Geller Theresa L. - The X-Files

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant
Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski
Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University

Advisory Editors
Robert J. Burgoyne
University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming
University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng
University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward
California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning
University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch
University of Delaware

Walter Metz
Southern Illinois University

2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

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ISBN 978-0-8143-3942-8 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-3943-5 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952472

Typeset by E. T. Lowe

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Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it
(Chris Carter, The Blessing Way, 3:1).

For John Crawford III, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Mya Hall, Jonathan Ferrell, Ranisha McBride, Corey Jones, Laquan McDonald, Cedrick Chatman, Oscar Grant III, Alexia Christian, Natasha McKenna, and for so many others for whom the search for answersand for justicecontinues.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

L ike The X-Files itself, this book is many, many seasons in the making. Indeed, it is my own sort of reboot of a project I began almost two decades ago while in graduate school at Rutgers University. It premiered as a talk titled The Alien Bodies and Other Worlds of The X-Files for the Rutgers Undergraduate English Association in September 1998. This talk turned out to be one of the best moments of my graduate career for many reasons. One key reason was that it was an event I shared with my cohort. I want to thank my fellow graduate students at Rutgers for providing me a community of brilliant and committed feminist scholars who challenged me to think critically and imaginatively, including Nat Hurley and Jennifer Worley. I am especially indebted to Jane K. Elliott, who also presented her research on the series with me at Rutgers; her breathtaking analysis of Dana Scully continues to shape my thinking about gender and television to this day. To Jenny I owe special thanks for being the brash, outspoken, wonderful friend she isshe helped change my life for the better the night I gave this paper.

The second season of this project came about in a graduate seminar with Brent Hayes Edwards, who rightly informed me that these ideas were better suited for a book. It took me over a decade to finally act on his advice, for which I am entirely grateful, as well as for his continued support throughout the years. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Grosz and Richard Koszarski for reading preliminary versions of this research.

Later seasons of this research were marked by my move to Iowa, where I joined the faculty at Grinnell College. I want to thank students who helped me think about these ideas over the years, especially Anna M. Banker, Brian Buckley, and Joe Hiller. I would also like to thank my colleagues for their support through difficult times: Vance Byrd, Javier Samper Vendrell, Heather Lobban-Viravong, Todd Armstrong, Tolya Vishevsky, Eliza Willis, and Janet Seiz.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the community of media scholars who have inspired and supported my scholarship, including (but not limited to) Caetlin Benson-Allott, Patricia White, Nick Davis, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Chris Holmlund, and Katherine Bond Stockton. I am especially thankful for my summer at the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell, funded by a research grant provided by Grinnell College. I want to thank Amy Villarejo for her transformative seminar, and a special thanks goes to my Ithaca comrades, Patrick Flanery and Andrew van der Vlies, whose kindness and support for this project have meant so much to me. I am also endlessly grateful to Amelia Ranche, Elizabeth Siahaan, and Kathryn Silva for their friendship and encouragement over the years. Special thanks to Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press for her perfect balance of honesty and encouragement to help me see this through to the end. I am entirely indebted to Jess Issacharoff for her astute and encouraging readings of drafts of the bookyou are truly a good friend.

Lastly, there is an almost supernatural backstory to my history with The X-Filesone I cannot do justice to here. Suffice it to say, I met my own one in five billion while writing that first talk back at Rutgers, which became our first date (thanks to Jenny). I cannot help but forever associate The X-Files with the beginning of a foliedeux that has been a dreamland for going on two decades. To David, I am endlessly grateful for all things.

A s of January 2016, the television phenomenon returned: The X-Files redux. Thanks to the FOX networks reboot of the multi-award-winning series, The X-Files (19932002), the groundbreaking series returned to the airways, with most of its original talent. Chris Carter brought his original brainchild back to life in a six-episode event series, with David Duchovny reprising his role as (former) FBI Special Agent Fox Spooky Mulder, of the X-Files Division, and Gillian Anderson returning to her Emmy-winning role as Special Agent Dr. Dana Scully, assigned to debunk his findings, only to quickly become his partner, intimate ally, and, eventually, his one in five billion (Folie Deux, 5:19). To the relief of many fans, other original characters returned too, such as Mitch Pileggi as Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Scullys mother (Sheila Larkin), and the reviled Cigarette Smoking Man, played with brilliant menace by William B. Davis. Most of the series production team, Ten Thirteen, was back as well, with Carter writing and directing three of the episodes, and other alums, including Glen Morgan, James Wong, and Mark Snow, also contributing. When the reboot was announced, Internet fan sites had a near meltdown, generating a slew of web content about the series return, while related conventions buzzed with excitement; Carter even premiered the first episode at New York Comic Con 2015. That Carter acknowledged the centrality of the shows fans in this way, many of whom populated the online communities that buoyed the series from its very beginnings, taking to the rapidly expanding forum of the World Wide Web to create some of the earliest digital television fansites, is hardly surprising, as he was one of the first, if not the first, to turn to the Internet and its fan cultures as a resource for the success of the show.

While other shows quietly fade into obscurity with their inevitable cancellation, this is not at all the case for The X-Files. In 2013, for instance, the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival featured a fan choice screening to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the series, with Chris Carter joining the ranks of Guillermo del Toro and Roland Emmerich as guests of the festival; a week later, the Art Directors Guild Film Society and The American Cinematheque hosted a celebration of the production design of the series. The persistent accolades for the series reflect the widely shared opinion that, with