tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25448914789703735352024-03-19T08:47:29.188+00:00Cult TV BlogThat Blog Where The Bloke With No Shirt Blogs About Cult TVJohn Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comBlogger764125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-22800832281531003032023-09-29T13:46:00.002+01:002023-09-29T13:46:24.135+01:00This blog has moved!<p><span style="background-color: white;">Future posts will appear <a href="https://culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive">here</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive</span></b></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;">or <a href="http://culttvblog.substack.com">here</a></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; text-align: center;"><b>culttvblog.substack.com</b> </p><p style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;">The archive of posts will remain here, unless something happens to it.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-65613278299536476712023-09-28T00:30:00.001+01:002023-09-28T00:30:00.140+01:00The Organization: Rodney Spurling and Peter Frame (Seventies TV Season)<p>Future posts on this blog will not appear on blogspot. They will be at </p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive</span></b></p><p>or</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">culttvblog.substack.com</span></b> </p><p>I am delighted to kick off my season of posts about 1970s TV shows with this show, which was the winner of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Television Drama Series in 1973, an award which was well deserved in my opinion. Perhaps I should stress that it is not to be confused with the film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, which may be better known in the US. Actually it may also be better known here, because I can't think why all the rubbish 1970s TV series are so dominant when there is quality like this lying about.</p><p>On the surface The Organization is a programme about the machinations and politicking in a large organisation called Greatrick. That is the introduction you will read all over t'internet and it may even say that on the DVD release, which is probably one of the reasons I'd heard of this show but never fancied watching it, because I find sitcoms about office politics deadly. But this show is much much more than that. If I tell you that we never see the oft-mentioned chairman and the business of the company is never made entirely clear (soft drinks and toys are mentioned at various times), it should give you some idea that there is much more going on here. In fact it's a portrait of a particular time and a documentation of people's responses to the stresses; actually scrub that because it makes this show sound terribly stodgy and completely misses how entertaining it is.</p><p>The show manages to depict all sorts of aspects of human behaviour and also encapsulates a lot of the concerns about modern life that I have often noted in the TV of the sixties. For example up to this episode we have seen a man apply for a job in Greatrick and the work he goes to to ensure he gets the job: he hires an agency to virtually guarantee he gets it by working on his every movement and response during the interview, even to the extent of him going through dress rehearsals under real conditions. This probably wouldn't be that unusual these days but I think in 1972 this would have been strong stuff and a scary indicator of the way the world was going. I wish I had the sociological history to know exactly when things like personnel, time and motion, audit and public relations hit the business world in the UK (although I have been surprised to find their historical origins go further back than I expected), because my perception has been that there is a common presentation of these things as scary innovations in sixties and seventies TV. I don't necessarily mean quite as scary as the Business Efficiency Bureau in The Avengers, although I think the show encapsulates a fear, as does The Prisoner in some episodes. I have no way of being certain that the fear of the brave new business world was real, but these shows must have perceived some real fear to draw on.</p><p>In Rodney Spurling and Peter Frame the Public Relations department is assessed by a psychologist called Dr Ducker (presumably an obvious reference to Peter Drucker), who meets with every member of the department. We go from the natural anxiety before his arrival to the way the entire thing turns into chaos as every member of the department says exactly the wrong thing. In between we see much of the workings of the organisation and I have to say that it's fascinating. You never get the sensation in this show that we are watching meaningless ordinary events as you do in some sitcoms: every event has a meaning which is explored and teased out, and builds up the picture. We see the staff relating to each other and of course how people react as the assessment of the department goes horribly wrong. Because obviously the thing to say to a management psychologist is that your job is completely pointless and unnecessary.</p><p>If I have a criticism it would be that the ending of this episode is rather weak and something more really needed to happen instead of the department just carrying on.