The Ex-Files
National Review Online, May 17, 2002
It has been a rough couple of months for fans of 1990s television. Waifish Ally is waving goodbye, ER's noble Mark Greene has already passed beyond the help of the most dedicated trauma surgeon, and even simpering Steve from Blue's Clues has abandoned his cerulean canine in favor of a beard and a band. Sunday, though, will truly see the end of an era. With the airing of its final episode, the X-Files will x-pire. Like Samantha, Fox Mulder's abducted sister, the series will be sorely missed. Its tales of alien mayhem and spooky intrigue are a dark, twisted delight, an unreality show that took paranoia to prime time and made suspicion a star. Brilliantly written and beautifully shot, the X-Files is film noir for color TV. Chiaroscuro interiors echo themes of a world lost in the shadows of conspiracy and moral ambiguity, while the series' pale landscapes are vistas of a not-quite-normal America, a place where everything is bleached out, other than the bizarre.
And, half-lit in the gloom, or, sometimes, seen as no more than a blur, there emerges a cast of characters to savor (occasionally, given the writers' rather unhealthy interest in cannibalism, quite literally so): monsters, mutants, maniacs, murderers, mechanical cockroaches, prehistoric mites and, most frightening of all, white men in suits. But there's no need to worry too much. If they can actually manage to avoid death, disease, demons, alien bounty hunters, abduction and walking off the show, Mulder and Scully will be around to protect us.
Strangely romantic heroes in an unromantic age, this oddly matched duo search for truth in a maze of lies. The eccentric interplay between them only adds to the show's offbeat appeal. Working with the exasperating Mulder, poor Scully finds herself in an often-thankless role. Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson would feel her pain. Played by Gillian Anderson, a strikingly attractive redhead (Doctor Watson would have approved), Dana Scully is the scientist, balanced, skeptical, and altogether quite sane. None of these adjectives apply to David Duchovny's Fox Mulder, a man with the soul of Don Quixote, the beliefs of Shirley Maclaine, and the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He is clever, cranky, obsessive, and inspired. Crumpled and faintly saturnine, there is also something of Sam Spade about him, but without the booze or, usually, the broads (despite getting lucky with a trainee vampire, Mulder's love life — and death (but that's another story) — is generally confined to pornography).
The X-Files has been a critical and popular triumph. At its peak four or five years ago, the show was regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million in the U.S. and it has been broadcast in well over a hundred countries (although what they make of it in Yemen is anyone's guess). With success came spin-offs (the X-Files movie, the Lone Gunmen TV series, various X-Files novels, video games), paraphernalia (t-shirts, action figures, trading cards, an "X-Files Ken and Barbie," comic books, posters, CDs, calendars, and no fewer than six "official guides") and, of course, learned tomes (Conspiracy Culture from Kennedy to the X-Files, Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, and a lengthy (and invaluable) section in Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization).
Launched in 1993, the series was also one of the first cyber-sensations. Its conspiratorial themes and otherworldly subject matter were at one with the weirdness of the amazing, expanding web. The brave new show and the brazen new medium echoed each other, and as the thoughts and the ideas bounced between them, rapidly amplifying and becoming ever more absurd as they did so, they helped create an intellectual climate in which the X-Files could thrive.
This new means of communication was also used to create some old-fashioned buzz. As science fiction with more than its fair share of gore, the X-Files attracted its first viewers among exactly the same 18-34 (largely male) demographic that was the source of the Internet's most enthusiastic early adopters. Word of mouth recommendation was said to be the most effective advertising. Word of web turned out to be even better. It is impossible to quantify the contribution made by the Internet to the build-up in the X-Files' audience (from an average of around seven million in the first season to the high teens of millions two years later), but the show's creators were always careful not to neglect the geeks' dank ghetto, a recognition that reached its height when they listened to cyber-feedback and made heroes out of the Lone Gunmen, three nerds whose idea of fun was "hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2."
However, it is not necessary to be Clyde Bruckman (the insurance salesman with the ability to predict the manner of someone's death) to realize that the X-Files would eventually have to close. The truth may still have been out there, but fewer and fewer have seemed to care. The number of viewers has fallen to around 8-9 million, and Agent Mulder hasn't been seen for weeks. Scully seems distracted and disengaged, a woman with more than autopsies on her mind, played by an actress who has now been in a period film (House of Mirth! Edith Wharton! Costumes!) and may be a tad too grand these days for little green men. And, yes, before anyone writes in, I know that aliens are gray. The more recent recruits, Agents Doggett and Reyes, are New Coke to Fox and Dana's Classic, perfectly acceptable, but not really worth the effort.
As even the makers of M*A*S*H eventually realized, no series can last forever. What was once original goes stale, innovation turns into a formula that even alien DNA cannot keep alive. While the X-Files has never been shy about repeating itself (we have seen a mutant that munches on human livers, a mutant that feasts on human fat, a mutant that is hungry for human hormones, and a mutant that browses on human brains) there comes a moment when there really is nothing else to say.
More than that, the X-Files is a product of a time that has passed. It is a relic of the Clinton years as dated as a dot-com share certificate, a stained blue dress or Kato Kaelin's reminiscences.
It's the attitude, stupid. Typical of that era, the X-Files combines credulity (too many episodes show alarming signs of a New Age "spirituality") with cynicism, irony, and a notable sense of detachment. This is a show where, for all the drama, no one seems genuinely involved — even with each other. There has clearly been an attraction between Mulder and Scully almost right from the start, but for many years they could not be bothered to do very much about it (Scully now appears to have had a child by Mulder, but that's a more complicated matter than it may first seem). Meanwhile, the underlying plot has twisted and turned, sometimes into deliberate self-mockery, sometimes into incomprehensibility, sometimes into real suspense. There are episodes that teeter between horror and comedy, while there are others (some of the most effective, interestingly enough) that are just played for laughs. This is Po-Mo Sci-Fi, a wild, self-referential, but essentially meaningless jaunt into the unknown. It is Seinfeld with flying saucers, another show, ultimately, about nothing. Nothing serious, anyway.
Nothing serious? Apart, that is, from the existence of a vast conspiracy involved, somehow (more details on Sunday?), with covering up, and perhaps assisting, the planned alien colonization of this planet. But aliens were the pet rocks of the mid-90s, and it's too soon for nostalgia. The X-Files' continuing obsession with our gray-skinned tormentors is, well, so over. The same is true of its conspiratorial premise and all those suggestions of an irrevocably untrustworthy and malevolent government. While Chris Carter, the series' creator, seems to see himself as a left-libertarian (it is not necessary to be an Earth 2 nitpicker to detect in the X-Files a worldview a little closer to that of Oliver Stone than the Cato Institute), it is not surprising that the show found a mass audience in that now bygone era, the epoch of Reno amok and the Gingrich revolution.
Of course, there's no real mystery as to why Chris Carter had to turn to aliens, the feds, and sinister "syndicates" for his dark side. As he once put it, "With the Berlin Wall down, with the global nuclear threat gone…there is growing paranoia because…there are no easy villains anymore." At the time, viewers seemed to agree, but we have since been taught that such an assumption was hopelessly, tragically wrong. With Duchovny largely absent (he'd had enough: E.T. was not really to blame), the X-Files would have been set for decline even without 9/11, but you would have to be Norm Mineta to avoid noticing that ratings fell almost 25 percent between the May 2001 season finale, and the ninth season's premiere last November. The X-Files was a show for self-indulgent, more complacent times, an entertainment for before. That is something that makes one aspect of the series' 1993 debut seem, now, eerily appropriate.
Its date — September 10.