It’s Ten Thirteen! Happy 69th birthday, Chris Carter! For the opportunity, I am posting the analysis of a long-form interview with him that came out in July: Chris Carter on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton. Lots of talk on #TheXFiles, how the TV production business works from the inside, discussions of the intersection of mysticism and science, and also unexpected insights on aspects of the mythology that Carter keeps thinking about. The whole thing bathing in Paul Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue” (heard on Millennium)!

I’ll focus on The X-Files’ future first.

Throughout the interview, Carter talks of a big idea he had for the mythology, that he hinted at especially in the last episode. He comes back to that again and again throughout the interview, which is impressively and obsessively insisting on one specific thing in an otherwise wide-ranging interview: he really sounds as if he wants somebody to figure this out, and he wants to continue developing the mythology further in the future. Here are all the mentions of this big idea throughout the interview, [along with my comments]:

• About putting a clue in the last episode for what would come next: “I just thought TXF would go on forever.” “The story goes on in my mind.” [It’s never over! I guess the ideas keep coming as long as the creative mind continues to think about them.]
• About Coogler’s series reboot project: “He’s got something to deal with he’s not aware of yet”. [It feels quite…self-important to pretend that your ideas have to be inserted in another person’s project, but this is really what Carter is saying here: Coogler might have his ideas, but Carter is imposing his own. I don’t know how receptive Coogler would be to that: he already has to balance many things, let alone loose threads from over thirty years of legacy mythology. Cynically, perhaps this is a way for Carter to re-insert himself in TXF’s future after being sidelined, or after distancing himself from show business for a few years.]
• The 4 My Struggle episodes “continue to be largely misunderstood”. In them, “I developed possibly what is the biggest idea that TXF ever posited”. [Big words!]
• “Scully’s character will come to know shortly something that will not only change the course of her life, career, biology, but the course of all of our lives, and for generations to come. It’s a big idea that I built in. I laid it out sparingly, cryptically, vaguely. At the very end I laid in a clue that to this day, 4 years later, no one has figured out. I’m really looking forward to the revelation.” [More like 7 years since season 11 already, Chris! It sounds as if this is an idea that would break completely new ground, disconnected from earlier mythology, with a before and after. And it is connected to Scully’s biology and the alien DNA that she carries.]
• His definition of the Syndicate: it was “in league with the aliens, with the colonists, and what the aliens have plans for”, related to this big idea he has. [He doesn’t talk of the aliens’ plans as something of the past or something that was a smokescreen for a human conspiracy, and he still uses “colonists” as a descriptive for the aliens: so whatever the revival seasons did, it was not a complete erasure of the colonization mythology of the first 9 years. Unless of course he compartmentalizes in his mind between what was true at one point in the series and what is not any more, but that sounds like a stretch.]
• That big idea, “part of that…”: he goes on about an ongoing discussion with his physicist brother about existence, about whether we are creating or discovering math. “We are discoverers” and math is a way to describe the universe, or the universe itself. A higher power, God, mother nature, an intelligence created math. Same way that Rachmaninov was discovering his music. We are the filter through which we discover the universe. So back to his idea, “I want to take it a large step further: there’s this idea of the music of the spheres, the planets are in alignment and it’s a musical chord of sorts, we are seeing a shape of our solar system that may predict the shapes of everything else in our universe.” “I wonder if every potentiality, every possibility, is out there, and we are living our lives based on our finding the best potential outcomes.” “The universe has some kind of beauty to it like that. That’s what the aliens know.” “They know things that we don’t know.” [This harmony of the spheres philosophy goes all the way back to pythagoreanism and the Renaissance and beyond. Here it is mixed with platonism‘s ideas about the nature of reality. Carter mixes mysticism with science, as a creative mind is wont to do. He posits that the future is just another point in the timeline that can be read if one learns how to do that, and even influenced if one has the proper tools. As superior mysterious beings, aliens have knowledge that is inaccessible to us and operate in mysterious ways.]
• Science advisor Anne Simon was the daughter of one of Dori’s long-time friends, she gave Carter the science in The Erlenmeyer Flask, which figures in this big idea of his. [So it has something to do with alien DNA, the extra nucleotides, experiments with an alien virus inside a bacteria.]

