TMC
01-17-2021, 09:51 PM
https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/did-the-x-files-prime-us-for-the-qanon-era/
A two-bit motel room in small-town Maryland. FBI special agent Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny) reclines on a couch, propped up on his muscular bicep. He wears a loose white tee and listens intently, though with unusual scepticism, as his powerful pant-suited partner paces the room, decrying the moral dangers of salacious cable news shows.
‘Recent studies have linked violence on television to violent behaviour,’ says special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), her silhouette backlit by the glow of the cathode-ray TV, truly putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assert’.
‘Those studies are based on the assumption that Americans are just empty vessels, ready to be filled with any idea or image that’s fed to them,’ Mulder replies—his delivery lacking any obvious irony—yet Scully insists ‘the causal connections are there.’ She posits that a dangerous cocktail of ultraviolent imagery and amphetamine use catalysed the murderous monster of this week’s remit.
‘TV doesn’t make a previously sane man go out and kill five people, thinking they’re all the same guy,’ says Mulder, incredulous. ‘Not even ‘Must See TV’ could do that to you,’ he all but winks at the audience.
When human beings do bad things, can and should we hold pop culture responsible? The truth, as they say, is out there.
I wonder if Edgar Maddison Welch ever saw this—that is, The X-Files’ season three episode ‘Wetwired’—and if he had, whether he may have thought twice before taking an assault rifle to a Washington, DC pizza shop in December 2016, and firing three rounds while ‘self-investigating’ a non-existent child trafficking ring. Compelled by the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory, Welch reportedly explained his motive by texting a friend, ‘I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something’.
Welch was only seven or eight when ‘Wetwired’ first aired in 1996, just as the cult show was gaining mainstream attention. In the years since—and despite Mulder’s cavalier, never-gonna-happen attitude toward the media’s influence on civilian behaviour—the episode’s ripped-from-the-headlines ethical dilemma has only become more pertinent: when human beings do bad things, can and should we hold pop culture responsible? The truth, as they say, is out there.
It’s also complex, subjective and context-dependent.
*
The FBI’s most unwanted made their network premiere in 1993, forever evolving the aesthetic, characters and themes permissible in a small-screen sci-fi series. Since then, the names Mulder and Scully have become synonymous not only with little green men but with women in STEM, bisexuality, and a paranoia born of government corruption.
Over the show’s nine original seasons (plus two feature films, two spin-off series and a recent reboot), showrunner Chris Carter orchestrated a complex, often convoluted narrative arc—dubbed the ‘mythology’ or ‘mytharc’—charting a decades-long Deep State ruse to produce alien-human hybrids before extraterrestrial colonists invade Earth. Ridiculous as the details sound (and are), the core premise of a shadowy government cabal just hits different in 2021, now that conspiracism has evolved from kooky fringe thinking to mainstream debate.
These days, Mulder and Scully’s worst fictitious fears are mirrored in real-life conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, QAnon and the imminent New World Order. A growing audience of denialists is quick to dismiss verifiable facts like climate emergency, the gender pay gap and the current global health pandemic, believing that when the lamestream media says one thing, the opposite must be true. Now, the truth—or, rather, post-truth—is out there on the internet, morning talk-shows, and maybe even in the minds of your family, friends and neighbours, where it culminates in violent acts of domestic terrorism like the pizza shop attack or this month’s riot at the US Capitol. So, to repurpose the ‘Wetwired’ question: to what extent did The X-Files itself, with its black helicopters and lethal alien virus, accidentally precipitate this era of disinformation and distrust?
A two-bit motel room in small-town Maryland. FBI special agent Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder (David Duchovny) reclines on a couch, propped up on his muscular bicep. He wears a loose white tee and listens intently, though with unusual scepticism, as his powerful pant-suited partner paces the room, decrying the moral dangers of salacious cable news shows.
‘Recent studies have linked violence on television to violent behaviour,’ says special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), her silhouette backlit by the glow of the cathode-ray TV, truly putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assert’.
‘Those studies are based on the assumption that Americans are just empty vessels, ready to be filled with any idea or image that’s fed to them,’ Mulder replies—his delivery lacking any obvious irony—yet Scully insists ‘the causal connections are there.’ She posits that a dangerous cocktail of ultraviolent imagery and amphetamine use catalysed the murderous monster of this week’s remit.
‘TV doesn’t make a previously sane man go out and kill five people, thinking they’re all the same guy,’ says Mulder, incredulous. ‘Not even ‘Must See TV’ could do that to you,’ he all but winks at the audience.
When human beings do bad things, can and should we hold pop culture responsible? The truth, as they say, is out there.
I wonder if Edgar Maddison Welch ever saw this—that is, The X-Files’ season three episode ‘Wetwired’—and if he had, whether he may have thought twice before taking an assault rifle to a Washington, DC pizza shop in December 2016, and firing three rounds while ‘self-investigating’ a non-existent child trafficking ring. Compelled by the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory, Welch reportedly explained his motive by texting a friend, ‘I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something’.
Welch was only seven or eight when ‘Wetwired’ first aired in 1996, just as the cult show was gaining mainstream attention. In the years since—and despite Mulder’s cavalier, never-gonna-happen attitude toward the media’s influence on civilian behaviour—the episode’s ripped-from-the-headlines ethical dilemma has only become more pertinent: when human beings do bad things, can and should we hold pop culture responsible? The truth, as they say, is out there.
It’s also complex, subjective and context-dependent.
*
The FBI’s most unwanted made their network premiere in 1993, forever evolving the aesthetic, characters and themes permissible in a small-screen sci-fi series. Since then, the names Mulder and Scully have become synonymous not only with little green men but with women in STEM, bisexuality, and a paranoia born of government corruption.
Over the show’s nine original seasons (plus two feature films, two spin-off series and a recent reboot), showrunner Chris Carter orchestrated a complex, often convoluted narrative arc—dubbed the ‘mythology’ or ‘mytharc’—charting a decades-long Deep State ruse to produce alien-human hybrids before extraterrestrial colonists invade Earth. Ridiculous as the details sound (and are), the core premise of a shadowy government cabal just hits different in 2021, now that conspiracism has evolved from kooky fringe thinking to mainstream debate.
These days, Mulder and Scully’s worst fictitious fears are mirrored in real-life conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, QAnon and the imminent New World Order. A growing audience of denialists is quick to dismiss verifiable facts like climate emergency, the gender pay gap and the current global health pandemic, believing that when the lamestream media says one thing, the opposite must be true. Now, the truth—or, rather, post-truth—is out there on the internet, morning talk-shows, and maybe even in the minds of your family, friends and neighbours, where it culminates in violent acts of domestic terrorism like the pizza shop attack or this month’s riot at the US Capitol. So, to repurpose the ‘Wetwired’ question: to what extent did The X-Files itself, with its black helicopters and lethal alien virus, accidentally precipitate this era of disinformation and distrust?