Criticizing Criticism: How The Legacy Of The X-Files Has Everything I Loathe About Academic Readings Of Art

 

In one of my first pieces in the Criticizing Criticism Series I wrote the following:

Early in Stephen King’s magnum opus It, future best-selling novelist Bill Denborough is in the middle of his college writing course. All of his fellow classmates and teachers are pretentious, who are exactly the kinds of people that critics of higher learning have been arguing against for decades. Finally after another long endless lecture on symbolism that everybody has agreed about for over an hour, but the class keeps droning, Denborough gets to his feet and says the following:

“Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics…culture…history…aren’t those natural ingredients in any story if it’s told well? I mean…can’t you guys just let a story be a story?

After a long silence, the instructor says softly ‘as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, ‘Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories?” Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in trying to make a buck?”

When Bill ‘honestly considers the question and replied, “I think that’s pretty close to the truth, in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.”

 

As I said: "In less than a few pages (King) has successfully explained what has been the eternal dissonance between critics and scholars for centuries and certainly in the last several decades in particular."

Now in the years that have passed since then I've basically hewed to this path when it comes to my writing and I tend to admire those critics I've met at this site and others who more or less tend to focus on letting a story be a story.  I've also read quite a few prominent critics in the field of TV who are more than willing to stick to the line of appreciation. And it's because of this I've now realized the difference between a critical reading of a TV show or movie as opposed to an academic one. There's a fair amount of overlap between the two but at this point I can tell the difference.

When a good critic, whether they are Alan Sepinwall or Emily St. James (my readers will know that I've referred to them multiple times in by own writing) looks at a TV show such as Breaking Bad or Lost, they are more interested in telling you why the show worked for them from the standpoint of plot, character or direction. Every so often they'll look at certain racial or gender standpoints but they only do so to use to explain this as a work of pop culture and its flaws as such, not to grind an axe. Basically they're interested in what made it a good story.

But an academic by and large doesn't care about what made a TV show work as part of entertainment or pop culture.  Their metric is to look at historic, socio-political and cultural factors and figure out what this work of art reflected in it. They're not so much interested in whether you want to see this show again by their writing but turning certain aspects of it into a term paper, with multiple footnotes sourced to academic journals rarely if ever using anyone connected to the show as source material. They want to turn something that you loved watching into a homework assignment.  The critics I mentioned wanted to tell you want to see the show afterwards; the scholars look at the show and decide to write an essay that they expect to be graded on by Monday

Now I'm not entirely opposed to those who take an academic view of TV shows: I've actually been reading quite a few scholarly journals that do so as well as certain essay collections of shows I've enjoyed over the years.  But the ones that work the best never forget that this about the TV show first and the socio-anything second at the very most.  In the best of them you get the sense the writers enjoyed revisited these TV series and want you to come away wanting to do the same. I didn't get that feeling from a book I recently checked out from the library The Legacy of The X-Files. I had hoped it from the first group and not only is it from the second group, it represents the worst aspects of academic and biased writing.

It would come as a shock to me if any of the scholars who wrote essays for this book are over the age of 30 or watched the TV series when they were growing up if they were older.  It is purely an academic writing: all of the essay writers are either professors or PhD students or candidates, only two of them are writing about TV or film and perhaps most telling the majority of them are not from America. Considering that The X-Files is a quintessentially American program even those who live in Britain would have a certain detachment from it. So one can tell from the start this isn't about spending good times with a familiar show: it's about looking at it from every scholarly perspective rather then one of TV.  (Though you should know upfront the essays I'm going to turn my glare on are not only written by Americans ) The introduction makes it clear it has no intention of recounting the production history of The X-Files:

"Rather it is to indicate the early context of the program's origins and initial broadcast and reception to begin to understand its legacy thirty years later. The seeds of the program's legacy were planted from the very beginning and led to it being part of, and even contributing to, a television revolution: the globalization of television and the expansion of new conglomerates  into television ownership and production; the intersection and collision of the program's creation with the rise of the internet and the new fan forums and the fusion of wider public cynicism in politics…"

I'll be honest, if I'd read the introduction of this book instead of skimming through it, I would have left on the shelves because this is the kind of analysis I loathe. It's basically talking about television without actually talking about television. Even the book makes it clear it is a 'vital work for researchers and students alike' which means its not for the millions of us who watched the show and loved it. I suppose some of us could take comfort if we knew in some schools The X-Files was part of an academic curriculum but having been in my share of college courses about TV and film (albeit twenty-five years ago) they always miss the forest for the trees.  I'd prefer them to have spent their time explaining why the mythology was, in fact, completely coherent from beginning to end, which any fan knows would have been futile but nevertheless a better use of their time and energy.

This would be bad enough on its own but I would be willing to let that go and leave this book for those who need to reduce everything in life to an academic subject. What bothers me the most – and is really the subject of this piece – is the final section: "Intersectional Legacy: Identity & Representation'.

And those of you who are already burning with rage just by hearing those words, let me assure it is everything you think it is and somehow worse. The introductory paragraph pretty much tells you what you know is coming:

"Similarly, questions of race and racial identity are core to the series mythology, not least through the repeated discussion of alien hybrids and alien colonization, immediately invoking discourse on imperialism and the Western legacy of slavery and colonialism."

Yep, that's exactly what all of us thought when we saw the Alien Bounty Hunter for the first time.

