TV show, to keep us entertained during the downtimes, because filming is very much a matter of hurry-up-and-wait. It can take a long time to set up a shot, either because cameras must be moved or because the director is conferring with the actors and hasn’t really blocked out that particular piece of action until they’re right there with him. Then eventually there are four to six takes of the scene…with downtimes and adjustments in between.

What really impressed me was the sheer number of people involved in the production. There were cameramen, of course, and people handling lighting and fog machines and other equipment, but in addition there were a lot of people standing around, most wired with walkie-talkies, etc. who appeared to be just watching sections of the arena to make sure things were going as they were supposed to and that the wrong people weren’t in places they weren’t supposed to be. I’ve heard there are about 100 crewpeople. There were people who seemed just to be standing guard over the wardrobe racks–all day–or other specific things. There were security people everywhere, too. And then of course people needed to be fed–including all approximately 300 of us fans who showed up, so there were more people doing food. Occasionally some crewperson would come by us with a big boxful of chip bags and toss chips out to us, or Hershey’s kisses, or something similar. (Made me realize what zoo animals might feel like, though everyone was really nice.) We had pizza and soda available for lunch, and then in the late afternoon there were munchies–hors d’oeuvres kinds of things: carrot sticks and celery and bread and dip and apples and bananas, bagels and Oreos, goldfish crackers, more Hershey’s kisses (must be a crew favorite), granola bars, etc. And soda or tea or coffee. And more pizza later for those who wanted more.

There’s a guy named Barry, a tall African-American man whose job title I haven’t connected with yet, who is essentially the emcee of what’s going on with the filming and I was really fascinated watching him do his job because he’s so perfectly suited to it. He carries a microphone and is in charge of quieting everyone down before filming starts, explaining things to cast or us ‘background artists’, relaying messages, and encouraging us to cheer louder or go for a sixth take on the same scene *with the same energy as the first five takes*, etc. And he does it so well. A very smooth, calming personality but one who demands that you do what you need to to get the work done. Barry is the one to announce ‘rolling’, at which time you’d better be quiet and listen for directions. As soon as he says ‘rolling’, you hear ‘rolling’ echoed back from crewmembers stationed throughout the auditorium, I suppose to make sure everyone, no matter what they’re up to, is alerted to the filming being done. There’s, of course, ‘cut’ when the filming stops, and when they’ve gotten sufficient takes to choose from or get the one they know they really want to use, Barry announces, ‘we have that shot.’ By the end of the day, there’s a lot of cheering going on when ‘we have that shot’ is announced.

There were probably four cameras, one on a big rig with a long, telescoping boom, a couple on moveable carts or dollies, and a handheld one. Some shots are taken from just one angle, but others are taken from two or three, so all the action has to be done again and again to get the shots they need. The next to last shot of the day was in the wrestling ring, a close-up with three cameras shooting and two crewmembers lying on the mat right next to the actors but out of camera-range. I know I’ll snicker over that one when I see it on TV, where of course it will look like just two contestants on the mat but I’ll know those other two guys were lying right there beside them and when the wrestler in red dives for the ropes, he had to be very careful to avoid squashing them on the way.

We were in charge of cheering and making the stands look full. Since there weren’t enough of us to fill the auditorium, we were moved around from place to place according to where we needed to be seen. Sometimes we had to cheer and encourage the wrestlers, and sometimes we had to do the motions without any sound because the actors were speaking lines we would have drowned out. So we had to be silent and do our thing and later they add the noise back into the background. A little difficult to keep up that beginning-of-the-fight energy level after a number of takes, but we did pretty well and Barry always told us when we were doing a good job. For some reason, right at the end the energy level was really high. Maybe we were all just ready to wrap and go, but in any event everyone worked hard.

