This is some of my recent work, posted here for general interest. Contents
will change regularly.
These should not be regarded as the final and definitive versions of any
poems, essays or stories. I may revise them at any time.
Have fun.
Soldiers and stones by the river of our bad dreams,
and deep in the warm night the water in our bones
makes us too beautiful to endure.
We send these bright rags and tatters, torn from our hearts
into the darkness, the rich waves, the black light.
I know that everything, in the end,
must go from my hands into this river
from this fragile lantern of my skin
asking why we are all so perfect and blind
what our bodies look like in the dark
as our bad imaginations manufacture time.
In the dreams of hate too many real bones are breaking open, spilling
water and blood and marrow on the hot streets, too many
real shattered beautiful girls are falling. The world explodes
like a day in summer. Make gentle the souls of the dead.
The living are walking, one by one, down metal stairs, down sand
light in our living hands
night in our living eyes.
I am a bad thought at dawn, my fingers clenched
in the morning's line of fire, believing more
in rain and darkness. My feet in wet sand
by a broken boat, wrapped in the water's green smell
I believe them now, these walking flames.
Wash the bad names from this river
rock in our small arms the hungry ghosts
in their lost places of velvet and lead, all our poor hearts.
We let go our holy things
scraps of bright hair, language, apples
fall into darkness
fall
the most lovely wounded creatures in the world.
Darkness, this vertical street.
Nervous and cold, insistent, we pass by shoulders
in silver light and hard whispers, here in the cloud, St Denys' corner
drawn by our different desires into the night.
We are all raw with needing
flesh or love or faith or information, in
the bands of neon and the doorways
the dark on our hands.
And on the island, trees turn to music.
Some metaphorical, fierce and shining bird
an eagle in an old text, crying for immortality
skids over the river, into the sun, into the water
into fire and resurrection, brilliant, wild.
We lean on a stone bridge, surrounded by flashing lights,
and the air smells of leaves and chocolate.
We are always in flight, through archways and passages
stairways and waves of light, as directing
my eyes over this river
I implicate words, trying to make it that simple,
that pure, just as it is.
My dear, all days and nights are dangerous, while the sun
etches our outlines on stone, while the streets
are nervous with nylon and silk, while we carry
bread and cheese and grapes in our hands,
the dazzle of small silver knives.
We cannot be still or safe, the accidents
of time and God pulling us into the darkness
here, absolute and guilty, as we stand.
Love traps us in chronology, but only this
is also our escape, this discipline of surrender, this
most painful knowledge. The water within us seeks a freedom
beyond our understanding.
We open our hands and breathe.
The body, dangerous, white, tangled
in wires and succulent leaves, the body
starved, manufactured, sexual, present,
coated with gold
I float at the edge of the cliff, I
lie on the sand, the body, naked, obsessive, bald
I bury myself in the garden, by cactus
under dangling globes of fruit. Red
the girl paints her lips, her nipples, covers her eyes
leans her soft flesh on the bars of the window
poses, mouth wet, limbs random
her head falling down
I did not tell you to do this
I did not ask you to do this
The sea is sick with green, the petals
of the thick sea convulse with green, someone will take
this girl, my mask, my lover
please do not hurt
********
In the days when I was invisible. When
I did not need safety, being untouched
and luminous in my bones
This is the acolyte
this is the narrow escape of the camera, blood-serious lips
this is the thin place
the times of the china doll
but the body surrounds us all in the end
being empty of sense or mercy
and binds us in golden
binds us in cutting thread
One of these days
I will write about needles
********
In the end we can never survive
despite the temporary
rescues, a cloth coat, an ordinary woman
so there is no reason to fear the day
you do what you must
And I am not brave, my love, only imprisoned
only
near the pale stone and the light
near your hand
near the shore
********
This face, then, jewelled
cannot be opened or eaten, this
man is mistaken, this
muscle and sleek skin are not
his to take
Sleep is not possible, but it is not
forbidden. Thick with gold paint
and artificial hair,female
I wait (she waits) in the dirt
in the cupboard
for only this time
*********
You have to lose everything
for one good thing to come out of this body
Thin flames of crackling paper surround
a dance on the seawall
these aging legs, faster than childhood
The happiest moments of my life
are when I lie
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
lasers in the jungle somewhere
staccato signals of constant information
a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires ...