[So what is this big idea and what is this clue? I have offered ideas every time Carter has hinted at this before. It could be William having life-giving capabilities and having a role in Scully’s new miraculous pregnancy. It could be the final shot of William smiling at the fact that he and Scully and Mulder can go on living without the weight of the fate of the world on their shoulders. Here Carter is more specific (but also vague, as is typical!). The revival seasons’ mythology prominently features the idea that alien DNA has been inserted in the human genome, and that this is creating mutations that can be used for nefarious purposes (by the CSM) or for good (Scully’s vaccine against the Spartan virus, but also Sveta’s ability to read minds, or even the super-human abilities shown by the children of Founder’s Mutation and by William/Jackson. Humanity is becoming a hybrid, to the point that Scully has nightmares that her child might become alien (Founder’s Mutation dream) or even herself (My Struggle 2 teaser). Taking this further, we could have more and more humans with additional abilities thanks to alien DNA — an X-Men-like situation laid out in the novel Perihelion. Another more subtle situation would be humans gaining insights into the nature of reality. William emerges from the water (reminiscent of a baptism or a rebirth) with his bullet wound standing as a third eye that has been awakened, seeing possibilities. What were Scully’s visions (the entirety of My Struggle 2) but a vision of a possible future by William? With those visions, William gave Scully the tools to prevent a global pandemic. What was My Struggle 4 but William’s manipulation of events in order to prevent his own visions of the future where he himself was being used by the CSM and of the CSM executing Mulder? Throughout the revival’s mythology, William has been exploring the universe and adjusting it so as to obtain a desired future; perhaps we are seeing just the final iteration of several attempts. William was the end product of a long line of experiments that can be traced back to the origins of the Syndicate, an attempt for humans to gain access to mysterious forbidden knowledge. Perhaps the aliens themselves, the ultimate mystics, are even behind the entire attempt to prod humans to experiment, in a long game of evolutionary uplifting. The next step could be Scully, and others, gaining such a reality-adjusting capability, or part of William’s capability. A capability previously reserved only to the aliens, which would be several steps ahead of us, perceiving reality, refining it, planning for their desired outcome. What the aliens’ plans with us could be is the ultimate mystery.]

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The whole of the interview is rich with detail and information about who Carter is as a creative person, how he built his career, what his inspirations, how he works as an artist. Definitely worth a listen. Here are my notes:

Early years:

• How he met his wife Dori, via a surfer friend Mark, and how they got to be together 43 years ago
• Dori encouraged him to become a screenwriter. Jeff Katzenberg read his second script, got hired. That script was “Bad O”, a Ghostbusters-like comedy. His first script got him in the door. He got a 3-movie deal. He said yes to everything, to get experience. He did TV work, Disney Sunday movies, did a movie with Dori, filmed a pilot with NBC. He realized he couldn’t only write to have control over his work, but be a producer. He could have worked on Michael Mann shows, but the family comedy Rags to Riches show was a opportunity on how to be a producer, he got to work with all departments. Then he got hired by Peter Roth to write pilots for Fox.

Inspirations and the TXF pilot:

• He pitched TXF to Bob Greenblatt (who wrote a chapter about that in his memoir [The Rockford Files, published in 2023]). He included numbers in his pitch on how many believe in the alien abduction phenomenon, from a study that he got from a psychologist friend. He wrote a detailed 18 page outline. A lot of scenes took place in forests. Vancouver was suggested. He had been in Vancouver in 1984 with Dori for a film of hers, he had seen the forests. They were late shooting the pilot, they got the last people to hire. The only note from the studio was that there was not enough sexual tension (in the mosquito bites scene). Story of the Rupert Murdoch screening.
• Inspirations: He played sports with Brandon Tartikoff of NBC, Tartikoff helped Carter out, Carter suggested him a Kolchak-like show, he didn’t buy it. Carter read about FBI investigating satanic rituals. He went to UFO conventions, those helped shaped the stories a lot.
• He had a clear idea of the characters and the mood before casting or shooting. The pilot fits with his vision.
• He developed a “look book” about what the series was going to be, with photos, episode descriptions, just as extra marketing material for the pitch.
• Sandy Grushow, marketing at Fox, was sure that Adventures of Brisco County was to be the success; TXF was just the lead-in.
• Did a screening to get audience reactions. Painful, but it was a revelation about how storytelling is a sequence of tension and release.

On science:

• He had a meeting with Foster Gamble of the Thrive Movement to discuss free energy devices. Interested, but the devices never showed up.
• He has a brother scientist at MIT. He corrected one thing in the pilot script: instead of “time is a universal constant”, “invariant”.
• “I think of science as the search for God. We are going to find God through our search for things like quantum physics.” 
• They tried to be meticulous with the science. Plenty of examples where they had science fiction which became fact afterwards, like cloning and Dolly the sheep, or My Struggle 2 and the pandemic.