</p><p>I realise that I probably haven't been able to give you an adequate idea of what this show is like so instead I'm going to end with its theme tune which is an absolute BANGER:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dywr5C_AuFlVgJZezE10XtN0L6ymCQqBEFNEsc4PCBmLLwKemfwtoLVjQiSLPixgX7riHPZ76tUh7We3QNVUA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>This blog is mirrored at </p><p>culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive(from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)</p><p>Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-31710835787755362042023-09-24T14:20:00.006+01:002023-09-24T14:20:53.618+01:00Seventies TV Season: Introduction<p>Well, that abortive move from Blogger didn't last very long did it? I don't know what happened but Overblog won't be getting the benefit of the millions of page hits that would result from hosting this blog, and instead I'm going to be absconding to Tumblr (address below). I'm still playing with it and will post here to announce my final switch.</p><p>This post is the introduction to a projected series of posts on 1970s TV series. I am going to try to write one post per series on a number of series which I really think are rather good, in a similar way to what I previously did about 1980s TV. When I did that I found that the shows I featured were mainly ones that I didn't feel I could do justice to in some way, but nonetheless could do an introductory post to the series and focus on one episode.</p><p>There are a number of problems with blogging about 1970s TV shows which I didn't find so much with 1980s shows.</p><p>The first is that whenever I have written about it in the past I have found myself focusing on the more distressing aspects of the decade: the conflict, poverty, and so on. These things tend naturally to be reflected in the TV of the time, and that casts a heavy historic pall over it.</p><p>The second is that that the decade is (in my mind) fanous for its sitcoms and I personally have never got on very well with sitcoms, which naturally makes it difficult to blog about.</p><p>And the third is that the television of the decade tends to be problematic in ways which attract the gammons. In fact it's a bit difficult when people know you blog about old TV and they tend to assume that you're a racist, Brexiteer, vote Tory, hate people of colour and immigrants, and think racist and sexist 'comedy' is hysterical. One of the reasons I rather loud pedal the woke on here is that it keeps those kind of people away because of all people those people love expressing their stupid opinions and I will not platform them. The official position of this blog is that it is never funny to make fun of people because of their race, sex or sexual orientation, and that means that some shows will not be appearing here. It is always funny to make fun of Tories because they could stop being Tories.</p><p>Obviously this has meant I have had to make some judgements here. I keep meaning to write a post about the TV which I don't write about but absent that I have made some decisions about what will not appear in this series of posts. For example (although it was made in the nineties) the only way Heil Honey I'm Home should be discussed in the public sphere is to delineate how offensive and anti-semitic it is. If you read the comments on the episode on YouTube, though, you will see the sort of people I want to put off reading this blog, saying that people are making a lot of fuss about nothing and you can't say anything any more without upsetting people, and there's no reason it shouldn't have a commercial release. The Shoah, that's what's wrong with it, it's not funny and they're pathetic man-babies who don't have the warmth and human empathy to care that the author of mass slaughter is not entertaining.</p><p>Among 1970s shows which will not be appearing here are Love Thy Neighbour. To me it crosses a boundary into negative depiction of Black people and for that reason alone, isn't funny. Curry and Chips (although it was 1969) stars Spike Milligan browned up to play an Irishman of Pakistani heritage, thus managing to be racist about two groups at once. Till Death Us Do Part and In SIckness and in Health also will never appear here.</p><p>There is, however a difference between glorifying the TV of the past *because* it is offensive and you like people to be insulted, and a nuanced judgement that there was some quality television which took place against a social and cultural background which has passed, and may be read against that background. For example, the gammons love Benny Hill because of his racial and sexual perspective. My personal opinion is that he has genuine streaks of comedy genius and can make me howl with laughter, while still depicting a lot of things which are clearly unacceptable. Another example, strangely, is Monty Python's Flying Circus: if you watch closely there is an incredible amount of homophobia and some very wrong attitudes towards women in there, and I've been trying to think why Benny Hill and Monty Python are dearly beloved: I suspect that it is because of their public perception. Nobody in their right mind would ever look at Benny Hill and conclude that he was setting out to be vile, because the man was plainly a sweetie. Similarly, the entire Monty Python team get a similar repute with the public (although I'm not sure John Cleese isn't going off it).</p><p>Basically, I'm going to make a judgement on the basis of whether I think the artiste and show is vile or not.