-- Paul Simon, 'The Boy in the Bubble'
In my late teens and early twenties, I used to fall frequently into conversation
with strangers on intercity buses and trains. Surprisingly often, at some
point in the discussion, the other person would inform me that they had
more or less given up on the human race, but retained the hope that the
extraterrestrials would soon be coming to save us before we could blow
up the world. In fact, a lot of perfectly sensible and intelligent people
seemed to hold this opinion and were prepared to discuss it seriously with
others.
It was also a motif I came across over and over in sci-fi books and comics
(although, artists being what they are, the aliens in these stories tended
to only just fail to save the human race, due to our stubborn perversity).
In those, somehow more innocent, days it did not seem odd for the extraterrestrials
to be filling in for divine intervention. Perhaps it was a remnant of the
optimism and fantasy of the Sixties, but for whatever reason, extraterrestrials
were permitted a benign and indeed superior moral status, coming to warn
or to save us from our self-inflicted doom.
The benign aliens' profile in popular culture probably hit an all-time
high with ET and Close Encounters, though their salvific function in these
movies was somewhat vague and diffuse. But somewhere along the line the
picture started to alter. The modern extraterrestrial (so to speak) is
not the old Bug-Eyed Invading Horde, but neither is it particularly benign.
It has acquired a fairly distinct and recognisable face, easily rendered
as a short-hand sketch, but it has moved into a very blurry and ambiguous
moral ground. And perhaps nowhere is that ground more ambiguous than in
the phenomonally popular X-Files.
Now, I will admit right from the beginning that I am a fan. I have
watched the television series regularly since the very first episode aired
in Britain. I also read the X-Files comic books, and possess an X-Files
t-shirt and an X-Files mug and an X-Files calendar, as well as both the
Official and Unofficial Guides. It is one of the first things my sister
and I have had in common in the past thirty years.
Like many fans, however, I find it difficult to give any sensible or coherent
reason for my fascination with the show. A loose canvass of a number of
friends who watch it regularly yielded answers ranging from "It's
scary," to "David Duchovny never has any facial expression at
all. I get a real kick out of that," neither of which seems sufficient
to account for the sort of fierce loyalty they feel for this show specifically.
My own answer tends to be "I like to watch for the plot discrepancies",
but of course there are quite a lot of television shows I could watch for
plot discrepancies. And I don't. It seems that the X- Files is hitting
a cultural nerve sufficiently deep that it is not possible to recognise
immediately.
Obviously this nerve has a lot to do with paranoia. Getting back to the
changing moral status of aliens -- not only is there an agreed sketch of
the "alien" face easily available, there is a fairly widely agreed
meaning to that sketch, and the meaning is paranoia. That face is staring
at you, and its motives are unclear, and its eyes are huge. That face
may or may not have appeared in your bedroom at night, and may or may not
have taken you away and done mysterious things to you that partly resemble
surgery and partly resemble sex, and you may or may not have forgotten
all about it. (It may or may not have done the same thing to Brian Mulroney
and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, but that is somewhat of
a side issue.) Or maybe you have forgotten something else entirely ....
The "alien abductions" which vanish from memory have replaced
all other Close Encounters as these had replaced UFO sightings, and have
some strangely disturbing resonances. Another writer has suggested to me
that many of these "recovered memories" of abductions are in
fact half- recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Certainly, as
one of the stronger myths of the culture at the moment, they indicate a
high level of fear and, perhaps even more, uncertainty. The abductors can
never be clearly identified as good guys or bad guys. In fact, we don't
really have much idea why they do the things they do. The things they do
to us.
People who use the alien face more self-consciously tend to use it almost
as a heiroglyph of paranoia. I have here, for instance, a book of strange
and unsettling black and white cartoons incorporating particularly stylised
versions of the Face and the UFO into line-drawings of a person eating,
the assassination of JFK, a person in the bath, a person prostrate in the
road, people in cubicles, mazes, wandering between buildings marked "heat",
"gold", "sleep", "flesh", "fear".