Our group of fans included a lot of college kids. A group had come from UC Davis, but there were local people, of course, and one girl who had flown here from Ohio just to come to this filming. There were also international fans who must have been in the L.A. area, including four guys from Norway, a girl from Sweden and a French Canadian from Montreal. The Davis girls made up trivia questions, and people who got the right answers won XF T-shirts. There were other prizes raffled off during the day as well (a raffle ticket was in each person’s envelope.) Prizes included Discmans, boom boxes, a VCR, and even a Palm Pilot and a TV. Some people chatted during downtimes, some were busy with the trivia contests (everything from “what is A.D. Skinner’s middle name?” to “can you repeat Scully’s half-a-cream-cheese-bagel monologue from *Bad Blood?”…and of course the ingredients topping the famous pizza.) A fog machine was going the entire time to give the arena that smoky look. The floors were laced with big, bundled bunches of thick power cords hidden in traffic areas under little…hmmm…thingies so you wouldn’t trip over them, and there were a lot of lights around that we were warned to stay away from because you could easily be burned. I found it interesting just to watch what was going on downstairs and to try to figure out what people were actually doing when it often looked like a lot of them were just standing around doing…well, not much. But they all had to be there for a reason; I just–obviously–was a clueless bystander.

At the beginning I wasn’t sure whether I’d stay all day because, as I said, a lot of the time is downtime, but it was interesting–definitely an education. So I did stay till the very end and was glad I did, though everyone was tired by then. I don’t know how this crew does it on a regular basis–starting at 6 a.m. and regularly running until ten or midnight…day after day after day. Really amazing that they don’t burn out a lot sooner than they do.

The last scene of the day was one that took a lot of setup time–probably close to an hour, and involved two women standing on a mark without moving for nearly forty-five minutes. I sat there thinking, no way would squirmy me be able to pull that off. There was lots of measuring with measuring tapes and other adjustments. It involves two similar-looking women, one of whom walks up to and recognizes the other. The characters are supposed to be twins, so I think in the end they’re going to shoot and then digitally replace one with a copy of the other and that had something to do with the close tolerances in preparation. That was a shot that was done at least six times, but finally–finally–they got what they wanted.

We were all tired by the end, but it was really interesting, so I’m hot to go down again on Monday when we’re promised that David and Gillian will be there all day. While the technical part of filming was interesting in and of itself, I don’t want to miss the chance to see David and Gillian at work.

I don’t think I’ll ever look at another episode in quite the same way after this. So much time and the involvement of so many people is necessary to put one of these things together that it’s amazing that the story, which always comes through so strongly, isn’t lost in the process. How the actors keep that continuity going in their minds through this stop-and-go-and-wait-and almost-and wait-and-go process is beyond me…but then that’s the opinion of a prose writer who gets to do the whole story process herself.
…………….
Monday

Well, here I am, back again, your faithful if tired reporter…

Monday’s crew of ‘background artists’ was a little bigger than Friday’s, no doubt because of the surety that David and Gillian would be there. We had about 500 ‘Philes as opposed to the 300 who were there on Friday. Lots of college kids again, but many others, including a high school teacher who’d somehow wrangled the day off, people from scattered places around the country including Ohio, Colorado and Greenwich, Connecticut (she won a T-shirt by popular demand just for coming from Teena Mulder’s hometown) and a woman from Italy and two from Australia who had flown in just to come to the filming. Two South Africans, too, who are now living and working in Boston, and the four Norwegians were back.

The routine was more of the same. Amazing to realize that two entire days were taken up with filming what will probably not be more than five minutes of air time when the episode finally hits TV screens (Barry, who I discovered is actually the first assistant director, told us *Fight Club should be airing May 7th.) There were more scenes of fights breaking out in the stands (that involved all of us–some people really got into the role) or us just being background and cheering on the wrestlers while some of the story’s characters meet down on the floor outside the ring. The story involves doppelgangers, twins who create chaos around them when they come into close proximity. Morning started with a scene where two female twins encounter each other outside the wrestling ring. Mulder has been chasing one of them and when he realizes they’re both there and what will inevitably happen around them, he picks up the one girl and hurries her off to get her out of range of the other. David did a lot of takes picking up the actress and carrying her away past the ring; it reminded me of his comments about having to do a lot of carrying and lifting of Gillian when they were filming *FTF. After one take, instead of putting her down he turned around and carried her right back to the starting point, which brought a laugh from everyone in the auditorium. Between takes he’d talk to people around him, or sit in his director’s chair, or once he sat down in the seats where the paid extras sat, outside the ring, and just watched what was going on around him as if he were nobody in particular. One time he spent a good half hour deep in conversation with Tex Cobb, who plays the wrestler who is also one of a pair of these explosive twins. David was on the set both morning and afternoon and Gillian came on to do a scene in the afternoon.

