Found at: https://www.inverse.com/article/49242-x-files-25-year-anniversary-essay

25 Years Later, 'The X-Files' Is Still TV’s Most Relevant Political
Drama

Forget 'The West Wing' or 'The Wire,' the best political education
comes from Mulder and Scully.

Approximately 12 million shut-ins, loners and nerds were treated
to something special on the second Friday of September, one
quarter century ago: the first airing of The X-Files on Fox.

The X-Files inspired many imitators. Some understood why it was an entertaining science fiction anthology (see Fringe), while others
saw it as a great paranoid thriller (see the doomed
one-season-wonder Nowhere Man) — there was also plenty of garbage
(see Baywatch Nights). But no major network television drama in the
years since appears to have grasped the show’s peerless command of
American democracy’s terminal decline, nor that decline’s roots in
the country’s post-WWII supremacy as a military power.

The X-Files reflects the power dynamics currently eroding U.S.
civic life better than many of today’s prestige cable dramas, but
it hardly seems fair to compare it to the current era of peak TV.
As cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson once put it in the introduction
to an X-Files coffee table book, the show is “a final, brilliantly
inbred expression of the Age of Broadcast Television.”

Nevertheless, season two of HBO’s The Wire is a pretty instructive comparison: After 12 episodes of trying to build a case against an international trafficker in narcotics and human beings, beleaguered
Baltimore police lieutenant Cedric Daniels receives the crushing
news that their target, “the Greek,” had been a protected FBI counterterrorism informant all along. It’s a revealing tragedy, a manifestation of all the institutional mendacity and indifference
guilty of immiserating Baltimore’s city streets.

It’s also just plain accurate. Will we ever know, for example,
everything that counterterrorism informant, Russian mobster, and
former Trump real estate associate Felix Sater has used to barter his
way through the corridors of power? Where is the full accounting of
all the rot that savvy operators like Sater, Whitey Bulger, and
others, have spread throughout our justice system?

The Wire could only zoom out on these national-scale bureaucratic
outrages a handful of times, but understand that this treacherous
shit happened to Mulder and Scully like every other week.

Scully’s whole assignment to the x-files — as a medical doctor who doesn’t share Mulder’s controversial ideas or louche approach to
bureau protocol — is framed as a clever staffing gambit to neutralize
his work. That the gambit fails can largely be attributed to Scully’s personal integrity (and, sorta implicitly, her Catholic martyr’s
approach to career advancement).

The show’s protagonists are repeatedly maneuvered, manipulated, and
made into unwilling bloodhounds for the shreds of evidence that their privileged adversaries hope to suppress. Episodes like this (across
the quality scale from “The Erlenmeyer Flask” to “Herrenvolk” to “Soft Light”) made a virtue of the narrative stasis typically
demanded of episodic television. It built off the same punishing
monotonous rhythm that shows like Giligan’s Island had to conform to, telling within that constraint a Sisyphean tragedy about the
principled resistance to power and its consequences.

The subversive genius of The X-Files comes not from the pat
observation that many of America’s most vaunted institutions are
corrupt, but that we are all complicit, compromised as taxpayers,
wage slaves, enlisted men and women, government scientists, and so
on. Moral action and insubordination become synonymous when one simultaneously works for the enemies one hopes to undo — and
reciprocally all those callous deceptions and cold betrayals that
come with managing such unruly ‘human resources’ become codified as routine acts of executive-level decision making. Apology is Policy.

At the heart of the series’ sprawling conspiracy plot, the actual
high crimes are ultimately secret medical experiments, conducted on
unknowing citizens for self-serving aims. Technically, it’s not
illegal to hide the truth about aliens. Performing covert science
experiments on the public, on the other hand, is a pretty clear human
rights violation: one suffered by each of the show’s major
protagonists and many of the individuals they meet.