In fact, the drawings are largely composed of the Face and the UFO ...
or, as the postscripts says, "they are BIGGER THAN YOU and that is
why YOU MUST LOVE THEM ... You can relax in the tub while they torture
you and enter your dreams ... No, it isn't about the aliens, it's about
the humans."
At the moment someone is painting alien eyes on advertisements in Toronto
bus shelters. The important thing about this is that I, and many others,
not only require no explanation to identify them as alien eyes, we also
require no explanation to understand that the intended message is that
advertising manipulates your mind.
The alien face, handled in the right way, can almost effortlessly stand
for any range of forces directing us in ways we may or may not want to
go. The first part of what the X- Files has accomplished is that it has
done just this, built a grand mechanism of paranoia around the alien face
that gradually turns into our own.
In case there's anyone who doesn't know the story -- the improbably named
Fox Mulder, Special Agent for the FBI, is toiling away in the basement
over "unexplained cases", convinced that the government is covering
up evidence of the existence of UFOs; he is largely motivated in this by
his belief that his own sister, Samantha, was abducted by aliens some twenty
years previously. Special Agent Dana Scully is assigned to work with him,
with the original intention that she should debunk his work. Since Special
Agent Scully is, at the age of twenty-eight, both a medical doctor and
an expert in theoretical physics, this seems not only an insult to her
but a bit of overkill; but in any case the plan backfires as she becomes
increasingly convinced that there may be something to Mulder's theories.
The first step is to win the viewer over in the same way that Scully is
to be won over -- if not to a full belief in the existence and activities
of aliens, at least to the point of admitting that there's some pretty
weird shit out there. If the show had left it at that, and simply sent
the agents chasing assorted paranormal phenomena around the country for
the next few seasons, it would have been entertaining but unremarkable.
However, within the first few episodes another set of hints began to appear.
Very slowly and cleverly, the extraterrestrial theme was undermined from
within, until finally, after a rather brilliant plot explosion at the end
of the second season, it was no longer necessary to postulate the existence
of aliens at all. The real truth, we are permitted although not directed
to believe, may be that the government, working in cooperation with Nazi
scientists, has been performing "tests" on humans since the 1940s,
involving genetic engineering and maybe more, linked to a mysterious organisation
(or something) called Purity Control. Subjects of the tests in the recent
past have included maximum security prisoners, Vietnam-era soldiers, the
animal population of a zoo in Idaho, and entire small communities in Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania, not to mention Samantha Mulder, and Dana Scully herself.
The conspiracy -- the people who are perhaps the final face hiding behind
the alien face -- is capable of both actual exercises of power, and mental
manipulation on a scale of which real-world governments, and even advertisers,
can only dream.
It is permissible to believe, within the terms of the show, that the reason
Mulder's investigations have never been stopped is that, with his belief
in UFOs, he is in fact planting the government's red herrings for them
(although it is also permissible to believe that aliens do still figure
in the plot somewhere, if only as a source of DNA for the experiments).
As of the time I'm writing this, Mulder and Scully continue to struggle
along attempting to determine what is going on with all this, and not getting
a great deal closer.
Along the way, and providing breaks from the tortuous plotting of the UFO
episodes, our heroes encounter an assortment of werewolves, children possessed
by the devil, genetic mutant serial killers, giant flukeworms and deadly
fungi; against which they have a rather mediocre record, rarely succeeding
in resolving a case and sometimes managing to leave everyone worse off
than they were to begin with -- it is in this way a peculiarly post-modern
kind of adventure show. These cases, though not necessarily part of the
grand conspiracy, almost always involve someone in authority performing
some kind of cover-up.
The relevance of all this is fairly clear in the case of the United States,
where a significant part of the population does believe (not without some
justification) that the government is run behind the scenes by a loose
affiliation of millionaires and billionaires involved in any variety of
evil conspiracies. The show's creator Chris Carter reports that "the
thing that was amazing to me in the test marketing was that, to a man [sic],
everyone believed that the government was conspiring."
This kind of belief can cut both ways. Although the right-wing Media Research
Center has listed the X-Files among their top ten evil liberal tv shows,
America's right-wing militias are equally convinced that the government
really is involved in conspiracies, usually involving selling the United
States to World Government in the form of the United Nations, which has
a power in the minds of the extreme right that it signally lacks in the
real world. Noam Chomsky has a favourite riff at the moment, about the
people who write and tell him, in absolute seriousness, that they have
seen the Black Helicopters secretly conveying UN troops into the country
for a planned take-over.
