2x13: Irresistible
This is a first draft and I haven’t even bothered looking at it since feverishly so let’s keep our expectations low, shall we?
‘I’m gonna modem it out to you immediately, see if you can run a match.’
But then also…
‘…the necessity of the story, the myth or the legend in a culture is almost universal. We think of myths as things that entertain or instruct, but their deeper purpose is often to explain, or make fanciful, wishes, desires or behavior that society would otherwise deem unacceptable. Myths often disguise thoughts that are simply too terrible to think about, but because they are conveyed in a wrapping of untruth — the story — these thoughts become harmless fiction.’
This is a story about a monster who does horrible things to women. Excuse me, no: this is a story about whether it’s safe to put trust in people in a fallen world. Or, no, about our collective fetish for grotesque death. Correction: our fetish for stories about well-groomed ‘normal-looking’ boys who do terrible things because they’re sex perverts, not out of any motive you and I and the Good People share…
Mulder’s Psycho-lite final monologue ends like this:
The fear of violent death and the primitive impulse to survive are as frightening as any X-File — as real as the acceptance that it could happen to you.
That muddled bit of speechifying handily misses the point, doesn’t it, since if this hour is worth anything at all, it is so because escalating fetishism could happen to you, not kidnapping and desecration.
Yes, yes, I get it: the ostensible ‘thematic material’ of the episode is Scully dealing with her nightmarish anxieties and halfway-suppressed memories of her kidnapping while going after — shock! horror! — a ‘normal-looking’ guy who does monstrous things. But that’s just perv-of-the-week network crime drama stuff, queasily well executed but otherwise undistinguished, even a bit boring. This isn’t a bad hour, it’s just in a lame genre; the thought of being kidnapped is scary, but the idea that the guy who’ll do it is a slow-talking freakazoid with a dead-mom fetish who goes after well-kept whores and neatly-coiffed FBI agents is a comfort. Because if you’re sitting home watching The X-Files, you’re not one of those things, and you’re perfectly safe. The bad thing is Out There, not In Here.
Yet the (likely-)accidental insight of the poor adjunct’s shoehorned-in ‘myth’ monologue is that the entire series wraps something unspeakably horrible up in an comically silly mix of aliens! assassinations! conspiracies! because that’s the only way we’ll ever acknowledge the truth (ahem, the Truth). And no, the nameless horror isn’t ‘serial killers look just like us,’ since the number of serial killers is vanishingly small and worrying about them is completely irrational and unjustifiable. Rather, it’s the much darker notion that you have already allowed into your home the eyes ears hands of organizations, government and otherwise, who have time and again done ‘evil’ things (Scully’s word) with your permission — and who would unhesitatingly do such things to you, if push came to shove.
‘The truth is out there’ is the final tag of the opening credits, even on the one-off episodes like this one. It does not refer to anything to do with UFOs or ‘super soldiers.’ And that slogan is wholly relevant even to this hour. It’s there because of its rather nasty implication: the reason you don’t have ‘the truth’ is that you would never even consider looking for it. The actual working of the world in its utter banality is too much trouble for you and me.
I can’t tell what I’m so angry about today. Sorry about that. You definitely shouldn’t have to listen to a guy like me being, of all things, angry.
Manifest content : Latent content :: Plot : Story
Briefly touching on a big topic for later:
The manifest and latent content of committee-produced TV stories are rarely in sync. Buffy’s manifest content was often play for comedy as its deep story touched on darker themes: look at good episodes like ‘Hush,’ and less good ones like ‘Witch’ or — much worse — ‘I Robot, You Jane.’ Deadwood’s two levels of story-stuff were perfectly aligned and equally deep, while the (I’m serious) direct Deadwood sequel John from Cincinnati had no manifest content at all. The Sopranos’s pointed satire and ongoing cultural critique infamously disconnected, as the show progressed, from its increasingly cartoonish violence and the comic shenanigans of its titular rubes and sociopaths, just as the equally sharp satire of Season Five of The Wire was trashed by TV critics and journos focusing on that year’s manifest story about, er, critics and journos. We still hear professional cultural critics complain about the ‘rapey’ ‘antifeminist’ world of Game of Thrones, with its enormous cast of fully autonomous female characters.
Even when plot and story and world are aligned, it can be hard for viewers to figure out what to pay attention to — consider the fact that Twin Peaks was subject to pressure from execs and fans alike who didn’t get that the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer was always a Macguffin; or the number of critics deriding Mad Men as a ‘watch the charismatic sociopath’ hour, overlooking the show’s abiding interest in the way Don’s (and Pete’s and Peggy’s and Roger’s &c.) flows from/throughout their entire setting, not excusing the characters so much as indicting the world…
The X-Files is unusual on this score. Its manifest content is split between somewhat silly fantastic and deadly serious ‘documentary’ portrayal of the unthinkable real-world history of post-WWII America — while its deep story deals both with that dark history and with the even darker dream of the premillennium High Weirdness, that post-JFK post-Vietnam post-Watergate total breakdown in trust against which (you might say) Mulder’s ‘credulous’ counterculturalism is maybe the last and strongest line of defense — all the while touring the fringes of the Matter of America, the mythic/Fortean dream-history that’s both essential to our national/cultural identity and now literally unspeakable in polite conversation. In other words, the onscreen shenanigans and the implied indictment and the hallucinatory mythos connecting them are constantly testing and testifying to one another, so that it’s never quite clear which part of the show’s ‘vivid continuous dream’ (John Gardner’s perfect term) you can rest your hopes on, what’s the contract and what’s the violation…its dramatic organization metaphorizes its jangled epistemology and vice versa.
So. What’s a ‘critic’ to do in the face of this show’s guerrilla ontology?
Come back later. We’ll talk.
