4x10: Paper Hearts

documentary as mythological method & vice versa

(I’m posting my backlog of short essays about The X-Files, and will go back to fill in late-S3/early-S4 shortly.)

Much the best episode of Season Four so far, even better than ‘Home’ (a very effective instance of something less interesting). Neatly, even beautifully inverts the usual X-Files paranormal formula. Again, Mulder and Scully are witness to some impossible goings-on, this time a sort of psychic crossover between Mulder’s dreams and those of a serial killer he’d put away several years previously; in the end Mulder chooses a retreat into maddening uncertainty, killing the psychic killer who might have abducted his sister, in order to protect the life of a little girl who’d otherwise be next to die.

He’s the hero and all.

‘Paper Hearts’ is a Vince Gilligan script, which guarantees superior dialogue and tight plotting, but this is the first of his episodes I’ve seen that feels like an X-Files story rather than a more generic crime story with paranormal stuff fitted in after the fact — it perfectly captures the darkness at the heart of Mulder’s character. Best of all, Duchovny rises to the occasion, delivering his most flexible performance; his final scene with Gillian Anderson is the first Mulder/Scully moment that’s both perfectly acted and perfectly written.

I’ve nothing to quibble about here. It’s top-shelf drama — and crucially, the story wouldn’t have worked quite as well on any other series. Throughout the hour, hints of Conspiracy echo distantly without a single explict mention of the show’s ‘mythology.’ Because we know William Mulder was one of the shadowy men in the back room, and because Samantha’s name has escaped the lips of the show’s Devil himself (the Cigarette-Smoking Man), the whole episode is charged not only with the uncertainty built into the premise but a complex crosshatch of implication and ambiguity. Ambivalence, too — after all we’ve seen of Mulder’s emotionally costly monomania, it’s hard to root for him without a little second-guessing, even in this most intimately emotional situation.

Of course, if you already know the eventual outcome of the Samantha abduction storyline, all this running around has a darker, more equivocal colour. I can’t imagine what this hour must’ve been like for viewers twenty years ago, who might well have believed as the credits rolled that Roche did kidnap Mulder’s sister.

I wish I didn’t know.

Madness, dark dreams, Wonderland; clairvoyance acquired through trauma. A literal ‘dreamland.’ The hatter, of course, went mad from mercury — poisoning his precious bodily fluids, so to speak.

If the show matters, here’s why:

‘Every episode is a mythology episode.’

Remember your Joseph Campbell: myths encode inner journeys, individual and interpersonal. The ‘mytharc’ of The X-Files is incoherent, yes, obviously; it was cooked up mostly week by week, by a literal committee of writers, and it’d be a miracle if it all added up to a history or made a lick of sense. But it’s no less coherent or than the inner journeys (Mulder’s, Scully’s, Max Fenig’s, the Lone Gunmen’s…) it metaphorizes. Indeed, the dream-logic of the show informs its every aspect — even Duchovny’s weird acting style makes sense as part of the show’s cool expressionist texture — and what binds the standalone and ‘mythology’ episodes together isn’t backstory, it’s their ‘inner story.’ Every hour of The X-Files depicts part of an American dream, ‘…the world that’s been pulled over your eyes’ per Morpheus, prophet of The Matrix. The series’s relationship to history, to politics, to American institutions, is skeptical because dreams can’t be trusted; it’s framed like a documentary not because the Jersey Devil and MK-ULTRA are real, but because we really do dream these images. We have for ages.

The X-Files had, I think, an unusually clear head about American culture, but its writers had no interest in realistic portraiture, because the condition of premillennium American life was dreamlike (nightmarish, for many). But there’s no need to ascribe motivations to them; their mythological method is clear enough, and in retrospect it seems obviously correct. The X-Files documents a nightmare from which its characters struggle to awake; they behave, not as federal agents, but as seekers on a mythic quest through a kind of American Wonderland.

The details of the show’s ‘mythology’ aren’t important, in other words; worrying about (familiar, incoherent) plotstuff re: Colonists and Men in Black and Super Soldiers is a mistake. It doesn’t add up and anyway needn’t. The mythology of The X-Files isn’t its backstory or the secrets it reveals, but the Fortean century for which it serves as a kind of recap and coda. Operation Paperclip, Timothy Leary’s experiments, the siege at Waco… These are elements of the show’s mythology just like the relationship between Cancer Man and William Mulder. Its ‘worldbuilding’ makes little sense because its setting is a late-20C America which made none at all.

‘Every episode is a mythology episode’ because the myth was never about UFOs.

Originally published at gist.github.com.