Certainly "Trust No One" could suit the harshly individualist
worldview of the extreme right just fine (the Official Guide has volunteered
the interpretation that it really means "don't trust the government",
not "don't trust other people", but it doesn't necessarily have
to be read that way), and "The Truth is Out There" could really
mean just about anything. However, the show's third prominent slogan --
"I Want to Believe" -- wouldn't suit at all, being far too tentative,
vulnerable, and even offering a dose of self-doubt. It is basically a wimp
slogan, which I think is all to the good.
On balance, the X-Files does lean towards a sort of vaguely left libertarianism,
closer to Chomsky himself than to the Black Helicopter people. Given that
it is an American show that wants to stay on the air, this has to be planted
somewhat subtly, usually through throw-away lines and short scenes, but
all these throwaways -- about Gulf War Syndrome, about violence on television,
about legal abortion, what have you -- are entirely what one would expect
from the anti- authoritarian left. There's also, throughout the series,
a strong if somewhat conflicted underlying environmentalism, a sort of
ironic feminism, and, oddly, a very powerful aversion to smoking.
The underlying politics rise to the surface most distinctly in "Fresh
Bones", which tackles the genuinely controversial subject of the treatment
of Haitian refugees and is one of the few cases in which Mulder and Scully
actually score real points against the government and manage to save a
lot of people's lives (though once again the show plays it safe by making
sure that the refugees voluntarily prefer to return to Haiti). Primarily,
though, it is the fact that, when you get anywhere near the bottom of the
conspiracy, you don't find the UN plotting world domination; you find old
Nazis, conspiring with the US government, apparently to promote some kind
of -- probably racial -- "purity control". The right- wing conspiracy
theorists would be unlikely to consider that a very bad thing.
(For some reason not entirely transparent to people from other countries,
belief in UFOs in the United States seems to have a vague link with liberal
politics; Jimmy Carter is the only US president ever to have openly claimed
that he had seen a UFO. He also claimed to have survived an attack by a
killer rabbit, making him excellent material for some kind of X-Files cameo
...)
As a left-leaning anarchist myself, I confess I am fond of, and have a
terrible feeling of recognition for, the unkempt and socially retarded
"anarchists" who put in regular appearances, mostly as well-intentioned
victims who get too close to the truth (Max Fenig, Brad Wilczek), though
the Lone Gunmen, who I am sure have some relationship to Covert Action
Information Bulletin and Lies of Our Times, seem, aside from the late Kenneth
Soona, to be preserving themselves fairly well. (The show has a more ambiguous
relationship with eco- activists, who, though they usually turn out to
be right in the end, are invariably extremely personally unpleasant. This
may be based on experience.)
Of course most people in Canada, or Britain, or elsewhere, are unlikely
to have the same kind of literal belief that their government is involved
in grand evil conspiracies, though they may believe that the US government
is. The appeal of the X-Files outside its home country is rooted in a paranoia
slightly more generalised, probably a kind of diffuse distrust of big institutions
and societal structures.
The paranoia is not only about government. There is an intense fear of
AIDS bubbling just under the surface of many episodes; it is notable that
every single mysterious disease is described as either "a retrovirus",
or something that "attacks the immune system", or both, even
when the symptoms -- for instance, huge exploding pustules causing death
within 72 hours -- seem in no way to resemble immune suppression. AIDS
is explicitly mentioned once, in fact, when Mulder refuses to drink an
attractive vampire's blood; admittedly, this is not a common transmission
route, and he later goes on to have sex with her without the question being
raised. (Since the act is not actually shown, we are free to assume he
uses condoms, but it does seem like TV is passing up one more opportunity
to convey useful information and instead warning against promiscuous blood-drinking.)
However, the episode that seems to be really "about" AIDS is
"F. Emasculata", where the fairly clear implication is that a
pharmaceutical company - - "Pinck Pharmaceuticals" standing in
perhaps for Burroughs- Wellcome -- has, with government complicity, invented
the disease with the express intention of selling a lot more drugs.