</p><p>Talking of public perception, there is another problem with 1970s TV which is that the entire British broadcasting industry at the time was absolutely riddled with child abusers and rapists, making the most of their reputation with the public to get away with as much as possible. I sometimes think there isn't a celebrity of my youth left who hasn't been caught out: and I even wrote to Jimmy Savile asking him to fix it for me. As always if subjects some up in blog posts which I think might be difficult I will put a warning at the top. Tumblr now have a system of community filters for posts, and I don't think they're optional: it may be that if I have to filter a post as mature you won't be able to read it unless you're logged in to Tumblr, but I'm afraid that's just the way the rules work there.</p><p>Finally, the seventies were notorious for being (or trying to be) incredibly sexy. Long time readers will know that I love the sexy stuff and so again will make a judgement if anything sexy comes up in these posts, and put a warning/community filter if necessary. </p><p>This blog is mirrored at </p><p>tumblr.com/culttvblog (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)</p><p>Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-1366771220727642662023-09-22T13:40:00.001+01:002023-09-22T13:40:39.708+01:00I'm not moving yet<p> Hold that thought and keep checking here because over-blog have deleted my blog without telling me so I'm not moving yet. 🤔</p><p>I remember a teacher telling me in years to come every office would have a computer and it would make everything much easier...</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-39427095982203125912023-09-19T22:46:00.001+01:002023-09-21T00:01:45.798+01:00Coming Next: This Blog is Moving!<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG2W3SbHcM3UVwkY6OfMHO62i24Q2g9uQ_biDA6rlfGtHRWS4a9z1ZPHMIFsJMV2NOeTkRdei8Ue3pmpwxzMTKiZtpNEULS_sPcmMquo6P7Plrt_kD-L8Geaimr6oKwZKLrDTO27UMF7KQtuayDQhRLh3-B-vJPkSM7PneEE78xwQD3l70uwvF5GZi6bs/s1891/Screenshot_20230917-012550.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1891" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG2W3SbHcM3UVwkY6OfMHO62i24Q2g9uQ_biDA6rlfGtHRWS4a9z1ZPHMIFsJMV2NOeTkRdei8Ue3pmpwxzMTKiZtpNEULS_sPcmMquo6P7Plrt_kD-L8Geaimr6oKwZKLrDTO27UMF7KQtuayDQhRLh3-B-vJPkSM7PneEE78xwQD3l70uwvF5GZi6bs/w229-h400/Screenshot_20230917-012550.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>This post is a brief summary of what is coming next on this blog.<p></p><p>First and perhaps most important, is that I have decided to move the blog from Blogger to another blogging platform (the mirror on Substack will be staying where it is). The reason is increasing frustration with Blogger: it's slow in comparison to Substack and has an increasing tendency to put my innocuous posts behind adult content warning for no reason apparent to me, and with no possibility of appeal.</p><p>I have finally fixed on a long-established blogging platform called Overblog to move to: it's easy to use and doesn't even have an app. But the main reason I chose Overblog, and you may want to call me superficial, is that my heart was stolen by the idea of being greeted by the words 'quel plaisir de vous revoir!'. Why did I stay with Blogger ranting at me for so long???</p><p>So from here on the blogspot version of this blog will not be added to and future posts will be <a href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/?m=0">here</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">culttvblog.over-blog.com</span></p><p>You can comment there using name and email without having to sign up.</p><p>Posts will continue to be cross posted <a href="https://culttvblog.substack.com/">here</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">culttvblog.substack.com</span></p><p>If you want to subscribe by email you can do so there and can comment after signing up.</p><p>Television-wise, I think that what will be coming next is probably going to be some Seventies TV. Certainly I have Terry Preston's Out out on the dining table again: it's proper quality television and I think needs the attention which blogging about it would give it. If you haven't seen it, you would like it if you like shows like The Professionals, The Sweeney, and so on. It depicts the same world, but with a whole layer of sophistication which is like a breath of fresh air.</p><p>Otherwise I have discovered a rich seam of seventies TV programmes down the back of the internet, and I'm very pleased to find that even I've never heard of some of them, and there are a good number which draw my interest and are definitely not rubbish. I am thinking of doing a series of posts, one post per show, focusing on one episode, like I did with a number of eighties TV shows. There is a certain irony going on here: since I stopped working I haven't had the money to buy TV series so have mostly been reliant on various pirate internet sources, and have mostly been downloading things because of their habit of vanishing off the internet again. I think the situation of cult TV on the internet will be improved by the collapse of Network DVD so that there is nobody to enforce their copyright. There is an irony in that my 1TB hard drive is now full, as is a back up external drive, and I have therefore been forced to invest in some blank DVDs to save these things on. We're going backwards for Christmas.