And of course: "The X-Files centers whiteness and white superiority with people of color marginalized and even demonized." Last I checked the Syndicate was planning to turn all of Earth into a slave race, not just Africa and South America.

Does it get worse? Naturally. The first essay 'A Reparative Reading of mad/disabled black veterans in 'Sleepless'. To be clear only five pages of this 'scholarly reading' dealing with the episode Sleepless. There are six pages that deal with black people as soldiers that are the meat of the essay.  The most generous interpretation is that these two 'writers' wanted to do a racial studies piece on the military, saw 'Sleepless' the night before and then decided to merge the two. And just to check off the other box there's the fact that he's disabled, which is another issue. Just to be clear the series did a few other episodes on Vietnam and Howard Gordon wrote another one about a White POW who basically did a variation of the exact same thing and suffered the same fate as Augustus Cole.  (See my piece on Howard Gordon from last month.) But why let the actual TV show get the way of the usual white supremacy bit?

Next is the inevitable story about the use of the 'rape by deception trope which in the minds of this authors is 'rarely talked about'. She clearly hasn't read Monsters of the Week, which discusses all of this in detail as well as the often problematic aspects and indeed that's not in the source material, though somehow Monica Lewinsky is quoted.  The series acknowledges that Dana Scully was a groundbreaking character for her time and revolutionary in her own way but argues she was positioned as 'a side kick not a co-lead.' Again this would come as a shock to those of us who realize that Anderson nailed Scully early and that she was the stronger character.  It brings up the usual times that Scully was threatened with violence while of course ignoring the number of times Mulder was in similar predicaments and how Scully had to save his ass far more often.  Naturally she ends the final image of the series as a 'reminder of inevitable destruction and death'. And as the final nail it argues that so many of the episodes that have sympathy for the 'other' feel patronizing while those that involve revenge  are muddled by the 'monster' status of the characters."  I suppose we should be grateful that vampires and werewolves aren't real or she'd be arguing that the shows take a negative portrayal of the rights of the undead.

Then there's one by a Czech writer who makes the argument of 'Mulder's queerness' because and you have to see it to believe it : "Even though he is able-bodied, white, middle class and heterosexual, he resists the patriarchal system which is represented by the FBI, law and government'. So the fact that he's an FBI agent is somehow irrelevant to this reading. But wait "I argue that Mulder's voluntary outsider status, opposition to authority and feminization, can be read as queer."

It gets worse from there arguing that Mulder's decision to seek out women as resources is read as 'deeply feminine' and the fact that Mulder and Scully never hooked up for seven years.  The author's biggest argument is the queer fandom that have it canon. Clearly this author has never spent any time at fanfic.com where your sexuality can depend on who's writing you.  God knows what she would have thought had she come across a fanfic where the Syndicate had gay orgies. (Pretty sure they're out there somewhere.)

The piece de resistance comes with the piece 'Disability and The X-Files which argues and I quote "Ableism is a structure of power'.  This is the one that really makes me want to throw up. The sweet innocent and demonic cripple trope, the discussion of genetic mutants…oh and she thinks 'Home' the only episode that has been taken out of rotation probably should be banned because of its presentation of 'demonic hillbillies'.  It doesn't shock me that the writer of this episode is legally blind and therefore can't get the full picture of what makes The X-Files a great show.

Even the last piece, which talks about one of the great triumphs of The X-Files 'the Scully effect'  can't help but take shots at the series. It acknowledges that Scully is a great character and everything that both she and Gillian Anderson did. But even then it still can't help but taking shots at the show, not the least of which involves a critique by Richard Dawkins when it comes to the debate:

This is fictional and therefore defensible as entertainment. A fair defense, you might think…Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational theory loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar? Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable."

First of all this proves to me that Dawkins has never watched any television at all. If he had he would have known The X-Files is science fiction and would therefore have not watched it. (He probably hasn't watched any procedurals either.) The fact the writer seems to support this idea means that she doesn't seem to understand the template of the series. I will admit it would be more realistic if Scully had been right at least a little more often but then the show wouldn't have been as much fun.

Look you'll get no argument from me that there are problematic aspects of The X-Files that go beyond the fact that it came out over thirty years ago. I've written about some of them before and I actually intend to write more of them the closer we get to the revival.  But there is a vast difference between legitimate criticisms and invented ones. In fact every time I read these kinds of 'think pieces' what comes to mind immediately is the way the toxic masculine fanbase online will review bomb any show that they consider too 'woke'  The writings in these pieces may be more intellectual then those of the philistines who body shame Bella Ramsey or call the most recent version of Star Trek 'DEI Academy' but in either case it gets back to the same issue that King said at the start: they can't just let a story be a story. In either case they take a lot of pleasure out of things we love and I abhor it, not merely from my professional opinion as a critic but as a fan.

None of this will make me love The X-Files any less, of course; that is its real legacy. Unlike what the authors of this book think the only real legacy a work of art needs to have is that it can draw in new fans years after it came out, that people still celebrate it long after it is gone and that we still rewatch every time we get a chance. We don't want to write research papers on it; we want to write fan fiction and tributes online even decades after the fact. That's all fans ever want of a show, really. If these scholars don't get this, well, to quote a different iconic institution satirizing a different fandom: 'Get a life, you people. It's just a TV show."