Now, you can argue about whether fostering this kind of paranoia is politically
useful. In fact, I have had a long- standing problem with Noam Chomsky
and the CAIB line of argument for exactly this reason -- the belief that
everything that happens is cleverly engineered by the shadowy "loose
affiliation" or by the US government itself, is more likely to be
disempowering than inspiring; the cracks in the machine are just too small
to be worth it, and any effort at resistance is bound to be absorbed. To
a large extent this appears to be the message of the X-Files as well. Certainly
it's quite something for a TV show to go even so far; to more or less explicitly
present even a doomed resistance to the machine is really a bit of a feat.
However -- maybe just because I'm a fan -- I think there are other levels;
that the felt-meaning of the show is subtly different from the discursive
meaning.
We can start off from the observation that, although the show says "Trust
No One", that is clearly not what it means. In fact, most of it is
really about the desperate importance of trusting someone. Here we touch
upon the peculiar relationship between Mulder and Scully.
Now, it is fairly well known that a lot of people watch the X- Files every
week in order to see if Mulder and Scully are ever going to manage to get
into bed together (by the third year of the programme they are actually
being permitted a few brief moments of affectionate physical contact in
crisis situations). It is interesting, however, that the show has chosen
not to use the normal television conventions for unresolved sexual attraction
(the "volatile love-hate relationship", the significant glances,
etcetera; all things the writers seem to have experimented with and then
trashed). What has replaced these conventions is a degree of mutual dependency
that would, frankly, verge on the pathological if it were meant to be at
all realistic. The two of them spend an enormous amount of time reiterating
their trust in and reliance upon each other and nobody else, rarely making
a move without contacting the other person via mobile phone, and constantly
checking up on each other's well-being. Scully has a key to Mulder's apartment
and often drops in when concerned about him. Forcibly separated, they either
mope about and leave each other coded messages arranging secret meetings,
or, if quite deprived of the other's presence -- as when Scully vanishes
in an apparent alien abduction early in the second season -- resort to
having fairly unmotivated sex with vampires. It is all rather sweet and
adolescent, in a curious way. By the middle of the second season, after
the X-files have been closed and re-opened and Scully has returned, the
writers also begin milking the word "partner" for every bit of
ambiguity and intensity they can squeeze from it.
On the feeling level of the show it matters -- it matters a lot - - that
Mulder and Scully trust each other absolutely. This matters a lot more
than whether they are ever going to go to bed; it matters enough that if
their trust failed, the whole show (and, by implication, the whole within-the-show
world) would fall apart. In fact, in the better episodes the mechanism
of suspense has little to do with whether they are going to be killed (we
know they aren't), or whether they are going to solve their case (they
often don't, and we really don't care); it has to do with how far their
trust and dependency can be stretched, and if there is a breaking point.
That it what really captures the audience's emotions.
Now, it is not necessarily useful or progressive to replace "Trust
No One" with "Trust No One Except One Best Friend". But
in fact, a debate about trust runs through the show. It is notable that
Mulder, the originator of the slogan, is a remarkably trusting and guileless
individual at heart; challenged by Scully about this at one point, he tells
her, "I changed it to 'Trust Everyone'. Didn't I tell you?" This
does seem to be a more accurate reflection of his actual behaviour. Chris
Carter has suggested that "Trust No One" is actually a slogan
more likely to be invented by person who has "a tremendous hope that
you can trust someone."
And after the context of paranoia has been established, we are surprised
to discover that there are a significant number of people out there in
whom our heroes can, and must, place some degree of trust. It seems certain
that you can trust no institutions; but even quite deep within those
institutions you may find someone like Assistant Director Skinner, who
is trustworthy up to a fairly advanced point.
Indeed, in the most crucial episodes -- such as the three-part 'Anasazi'/'Blessing
Way'/'Paper Clip' -- it is not excessive trust, but giving in to a climate
of suspicion (carefully fostered by the conspiracy) which creates the real
devastation; leading up, in this case, to a plot twist which reveals that
the very safest thing to do with secret information is to tell it to every
Navajo in the United States.