</p><p>Did I happen to mention that by prioritising competition, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction because you can actively CHOOSE not to put money in the pocket of one of the three businesses that run the planet?</p><p>Speaking of alternative economy I have been watching the 1987-88 ABC Max Headroom series, paying more attention to it than I have in the past, and really appreciating it. I am particularly struck by the way there are people who are 'non-people', or blanks, in the jargon of the show, who have deleted their history and don't exist officially. They don't even have surnames as such. In a world where it is illegal to have an off switch it's an act of rebellion to do so. It's possible that my grasshopper mind will have gone off the subject before I get to it but I would like to go through the series.</p><p>Not immediately, but I want to go through The Prisoner again, following the assumption that Number 6 is a plant. I last went through the whole series ending in February 2023 so would want to start this in the new year at the earliest.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-7026103846090057072023-09-18T13:26:00.001+01:002023-09-18T13:26:59.130+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: I think these Conclusions will be Final<p>The introduction to this series of posts on the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1</p><p>So I've reached the end of Season 4 and I think I can truthfully say I'm now burned out at this series of posts and shouldn't pick it up for another whole season. Of course I may comment if an episode I watch in the future particularly makes me think of the subject.</p><p>I have three over-riding conclusions from doing this series of posts.</p><p>The first is that as an outsider the picture of the American dream which is in my head is probably formed by The X-Files. That's why the show makes me think of the subject, and obviously blogging is cheaping than therapy. I have realised that actual Americans tend to see the subject differently and accentuate different things.</p><p>The second is that the show tends to foreground something (for example part of the series mythology or a monster of the week) while what is in the background connects the show to the American dream. I suppose this is inevitable in any show, that it would necessarily feature the nation where it is set in the background (G*d help anyone who thinks The Avengers showcases Britain in the background, although we could definitely do with Steed dealing with a megalomaniac Prime Minister before marching off into the sunset with Britannia, while scattering Euros to the populace). There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that any reference to the American dream was deliberate, so it may simply be my reading of the show. Nonetheless the show's clever weaving of reality into the fiction naturally brings up key aspects of American life and the show focuses on the sort of things you would expect it to: injustice, lack of transparency, unethical experimentation, inequality. Of their nature these things poke holes in the American dream so the connection is rather inevitable.</p><p>Thirdly I am particularly proud of my theory that you could read the show as indicating that the American dream is a part of the conspiracy depicted in the show. The whole point is that the American populace are being distracted from the reality by a governmental (or para-governmental) conspiracy, so naturally life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are part of the distraction.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-53728158220193112882023-09-17T20:54:00.003+01:002023-09-17T20:54:25.438+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Tempus Fugit, Max, Synchrony, Small Potatoes, Zero Sum, Elegy, Demons, Gethsemane<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiemg5FCJ4-wNOQVUWhP9utXKp60t3Pm3SwXo547gy4AS9BYEspeKTgg06m6IaMUOUMzeW0Q1Q0k6fVvFR3Vk8hJVED0AgE7XL2QvigP8y2ZPwkyr7mkBc7kBqM1hukegGM_NGSVg0jAdEGI43JOpU_f-i0wjovGdvwxEDQ1EFVOg-55HwDe64QLZB1TVw/s1024/Delta_Air_Lines_Boeing_737-800_cabin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiemg5FCJ4-wNOQVUWhP9utXKp60t3Pm3SwXo547gy4AS9BYEspeKTgg06m6IaMUOUMzeW0Q1Q0k6fVvFR3Vk8hJVED0AgE7XL2QvigP8y2ZPwkyr7mkBc7kBqM1hukegGM_NGSVg0jAdEGI43JOpU_f-i0wjovGdvwxEDQ1EFVOg-55HwDe64QLZB1TVw/w400-h266/Delta_Air_Lines_Boeing_737-800_cabin.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts on the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found at: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>4x17 Tempus Fugit and 4x18 Max (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>I'm a bit surprised on rewatching this two-parter to find that I didn't find it replete with possible references to the dream, which was what I was expecting. Instead the criticism of the dream which is hammered home at length is, of course, that there is a huge conspiracy and the justice and freedom from fear you might expect are possible illusory.