The new X-Files have hit the airwaves and there hasn't been this level of fan interest since the late 90's movie took the titular series to the big-screen in a film with maybe the greatest name ever: Fight the Future. Man! With a name like that, the movie could be about so many things, and I'd still want to see all of them! Since my future fans are still safely in the future awaiting my inevitable sophomore release (that's writer-speak for my next book) there isn't a whole lot to blog about on that front. Yes, I'm still writing. The current story could be described as Django Unchained meets... well, Lorna Lockheed, of course. But my point is, I need something else to blog about in the meantime if I intend to tell people I still have a blog. Just kidding. I don't tell people that. And if I do, it's more like a whisper but they aren't listening anyway. So until I finish my needlessly long (and self-indulgent) Star Wars: The Force Awakens post, a little X-Files will have to do. Review First: The new Season 10 revival is great! It's every bit on par with the original and unless you're the kind of skeptic who still thinks all those UFO sightings are a hoax, believe me when I say this new season is off to a killer start.
(Seriously, though, of course the UFOs are all hoaxes. I'm not crazy.) But X-Files is awesome. It succeeds in scratching that suspicious post-modern itch for distrust in the modern system of a super-society too big for our brains to comprehend without feeling helpless and insecure. More on that below... I said review first. The acting is amusing and convincing, even after all these years. Mulder may not have the same charisma and optimistic resilience of the earlier seasons (Geez! Was that the early nineties?) but he's been through a lot since then. The weariness shows itself through a form of depression and powerlessness as he sulks in a ratty basement with duct tape over his laptop camera. Apparently they had a son in the later seasons (ok, I quit watching around then, so I'm not really a die-hard fan... yet) and then gave him up for safety, never to be seen again. So he's bumming about it. Plus his career ended on a low note and now he just loafs around off the grid keeping up with Truther conspiracies and Snowden and NSA stuff. Scully is equally demoralized and makes up for her missing son by performing charitable surgeries on malformed children. Actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson look younger than they should after all these years (Celebrities? Am I right?) but seem very comfortable in their old clothes and they're non-chemistry together is still enjoyable in spite of itself. The inclusion of contemporary political dynamics like conservative gun paranoia and post 9-11 security vs freedom debates feel as natural here as secret military aircraft did back in '93 when stealth bombers and satellite-guided missiles had only been made public within the previous two years during Desert Storm. This is all such natural X-Files fodder that I almost wonder how it took them so long to get the show back on the air. Needless to say the special effects have come a long way, but the artistic integrity of the show and it's cinematic stylings don't change in the slightest, and never needed to. After since re-watching the original pilot (and a few more after that), I can safely say the aesthetic still holds up, and the new season holds true to it. They don't even update the opening credits. Brilliant. I loved the way Mulder got to visit an RAV (replica alien vehicle if I caught it correctly). He says he's never seen one in person like this before, which is clever because we immediately recognize the triangular hover craft from all the way back in season 1 ep 2, where he did in fact have an encounter with one on a hidden military base right before they wiped his memory. Great call back and a great moment of satisfaction to finally give to Mulder after all these years. This is where the writers get creative though (Chris Carter, thankfully still on board, the original mastermind), because we aren't being thrown into the alien conspiracy we watched go back and forth for nine seasons. Instead they turn it upside down. All the alien hoax hunting turns out to be itself a clever ploy. The government isn't covering up the aliens (well, technically they still are but that's a coincidence) rather the government is using the idea of aliens as a cover up for... themselves. It's a less than veiled metaphor for today's post-911 conspiracies: the government is the real threat beneath the fake terrorism and fake school shootings and fake economic hardships. In this case fake alien UFOs and abductions. Mulder has been searching for the alien explanation all this time and now it turns out maybe the government kept him hunting those aliens so that he wouldn't discover it was really just them all along. Or is that just another red herring? Anyway, check it out. It's good stuff. And though the second episode of the new revival isn't quite as edgy or conspiratorial, it goes instead for some surprisingly genuine emotion regarding the loss of their son, which