The pivot, however, remains the Mulder-Scully relationship. It sometimes
appears that the trustworthiness of people like Skinner is not necessarily
inherent in them, but something called out of them by a sort of joint moral
power wielded unconsciously by the main duo. The source of this moral power
may seem a bit obscure. It is not because they are especially effective;
it is not because they are always, or even very often, correct in their
theories. It is not really anything they do. In the end, the only
thing in which Mulder and Scully succeed is their stubborn insistence on
*believing *that there is some kind of sense, and some kind of moral centre,
to the world.
At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I will make a sudden thematic leap to
the Jewish tradition of the Lamed-Vav, the thirty-six Just Men (Tzaddikim).
The tradition tells us that at any time there are thirty-six perfectly
just men (sadly, men seems to mean men) in the world -- some variants
of the tradition say there are seventy-two, thirty-six in Palestine and
thirty-six outside. No one knows who they are -- often they themselves
do not know who they are -- but "upon them the Shekinah [the presence
of God] rests", and upon them the continued existence of the world
depends.
The tradition springs directly from a saying of the fourth century Talmudic
teacher Abbayah, but very likely owes something as well to the Biblical
account of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, in which Abraham
negotiates an agreement with Yahweh that if ten just men are found in Sodom,
the city will not be destroyed (although, in this event, a sufficient number
of just men is not found).
Many of those who have spoken of the Lamed-Vav have said that, at a time
of great threat to the Jewish people, one of these Tzaddikim will come
forth to save them. Others, however, have implied -- more in line with
the story of Sodom -- that it is really the pure existence of the thirty-six
that preserves both the Jewish people and the world itself. One of the
most recent and powerful tellers of the story, novelist Andr Schwarz-Bart,
says, in The Last of the Just, "If even one of them were lacking,
the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and
humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed-waf are the hearts
of the world multiplied, into which all our griefs are poured." The
task of the Just Men is, fundamentally, to maintain compassion. The Tzaddik
at the centre of his tale, the contemporary Ernie Levy, perishes in the
Nazi gas chambers. Yet the novel ends on a note of slight, painful but
real hope. "Yesterday, as I stood in the street trembling in despair,
rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above unto my face."
Now, it may seem not only eccentric but actually objectionable to draw
comparisons between Schwarz-Bart's tragic and dignified novel and a mass-audience
TV show, particularly one which attracts such paraphenomena as Your Own
Cut Out And Keep David Duchovny. I don't feel entirely comfortable with
it myself. But I do believe that the deepest fears and longings of our
hearts find their expression in some curious ways, and bad TV is not the
least of them. It does not always speak against the depth and meaning
of a feeling to observe that it is expressed in a fundamentally cheesy
form. Nor am I arguing that Chris Carter is personally aware of the story
of the Just Men -- he may be, but I think it's not very likely. I am arguing
only that there are certain needs and certain archetypes that live in our
minds.
And I do think that there is a particular need that is addressed by the
tradition of the Lamed-Vav on a fairly sophisticated and theological level,
and which is also partly addressed, in a sketchy and secular way, by the
X-Files. It is the need to believe that some small number of people have
not been ruined by this world. We are all probably aware of just how damaged
and corrupt we are. We need, in this hard world, to know that there are
some few people who are not -- and to believe that they can love us.
Because only in this way can we be saved. (There is, of course, something
of this in the central story of Christianity as well).
What, then, under the terms of the show, defines Mulder and Scully as the
just people who will preserve us? Part of it is simple -- that they will
not cooperate with, or be intimidated by, the conspiracy, and persist,
no matter how unsuccessfully, in trying to determine and reveal the truth.
Part of it -- interestingly, in the light of "Trust No One" --
appears to be that, in a world of systemic paranoia, they have in fact
retained the ability to trust.
The tension in the better episodes, if we follow this line of thought,
would result from their being in some sense temptation narratives, in which
Mulder and Scully's resistance is under threat. In a few cases, this involves
the temptation to cooperate with the authorities, as in "F. Emasculata",
where Scully argues that the truth about the killer disease must not be
released in case it causes panic (once again, there are echoes of the early
days of the AIDS crisis) -- leaving Mulder in a particularly complex situation,
torn between his loyalty to Scully and his determination to reveal anything
and everything. (Of course, since it's only a one-hour show, this is resolved
pretty quickly by having Scully change her mind after further disclosures
from a dying scientist).