</p><p><b>4x19 Synchrony (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x20 Small Potatoes (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x21 Zero Sum (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>I'm not a great believer in the 'few bad apples' argument whether applied to law enforcement or churches, because the few bad apples are usually just what you know about and there's all sorts of wrong going on behind the scenes. Despite my focus here on reading the show's great conspiracy as being related to the American dream, here I think Skinner is genuinely acting as an individual so his actions don't reflect on the corruption and conspiracy of the dream depicted elsewhere. I am aware that you could also read this episode the exact opposite way, that Skinner is exactly the sort of government official who makes the American dream an unattainable fantasy.</p><p><b>4x22 Elegy (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream. I was hoping to say that this episode might show that part of the dream could include being looked after if you are not so able, but in the show's relentless depiction of everything unpleasant in human experience, Nurse Innes has rather prevented me exploring that avenue.</p><p><b>4x23 Demons (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>Season 4 was made in the late 1990s and I think this episode may obliquely reference False Memory Syndrome, one of the hotly contested topics in psychology at the time, and again apply real history to the show. The application to the American dream, although I'm probably stretching this connection too far, would be that False Memory Syndrome feeds into the show's way of setting the show's conspiracy into the USA social setting also brings other aspects of US life, and thus of the American dream, into the conspiracy.</p><p><b>4x24 Gethsemane (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream. </p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 30 (with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men, Anasazi, The Blessing Way and Paperclip.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 67 (with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, Syzygy, Home, Teliko, and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-88617601270218978562023-09-17T12:34:00.002+01:002023-09-17T12:34:48.312+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Paper Hearts, El Mundo Gira, Leonard Betts, Never Again, Memento Mori, Kaddish, Unrequited<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="page"><div class="bg-photo-container" style="height: 480px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; width: 346.24px; z-index: 1;"><div class="bg-photo" style="background: url("https://themes.googleusercontent.com/image?id=1sbDCVdylfaB7TKeFHt378q5EKX7N0LZqrNn6Rj52PMX_6iCNiKeZmsuGc-TyI4VlelfT&options=w480") center top / cover repeat scroll rgb(132, 12, 21); filter: blur(0px); height: calc(100% + 0px); left: 0px; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: calc(100% + 0px);"></div></div><div class="page_body" style="position: relative; z-index: 20;"><div class="centered" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 922px; min-height: 100vh; padding: 10px 0px;"><header class="centered-top-container" role="banner" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 0 auto; padding: 0px 16px;"><div class="centered-top" style="margin-bottom: 5px; position: relative;"><a class="return_link" href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #f20e1f; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; position: absolute; text-decoration-line: none;"><button class="svg-icon-24-button back-button rtl-reversible-icon flat-icon-button ripple" style="appearance: button; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-color: initial; border-radius: 50%; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: content-box; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: 24px; line-height: 0; margin: -12px; min-width: 24px; outline: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 12px; position: relative; width: 24px;"><svg class="svg-icon-24"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_arrow_back_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></button></a><div class="search" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); display: flex; float: none; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0px; position: absolute; right: 0px; transition-duration: 0.5s; transition-property: width; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1); width: 24px; z-index: 101;"><button aria-label="Search" class="search-expand touch-icon-button" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; appearance: button; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; flex: 0 0 auto; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px;"><div class="flat-icon-button ripple" style="background: 0px 0px; border-radius: 50%; border: 0px; box-sizing: content-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; line-height: 0; margin: -12px; outline: 0px; padding: 12px; position: relative;"><svg class="svg-icon-24 search-expand-icon"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_search_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></div></button><div class="section" id="search_top" name="Search (Top)"><div class="widget BlogSearch" data-version="2" id="BlogSearch1" style="margin-bottom: 16px;"><div class="widget-content" role="search"><form action="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/search" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; display: flex; flex: 1 0 0px; height: 36px; margin-bottom: 8px; padding-bottom: 8px; transition: border-color 0.2s cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) 