Making the show:

• The reason for the success was Mulder and Scully: their relationship and their characters. There was both sexual tension and respect.
• When he was still unknown he called the FBI for information. Later when TXF was successful, he got called in to Quantico, got “the Jodie Foster treatment”, had many secret friends at the FBI.
• He’s most proud of affecting people’s lives, of the Scully effect.
• “My success is hiring a group of smart people”, to write and develop the show.
• They tried not to show the aliens, the plan was to keep them unseen for 5 years; but all the rules were broken, they saw one on the first episode of season 2.
• Advice from Rick Carter, who read the pilot script right after Amazing Stories had been cancelled: to put the scary stuff in the shadows, makes the experience more cinematic, the imagination is scarier than what you saw.
• When Gillian got pregnant, executives wanted to fire her, it was a fork in the road, he insisted to keep her and work around it.
• It was great to be at the Friday night time slot. His autobiography will be called “Fridays at 9”.
• The many work hours he poured in was not micro management, it was an obsession with the success of the show. But it was not a healthy way to live your life.
• Glen Morgan would go read reactions on the internet forums more than Carter.
• Fans are mostly women, because of the M-S relationship.
• During season 1 he got a letter from woman fan with encouraging criticism, which convinced him what to focus on for what came next. He named a character after her in the season 1 finale. [Mentioned in his 2023 commentary to the episode, that was Dr. Berube.]
• The Vancouver personnel was completely invested in the show, he loved that esprit de corps.
• The writer/director of Risky Business [Paul Brickman] gave Carter high praise for a writer called Vince Gillian, years before he expressed interest in the show.

About the mythology:

• “The mythology was really the way to deal with Mulder and Scully’s relationship, among other things” [One doesn’t exist without the other, I say!]
• After the movie, “the stories almost start telling themselves, because you’ve laid down so much foundation that the shape of the building is dedicated to what you’ve already laid out”.
• Spotnitz and Carter were “the keepers of that faith”, “the keepers of the mythology”.
• The Black Oil was his idea: oil is a fuel we use every day, it predates us, it was fitting that there would be something alien living in it. [I wish this allegorical dimension had been more developed.]
• The Syndicate is “above top secret”, they are still part of the government but a separate entity. [This clarification is useful, as at some point it seemed like the Syndicate was a completely private independent entity; but it still is part of a governmental conspiracy in Carter’s mind.]
• He loved Karl Ove Knausgard’s books, he decided to do 4 episodes inspired by them. [The 4 My Struggles.]
• William is described as “Mulder and Scully’s son, they had a baby together”. [Despite many backs and forths on this, we should understand that the CSM only contributed to William’s creation but is not his father, but still that William somehow thinks of the CSM as his father?…]

The movies:

• Duchovny pressed to do a movie, otherwise he would go do something else.
• How he describes the first movie: it was about experiments and a “natural component” via a virus, and abductees held in an underground base.
• The second movie had one third of the budget of the first. The studio said they wanted a PG-13 movie; it was a hard lesson to learn that PG ratings for movies are less permitting than in TV, many edits and back and forths. Hence the upcoming director’s cut.

Some more things about Carter:

• He hasn’t quite experienced the supernatural, but he’s experienced kismet, serendipity, déjà vu…
• He still watches All The President’s Men every year.
• Carter admires Kurt Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses, it read like what he was writing about for decades in the show, about processes changing society over decades and carefully drawn out plans by certain people. Andersen’s book The Real Thing was a big influence on him. Story about comments Carter made about the Emmy awards in the 1990s and an article about that by Andersen on the New York Times; Carter called him to make amends, and quoted him with a haiku of his to show his admiration.
• Tad O’Malley was based on Alex Jones. He got a call from Jones, who invited him on his show.
• With his wife they decided to watch the entire show from start two years ago. He has forgotten many things about making the show, in many ways it was like watching it for the first time.
• In the Vancouver years he usually watched the show at home with his wife, or during season 5 in a Vancouver bar with colleagues.
• He remembers watching Apocalypse Now in a theater, getting a jump scare at a tiger; then going to the theater to watch it again, to watch the audience reaction at the jump scare. He realized how powerful cinema is.
• He resisted the denomination “science fiction”, he went with Spielberg’s “speculative science”.
• TXF is a political show.
• 9/11 was a “very important turning point in the history of planet Earth”
• Is it possible that TXF is actually non fiction? “Yes it’s possible.”