More often, the temptation is that the trust of one of the leads in the
other will fatally waver. This is a motif which recurs over and over --
it is implied in probably every episode, but forms a particularly major
part of the plot tension in the pilot and in "Ice" (8th episode
of the first season, described by Duchovny as "the first really rocking
episode"), "Lazarus" (15th episode), "The Erlenmyer
Flask" (24th and final episode of the season), "Little Green
Men" (1st episode of the second season), "Colony"/"End
Game" (16th/17th episodes) and the crucial "Anasazi" (25th
and final episode of the season). In the third series the motif recurs
in "Grotesque" (14th episode) and "Wetwired" (23rd
episode) -- I can't tell you about the first half of the third season because
I missed the whole first half of the third season, so you'll have to work
that out yourself. There is also an interesting variant on the motif in
"One Breath", the 8th episode of the second season. This almost
exact regularity suggests that the producers and scriptwriters are very
aware of this as a key source of tension and know exactly how often it
needs to be tweaked to keep the audience watching.
"One Breath" is worth looking at further. Scully has reappeared
from her presumed abduction, but is in a coma somehow caused by "alterations
in her DNA" and the near- total "destruction of her immune system".
The improbable coma is diagnosed (impossibly rapidly -- this episode is
particularly full of pseudo-medicine) as a persistent vegetative state,
and her family decides, following her own Living Will, to have her life-support
systems turned off. They make this decision over Mulder's objections, but
we are strongly directed to believe that, in this case, he is wrong. In
fact, Scully does not die, but also does not emerge from her coma. Meanwhile
Mulder, in a rather uncontrolled and violent state, threatens the Cigarette-Smoking
Man, apparently one of the leaders of the conspiracy, at gunpoint -- only
to be told, "I have more respect for you now ... You're becoming a
player." Shortly afterwards, Mulder is posed with the choice of meeting
with, and having a chance to take some kind of revenge on, the "ones
responsible" (we don't learn exactly who they are), or of sitting
with Scully at the hospital, awaiting her probable death. It is only after
a considerable amount of conflict that he does make the latter choice,
and thankfully the scriptwriters don't make her wake up on the spot, though
she does recover consciousness the next day, in the presence of her family
rather than Mulder.
This is not the only time that Mulder is implicitly condemned for his tendency
to lash out almost randomly whenever anyone he cares about is in trouble,
but it is certainly pressed home harder here than in any other episode.
There are certain kinds of "heroism" that the X-Files, thankfully,
has not very much time for; and indeed, it has several times been suggested
that, if Mulder ever does compromise himself and fall in with the loose
affiliation, it will be because of his tendency to resort to violence when
in distress. (Although both characters carry guns and display them with
dismaying frequency, they actually do not fire them often, and very rarely
kill anyone; though they do have a tendency to accidentally chase villains
in the direction of someone else who then kills them). If he ever gets
himself killed -- ultimately a lesser violation of the show's moral code,
but still something to be avoided -- it will probably be because of a residual
tendency to try to be a lone hero, while Scully insistently pulls him back
into relatedness (this sub-theme emerges more strongly in the third season,
particularly in "Pusher" and "Grotesque").
What is validated, over and over, is not really any kind of heroism at
all, but a certain sort of persistence and loyalty, an ability to give
in to another person's wishes -- most importantly, an ability to remain
connected to another person. It is also worth noting, in this regard, that
when people like Skinner show resistance to or defiance of the conspiracy,
it is usually in order to help one of the principals locate and rescue
the other. This, apparently, is what the writers of the show consider salvific
in the modern world. It matters terribly that Mulder and Scully trust --
and, in whatever sense of the word, love -- each other, because it signals
that they have not been corrupted; and because it means that they could
love, and save, us as well.