When I think about what we watched/experienced, the things that stand out to me are the vast numbers of people involved in production, the long stretches of downtime while cameras are moved and adjusted and scenes are blocked out and rehearsed and sometimes tape-measured repeatedly to get just what they need distance-wise, and what it must be for the actors to be working a job like this for an extended period–that was the principal thing I pondered Monday. David arrived to cheering in the morning, but after an initial greeting to the audience went right to work and didn’t look up into the stands again. The mere idea of being one person, a human being who can get lost in a crowd of other human beings as if he were nobody in particular, being treated as if he were a god, watched and talked about and occasionally squealed over…and having to be accompanied by security in case some wacko gets out of hand…must be completely overwhelming, and very constricting as well. He can’t just go up and talk to one person without having to talk to 50, or 150, so the only choice is to block it all out and stick to your job. Obviously, this is one man you’ll notice in a crowd, but it took a while of watching before I realized that what was just a little ‘off’ for me was (duh!) that I was watching David, and while Mulder is a very familiar quantity to me, David isn’t. So of course there weren’t all those little Mulder mannerisms we’ve gotten so used to seeing this man exhibit for us on the show. Okay, so this isn’t anything earth-shattering, or shouldn’t be, but it’s what hit me in watching…

Gillian arrived to do a scene that placed her about 8 seats away from me. She comes down an aisle with the wrestler’s twin in handcuffs and when her captive recognizes his twin in the ring and breaks the cuffs, chaos breaks out in the stands and spectators begin brawling. They’d stationed stunt people along the edges of the aisle Gillian was to come down and the rest of us were doing our thing from our respective seats. The scene was set up (over an extended period of time) with Gillian’s body double, so they could get the distance and angles, etc., set up. But finally Gillian herself came up, flanked by security. People who have seen her in person always remark about how tiny she actually is in person, so I was ready for that…or at least, I thought I was. But folks, she really *is* tiny! Especially impressive when I stopped to think that she’s smaller than my own daughter, who’s a pretty small person to begin with; that brings it home. On the first take we ‘background artists’ and the stunt people were so vigorous in our duties that Barry called ‘cut!’ very early on, because people were so far into the aisles that the camera couldn’t see Gillian at all. Every time she came walking down the aisle, though, even afterward (well, from my vantage point as I was ‘brawling’ with Lia, who sat next to me) it seemed like Gillian might be crushed by the goings-on. I would have liked to see Gillian and David actually standing next to each other in person to see what the height/size disparity would be. Gillian, too, was forced to keep strictly to her work, though you could tell she wanted to greet people (again, if she started with saying hi to just one person it would have become an avalanche of greetings), though when she was finished (I was downstairs getting a soda), I could hear her thanking the fans for coming and evidently she signed some autographs, too, before she had to leave.

Amazing to consider what it must take to stay in character and focused on the story itself and the characters’ moods and motivations when it’s filmed in such small snippets of time over long, wearying days…and sometimes not even in sequential order. And to have to act in the middle of this herd of people around you doing their jobs and block it all out as if it weren’t there. I’m sure shooting on the lot is a little more intimate than being in an auditorium with 500 fans as well as lots of extras, but still there have to be a lot of crew around. Imagine if you were trying to do that final *all things scene with dozens of people and cameras and lights and equipment around you. My hat is off to David and Gillian even more than before, especially considering the depth of characterization they give us. Too cool.

I must say I learned a lot about production in the two days I spent on the set, and found myself with a lot of questions to ponder, and things to consider. Amazing to see a lot of other fans and realize that many of them are (gasp) typical TV show fans, up on show trivia and collecting pictures or magazine and collecting autographs, while I’m used to the Cave crowd, where what we find so compelling is the stories themselves and the characters and characterizations. (Scary to think that when you say you’re a fan of TXF, people are going to see you as one of those… well, other people–the autograph seekers, the typical TV show fan.)

In the end, though, as the Bard said, “The play’s the thing.” It’s where the substance is, and it’s the center around which all this other interesting busyness revolves.