XAnon
An essay on the episodes This is Not Happening / DeadAlive. I have just submitted it to the second volume of ATB's books of new X-Files reviews. My essay on Die Hand Die Verletz is appearing in the forthcoming first volume, and is also posted here for my patrons. Word limit of 1K means this is pretty breezy. Comments welcome.
In 1954, aliens informed a Chicagoan named Dorothy Martin that the world would end in a great flood just before Christmas, but that she and her cult, the Seekers, were to be picked up and transported to safety by flying saucer. Observing the reactions of the Seekers when none of these things happened, the authors of the book When Prophecy Fails theorised that devout believers with substantial ‘sunken costs’ who encounter powerful disconfirmatory evidence may remain believers - and even take to evangelism - as long as they are embedded in a system of social support for their beliefs. Martin herself stayed a believer until her death, the year before The X-Files debuted on Fox and the Branch Davidian compound was sieged in Waco.
During The X-Files’ fourth series, at the height of the revived UFO-mania of the time, the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California committed mass suicide in order to rendezvous with an alien spaceship they believed to be accompanying the Hale-Bopp comet. As in Waco, as in Jonestown, Heavens’ Gate was doing something that people who study cults call ‘forcing the end’.
There is a sense in which, after Two Fathers / One Son, The X-Files itself is a cult still existing after prophecy fails. The prophesied day of invasion is averted. The Syndicate are wiped out, together with their families, in an onslaught of fire. The show’s makers - themselves a cult leadership in another sense - have ‘forced the end’. But Mulder and Scully are left to make sense of it all, their quest truncated. Mulder fails upward, through disillusion into abduction and disappearance. Scully, with the dedication of one trying to convince herself, stays loyal to the lost leader of her busted cult à deux, constantly dogged by a personification of her own repressed scepticism. The show insists it can continue past the failure of its own prophecies, convincing itself for a while, but never quite convincing a dwindling number of viewers.
This Is Not Happening / DeadAlive looks like the show struggling with this state of affairs. A messianic leader still has followers after his prophecies failed and his first cult died, and is hunted by the federal government. But do I mean Absalom or Mulder? Mulder, so nearly buried forever, is resurrected, a seemingly healthy zombie - like the show. Like Absalom’s cult, collecting and healing abductees, The X-Files itself is tidying up the wreckage of its curtailed arc - Billy, Theresa, Jeremiah, Mulder himself - and trying to build a new one from the old. Billy is literally rebuilt into a new monster.
The X-Files, the quintessential ‘Cult TV’, was obsessed with cults. In these episodes, from the reality of the faith healing to the heavy-handed tactics of the feds, we see the cultist’s view of the world vindicated. The X-Files empathises with it. But in the real world, the cultist’s view is inherently authoritarian and fascistic. The show’s vindication of Mulder’s point of view obscures this. Mulder is the quintessential politico-religiose saviour, both of the establishment yet against it, both cult-leader and hero against the cabal. In This Is Not Happening / DeadAlive he is literally resurrected to save us all and drain the swamp.
As with serial killers, another of the show’s obsessions, the heyday of the cult has passed. But neither have disappeared, only changed. Our day is the day of the online cult and the individual indoctrinated into committing lone acts of ‘forcing the end’ - spree killing - after becoming enveloped in an ‘epistemological bubble’ by an algorithmically served-up diet of online extremism. These days, cults work like internet fandoms.
The fastest growing instance at the moment is QAnon, which imagines a secret ‘cabal’ (or Syndicate?) of elites engaged in conspiracy and occult ritual, and looks forward to the day when Donald Trump will finally move against the ‘Deep State’, the Cultural Marxists, Hollywood, George Soros, etc. QAnon hasn’t created any spree killers yet. But it is growing. QAnon devotees are running for office. Failed prophecies have not slowed QAnon down. Believers are their own vast support mechanism.
The X-Files sees itself as progressive, as being about opposition to unjust power. But so does QAnon, which is the newest form of fascism. The deep politics of both is the conspiracy theory. Both reduce the complexity of the social problems to a question of exposing and exterminating the group conspiring against us from without and within… ‘us’ being the nation which must be made great again. The X-Files, not made by fascists, constantly thrashes against this logic, yet it can never escape the ideological pull of its most basic aesthetic.
Both The X-Files and QAnon offer a convoluted ‘mythos’ containing lots of little ‘monsters of the week’. Both posit a shadow government with a bizarre agenda. Both offer an insider/outsider hero, widely mocked as foolish for telling ‘the truth’. Both see politics not in material terms but as occult cosmology. Both look forward to either a doomsday or a judgement day. The X-Files is QAnon. It even has a cryptic single letter in its name. This isn’t because QAnon was inspired by The X Files. It’s because the same kinds of ideas tend to take the same shapes. The problem isn’t that TV shows present unlikely accounts of the world. The problem is that a set of propositions with no more validity than a TV show are now, in 2020, becoming a mass social movement. We await to see what will happen when prophecy truly fails and a satisfactory end needs to be forced. Let’s hope we’re not all left muttering “this is not happening…”