In Season 2’s Red Museum, an entire community of ranchers in
Wisconsin is covertly exposed to an unknown substance in their beef
cattle — which, of course, Mulder believes is extraterrestrial —
while a nearby cult of vegetarians is used as the test’s control
group. In Season 3’s Wetwired, an entire Maryland town is
hypno-programmed into a murderous paranoid frenzy via devices
installed in their TVs by a shadowy cable industry cut-out.

In real life, the entire San Francisco Bay Area; Minneapolis; St.
Louis; Winnipeg, Canada; Dorset, in southwest England; the subways of
New York and more were targeted for the covert release of airborne
bacteria as part of the U.S. Army’s biological warfare testing
program. Thanks in some small part to that military assistance, one
of the bacteria used, Serratia marcescens, has evolved from a
relatively nonpathogenic microbe to a significant cause of
in-hospital infections (and some deaths), one that’s increasingly
resistant to antibiotics. In November of 1950, the CIA reportedly ran
its own bioweapons test on New York city’s subway system exposing an unknown number of commuters to LSD, according to an FBI report and a
former researcher at Fort Detrick named Dr. Henry Eigelsbach.

Inmates at California’s Vacaville prison, the Georgia state
penitentiary and other state prison systems also became test subjects
in the agency’s classified research into potential mind control and
truth serum drugs. The CIA’s MK/ULTRA program is justly infamous now,
part of the paranoid popular culture and the subject of Netflix
documentaries and an ongoing lawsuit in Canada, but the scope of its inhumanity, particularly towards imprisoned black men and recovering
drug addicts has barely been reckoned with. To cite one horrifying
example, the then-director of Lexington, Kentucky’s Addiction
Research Center, Dr. Harris Isbell, working with the CIA through a
Navy cover, subjected seven ‘volunteer’ inmates to LSD for 77
consecutive days.

We know next to nothing about the successor programs to MK/ULTRA,
Projects OFTEN and CHICKWIT — except that they were supposedly
terminated in 1973 and that 130 boxes or so of documents exist on
them, somewhere, compared to the 7 boxes that investigative reporter
John Marks liberated on MK/ULTRA via the Freedom of Information Act
in the late 1970s.

This is what having unchecked black budget operations gives you. This
is the world to which Mulder and Scully’s weekly adventures held up a mirror.

Cloaked in the genre trappings of science fiction and supernatural
horror — like the pointed political commentaries of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone decades prior — The X-Files is arguably the only
American television show to have taken seriously the fundamental contradiction between government secrecy and participatory
democracy.

Ask yourself: What TV show holds a candle to The X-Files on political
acuity? The West Wing? A Capra-esque fantasy in which a sitting U.S. president would use the 25th Amendment on himself because he’s too
stressed out over his daughter’s kidnapping? This is a policy nerd’s vision of how politics might be, not a historian’s assessment of how
it is.

What about the neocon jingoist hypotheticals of 24? Or its slightly
more left-of-center cousin Homeland? Do you feel safer 15 years into
the War on Terror? What about Scandal? A show built on the hot take
that maybe PR flaks and crisis managers are actually, secretly, ‘the
good guys’? Scandal is a show that recklessly mixed soap opera
conventions and contemporary politics until pretty soon one character tortured another on-screen while saying “YOLO.” How about Commander
in Chief? Or Madame Secretary? Hillary lost. Designated Survivor?
LMAO.

All of these shows (even and especially the darker ones) are nothing
but wish fulfillment and escapism despite trying much, much, harder
to seem plausible.

Polite discourse in America exists under the shared misconception
that the wave of post-Watergate congressional investigations into
Cold War abuses of government power — the Rockefeller Commission, the
Nedzi and Pike Committees, the sweeping Church Committee
investigations — somehow fixed the problem.

Here was a real concrete outcome: Frank Church lost his senate seat,
bested in his next election by a campaign coordinated by the National Conservative Political Action Committee and funded by military
contractors. Congress did not ban the CIA assassination programs that
so shocked the American public and the world, when they were brought
to light in the 1970s. Legal authority was left to a series of
executive orders that were eventually radically reinterpreted by one
U.S. Army judge advocate general acting under the first President
Bush.