I wonder might become an ongoing plot thread? Who knows! Part of the X-Files fun, like Lost so many years later, was never knowing for sure if anything you were seeing was going to turn out to matter at all. That's the perpetual debate at the heart of the series' premise: Is this the tip of the conspiratorial iceberg? The secret at the center of a grand scheme? Or just another hoax or at the very least, an isolated incident. A fluke. A distraction. You never know for sure unless you keep watching. After all, inherent in all conspiracy theories is that dual possibility that the proof you may encounter at any moment will finally tie it all together, or instead undermine everything forever. Truth cuts both ways, and it always cuts sharp. Post-Modern angst in a Modern power structure. But this is why I really like the X-Files. We live in a society that is bigger than we can wrap our minds around. Governments are by nature, bigger and more complex then at any time in human history. Companies and corporations have grown into conglomerates. The economy is globally interconnected. We have built the Modern World our great grandparents only dreamed of and it scares the hell out of us. It's the great machine and now that we have created this System of society we find we are too small to control it. It controls us. Sure, most of the time, life is good. Honestly, it's really not so bad. Maybe a little whiny, but whatever. But when you run into a real problem, like a big-deal problem, we find the system has very little give to it and it can be virtually impossible to effect change. If you suddenly don't like the decisions your Governor or Senator have made, what can you do? If your Insurance denies you, you're screwed. If you take out six figures in student debt because someone said it was a good investment and then you can't get work after college and you realize your rates are really high and the loans are coming out of deferment soon, you realize you are a helpless pawn in the industrial machine that is the Modern World and you have zero power within a power structure that is infinitely complex. That produces an innate sense of powerlessness and insecurity. Valid or not, I'm strictly speaking on a psychological level here. If you feel insecure and powerless, you will find ways to lash out. To act out. To protest and demonstrate. To rally. Or at the very least to write long rants on social media. You want to fight back. This is regardless of whether the Modern World is really good or bad or whatever. You can't help it. You're fighting less because the cause is worthy and more because at a primal level, you need to reassert your own significance. This is where X-Files comes in. Mulder is the perpetual small fish in a big pond. Some weeks he has the truth in his fingers. Others it turns out to be nothing. At the end of the second episode, the UFO hovers right over his head. He sees it. He can almost touch it. But they erase his memory, so he'll never really know how close he got. Other weeks the aliens turn out to be kids in costumes (is that an actual episode? I don't remember. I might be thinking of Scooby Doo). Every time Mulder gets ahold of real hard evidence, they destroy it or take it away and file it in the basement. But he doesn't give up. His search is not merely for the proof, but for the truth. The poster in his office says "I Want to Believe". He wants to know if his fears are valid and he wants to know if they aren't. No one has convinced him completely one way or the other. He knows he is a small fish in a big pond but if he can solve the big mystery, it makes him bigger than the big pond. If he can make the pond small enough to understand it, if he can uncover the truth and shrink it down to a size he can comprehend, then he will have defeated it. Better, he will have asserted himself over it. He will have restored his power. X-Files taps into our own inferiority complex. It feeds it, and then it teases us. It inflates our fears with the way they throw around dates and historical anecdotes, but then it slaps us back to reality when we realize it's just fictional TV. They aren't obligated to quote anything accurately. They aren't obligated to show where a hoax has been unanimously debunked. They don't even have to use real conspiracies. The reality of the conspiracy or the hoax is irrelevant. The post-modern angst we feel is real. And the endless struggle to validate that angst is real. And as we live our lives every day, we find endless evidence of both truths: that we are weak and petty and insecure simply because of our own human nature; but also that the Modern World can hurt us and it can and will do so in an unfeeling mechanical fashion. I may not be able to overcome the giant machine that is the Modern World, and I may not be able to satiate my primal neediness for self-empowerment, but damn if I can't binge nine seasons of X-Files on Netflix and not feel like it means something. I want to believe. The truth is out there. Fight the Future. Next episode starts in 29 seconds... 28... 27...26...
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