In the third season finale, Cigarette-Smoking Man confronts the almost
Christ-like Jeremiah Smith -- introduced earlier in the episode when he
disarms a disturbed killer and heals the wounded, with the promise that
"nobody's going to die" -- in a scene that seems to be derived
directly from Dostoyevsky's 'Grand Inquisitor' parable (though Jeremiah
is much chattier than Dostoyevsky's silent Christ and pulls several stunts
which Dostoyevsky's theology would have found unacceptable). Cigarette-Smoking
Man, arguing that Smith must not be allowed to disrupt the "project"
in which they have "taken away men's freedom and given them happiness"
argues that "if you can appease a man's conscience, you can take away
his freedom." Smith insists that people are better than the "project"
believes -- "If you can't appease their consciences, you kill them.
But you can't kill them all. You can't kill their love." We are given
to understand that it will be Smith who is proven right in the end.
This scene bears comparison not only with the Grand Inquisitor parable
but also with 1984 (the civil servant Jeremiah Smith and the civil servant
Winston Smith compare interestingly), where a similarly-structured debate
comes to a much more pessimistic conclusion, as Winston is finally broken
by being forced to betray the woman he loves, facing his worst fear and
screaming "Do it to Julia! Not to me!" This is, in fact, a very
near analogue of the sort of tests regularly presented to Mulder and Scully,
and we cannot say that because the X-Files version is more optimistic,
it is necessarily less true or important. After all, Dostoyevsky too believed
that you cannot utterly kill love.
The X-Files is, in its somewhat primitive way, a fairly strongly moral,
and oddly humane, show. And it is interesting to note that when an external
source of moral direction seems necessary, the writers often call on --
of all things -- organised religion; not the sort of fundamentalist Protestantism
popular in the United States,which is cautiously mocked in several episodes,
but, in more than a few cases, that old bugbear the Catholic Church (among
other recurring touches, Scully almost always wears a small cross around
her neck, and may even be a semi-practising Catholic). This is really quite
strange for a mainstream American television show; I am not necessarily
arguing that it is an intrinsically good thing, but it does indicate the
desire of the show's creators to find a serious moral centre.
Nor is it, probably, coincidental that the ultimate evil conspiracy turns
out to be linked to the Holocaust -- a plot twist possibly introduced by
Duchovny, who co-wrote the key episode, comes from a Jewish background
himself and has stated in an interview that he considers Mulder to be Jewish
(this is very unlikely from the evidence of the scripts -- in one early
episode Mulder is shown apparently praying in a clearly Christian church
-- but an actor is, I suppose, allowed to believe whatever he likes about
his own character). The Holocaust is, after all, perhaps the harshest example
of a mass atrocity that can hardly be explained and that can in no way
be redeemed except on a completely abstract level. Even if our fictional
FBI agents were to succeed in stopping the conspiracy, this would mean
little to either the actual six million victims, or the fictional later
ones -- and anyway it seems very improbable, even within the fiction, that
they will ever do so. What is important, we are told, is that at least
a few people know what happened (a message of no small importance, perhaps,
in these days of Holocaust revisionism), and that they care. This is the
only redemption that Schwarz- Bart could find; on its own level, it is
the same redemption the X-Files seems to find. It is not much, perhaps.
But it may be all we've got.
To speak personally, after many years as a human rights worker, this is
the only value in my work that I can feel sure of. I cannot be sure that
anything I have done has saved one life, and I often suspect it hasn't.
But I know only too well the experience of sitting and cataloguing the
atrocities, believing that there has to be some value in that, that someone
has to know about it, even if it's only one person. That someone has
to know about all the terrible things, and still stay human enough to grieve;
and that this matters. It is only this kind of belief that allows me to
go on with my own forms of resistance to the machine -- because, conspiracies
aside, there is a vast machinery for evil in the world, even if
no one gang is running it.
The X-Files is certainly not an ideal model for resistance. Aside from
anything else, the heroes are FBI agents, which implicates them fairly
heavily in the system they're supposed to be opposing. The conspiracy theory
is laid on heavily enough to create a largely disempowering effect. Myself,
I consider the fact that they are always waving their guns around a serious
weakness. And -- as we must not forget -- it's basically a rather silly
show.
Nevertheless, I think we could do a lot worse.
... these are the days of miracle and wonder
this is the long-distance call
the way the camera follows us in slo-mo
the way we look to us all
the way we look to a distant constellation that is dying in a corner of
the sky
these are the days of miracle and wonder
and don't cry, baby, don't cry