The American Dream in The X-Files: 2Shy, The Walk, Oubliette
 |
| https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1681421067737350150 |
3x06 2Shy (Monster of the Week)
Unfortunately the obvious reference to the American dream that this episode makes is to one of Roosevelt's four freedoms, freedom from want, or rather in true dystopian X-Files mode, to its extreme of obesity. A serial killer who only attacks obese women is rather calculated to alarm an audience in the USA since CDC figures say the prevalence of obesity stood at 30.5% at the end of the nineties, rising to 41.9% in March 2020. The uncomfortable fact here is that globally you would expect poor people to be thin, but this is also combined in the USA with a diet industry and high incidence of cosmetic surgery, leading to an occurence of rich people starving themselves to be thin and poor people being obese because they can only afford junk food.
Did I say that the show portrays the events of each episode against the backdrop of the USA and doesn't half cast some (what would now be called) shade?
3x07 The Walk (Monster of the Week)
Again the supernatural action of the show takes place against a background depicting and criticising aspects of the dream. Here the most obvious reference is the one which has come up several times already, of how the US's military-industrial complex screws people up. The country is incredibly deferential to its ridiculously high proportion of veterans, and of course the point of the country's military spending is idealistically to defend the dream. Yet so many of these walking wounded have been permanently injured in one way or another by their service: defending the dream can screw you over and you won't necessarily get much in the way of help or sympathy. I'm particularly thinking that exactly the kind of people in this show exist in real life, but are even less fortunate, such as the veterans of the Enewatak Atoll cleanup, who are now getting really sick but are still having to campaign.
3x08 Oubliette (Monster of the Week)
I was going to say that Oubliette doesn't reference the American dream at all, but actually I think it does in an oblique way, which I'm not at all sure I'm going to be able to communicate. I have kept finding myself harking back to the freedoms so integral to the American dream, although less to the quote from Bill Clinton I included in the introduction to these posts where the dream is defined as being given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you, if you work hard and play by the rules. With sledge hammer subtlety the episode smashes Clinton's comment apart by pointing out what happens with the people who go as far as their ability and whim will take them, but don't play by the rules and may only work at things which are illegal.
This is how I think this episode about an abuser is reflecting the American dream. There is a contradiction that the dream is built on giving everyone certain opportunities and freedoms, and this means that the dream allows these things to people who will use them monumentally badly. I was beginning to wonder whether it was just me wondering whether this potential to go wrong was built into the American dream when I discovered that actually I was far from the first. Here Lincoln is talking about the risks of giving everyone the right of involvement in government, although he is talking about it connection with slavery, and these are exactly the risks which I think apply to the rest of the dream:
'In the years that followed, Lincoln explored such questions publicly and privately, eventually distilling his own position into three simple sentences: 'As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
'And democracy, it almost went without saying, was for Lincoln the greatest form of government. He realized this was not something everyone took for granted. "Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights to men, as I have, in part, stated them," he wrote in notes to himself in 1854. "Ours began by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant and vicious to share in government . . . .We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us."' (Ian Cullen: The American Dream - A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, p.86.)
Not just democracy, but in the American dream this applies to everything else so that everyone has to have the opportunity to improve themselves and go as far as Bill Clinton said. Lincoln highlighted the contradiction I've seen, that there will be some who seem too weak, and also highlighted that the dream is predicated on those people improving. What this X-Files episode does is highlight the risk of that part of the dream: giving people freedom gives them the freedom to go wrong. It is actually built in.
He also highlights one of the things which most surprises me as an outsider: the way Americans call their system of government an experiment. I have kept noticing, in all the discussion about January 6th, Donald Trump, etc, that people keep returning to the principles of equal justice and the principles of elections and saying that if they are overturned, it means the end of the experiment. For example in the tweet from a parody Jack Smith which illustrates this post, although I have seen it elsewhere, repeatedly.
That's the contradiction: it's not only a dream, but it's an experiment.
As I go through these posts I am going to keep a tally of how many episodes of Core Mythology and Monster of the Week types have significant content making the American dream in effect part of the plot rather than the omnipresent setting, and so far we have
Core Mythology: 16 (7 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men, Anasazi, The Blessing Way and Paperclip.)
Monster of the Week: 41 (8 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless and Fresh Bones.)
As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.