To the extent there has ever been a reprieve from the incessant,
parasitic swelling of the U.S. national security state, it came
during that interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, a rare decade when deficit hawks had a
slight edge on the warmongers. There have been ebbs and flows, but
few reversals.

Somehow, The X-Files managed to get this version of American history
on commercial airwaves. It situated its conspiracy plot not in
popular paranoid delusions about freemasonry, or the Illuminati, or
ancient lizard beings, but in the Faustian bargain that the United
States made with the Axis powers after the second world war —
absorbing their intelligence networks and scientists and letting
their corporate collaborators mostly roam free. One of the show’s senior-level conspirators, Conrad Strughold, takes his name from a
Nazi physiologist Hubertus Strughold who never went to jail for his
human experimentation, but instead worked for the Air Force and NASA
and got an aerospace medical award named after him for 50 years.
Imported war criminals from Imperial Japan’s infamous biowarfare and chemical experimentation division, Unit 731, make a critical
appearance in one of the show’s best installments from Season 3.

At some point, Mulder and Scully’s beleaguered boss, FBI Assistant
Director Walter Skinner, is nearly killed by a mysterious assassin
they soon learn is a Nicaraguan mercenary with an Iran-Contra scandal pedigree. So many minor details on the show, even comedic beats, tend
to pair adroitly with the historical record. Much like Watergate
burglar and CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, the show’s iconic Cigarette
Smoking Man is an aspiring author of pulpy political thrillers.

The show understood that dangerous far right movements were also
trading in conspiracy narratives and deliberately positioned Mulder
against them by having him infiltrate a NeoNazi group, in one
underated episode, as basically a caricature of his anti-government
self.

Critics of the shows later seasons tend to pay short shrift to what
an achievement all this is — sometimes casting Chris Carter as a
George Lucas-like figure who ultimately ruined his own creation
through narcissism and hubris. The comparison is only skin-deep
though. Unlike Lucas, who owned Star Wars outright, Carter has had
very little control over what Fox does with The X-Files since the
very beginning; he really could have only played ball or walked away
when his four year-contract ended. He has been a compromised figure,
not unlike AD Skinner on the series itself, working as best as he can
to protect his team from the uglier, more powerful forces hovering
just above them in the org chart.

You’ll notice that I haven’t even bothered to reach for the heavy artillery yet. You are, of course, aware of that The New York Times
published a series of stories last December about the Pentagon’s
secret $22-million-dollar UFO investigation program. Thanks to the
newspaper of record, we now know that the U.S. Navy collected
mid-wave infrared targeting data, advanced 3D radar signatures, and
multiple professional eye witnesses to a bizarre series of aerial
phenomena in November of 2004 off the coast of San Diego.

It’s not just, as Marissa Brostoff put it in N+1, that “Mulder was right.” It’s that Chris Carter was right. The zen surfer child of Watergate, with the best stable of writers he could come up with,
created a horror anthology based on the maxim that “it’s only as
scary as it is believable” — and in doing so, more often than not,
told the truth.

The results speak for themselves. In March of 2001, a goofy X-Files
spin-off, The Lone Gunmen, articulated a fully formed 9/11 conspiracy
theory six months before 9/11 even happened. Even season nine —
universally recognized as a terrible slate of television — managed to
call out the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, a full decade
before Edward Snowden.

Today, critical make-or-break moments in U.S. politics, just as they
so often happened on the show, are repeatedly swayed by anonymous
leaks and shadowy hacks: mysterious figures with opaque motives
operating outside the normal checks and balances that we were taught
to revere in civics class.

“My power,” as the Cigarette Smoking Man once taunted Mulder,
“comes from telling you.”

Hour for hour, the 218 installments of The X-Files constitute of the
best political education you can receive on how power is used and
abused in American life, without stooping to engage with nonfiction
or deigning to read a book.

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