0.5s; z-index: 101;" target="_top"></form></div></div></div></div><div class="clearboth" style="clear: both;"></div><div class="blog-name container" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; margin: 0px 48px; min-height: 48px; opacity: 1; padding-top: 12px; transition-duration: 0.5s; transition-property: opacity;"><div class="container section" id="header" name="Header" style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 0px;"><div class="widget Header" data-version="2" id="Header1" style="margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 0px;"><div class="header-widget"><div><h1 style="color: white; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 13px; text-align: center; width: 218.24px;"><a href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: white; text-decoration-line: none;">Cult TV Blog</a></h1></div><p style="color: white; margin: 10px 0px 0px; opacity: 0.8; text-align: center;">That Blog Where The Bloke With No Shirt Blogs About Cult TV</p></div></div></div><nav role="navigation"><div class="clearboth no-items section" id="page_list_top" name="Page list (top)" style="clear: both;"></div></nav></div></div></header><div style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 0 auto;"><div class="vertical-ad-container no-items section" id="ads" name="Ads" style="float: right; margin-right: 16px; width: 128px;"></div><main class="centered-bottom" id="main" role="main" style="outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1"><div class="main section" id="page_body" name="Page body"><div class="widget Blog" data-version="2" id="Blog1" style="margin-bottom: 16px;"><div class="blog-posts hfeed container"><article class="post-outer-container" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 0px; min-height: 40px; padding: 16px; width: auto;"><div class="post-outer" style="border: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><div class="post" style="margin: 0px;"><a name="108210100239745170" style="background: transparent; color: #f20e1f;"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" style="float: left; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 20px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0px 8px; max-width: calc(100% - 48px);">The American Dream in The X-Files: Paper Hearts, El Mundo Gira, Leonard Betts, Never Again, Memento Mori, Kaddish, Unrequited</h3><div class="post-share-buttons post-share-buttons-top" style="float: right; margin-left: 0px; position: relative;"><div class="byline post-share-buttons goog-inline-block" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); display: inline-block; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: top; width: 24px;"><div aria-owns="sharing-popup-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" class="sharing" data-title="The American Dream in The X-Files: Paper Hearts, El Mundo Gira, Leonard Betts, Never Again, Memento Mori, Kaddish, Unrequited" style="float: right;"><button aria-controls="sharing-popup-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" aria-label="Share" class="sharing-button touch-icon-button" id="sharing-button-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" role="button" style="appearance: button; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px;"><div class="flat-icon-button ripple" style="background: 0px 0px; border-radius: 50%; border: 0px; box-sizing: content-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; line-height: 0; margin: -12px; outline: 0px; padding: 12px; position: relative;"><svg class="svg-icon-24"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_share_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></div></button><div class="share-buttons-container"></div></div></div></div><div class="post-header" style="clear: left; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); margin: 0px; width: inherit;"><div class="post-header-line-1"><span class="byline post-author vcard" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 24px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span class="post-author-label">By </span><span class="fn"><a class="g-profile" href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907" rel="author" style="background: transparent; color: #f20e1f; text-decoration-line: none;" title="author profile">John Berry (he/h</a></span></span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">The introduction to this series of posts about the </span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1</span></div><div class="post-header-line-1"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></div><div class="post-header-line-1"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">(Reposted in an attempt to stop Blogger putting it behind an adult warning: how's that free speech going for y'all?)</span></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content float-container" id="post-body-108210100239745170" style="color: #666666; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 1.5em 0px 2em;"><p><b>4x10 Paper Hearts (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The episode brilliantly reuses the events of Samantha's abduction in Mulder's dream, turning it into her ********* by Roche. This of course means we are once again exposed to the news item about Nixon's secretary and the Rose Mary Stretch. If you listen carefully to the news that's on the TV during the ********* rather than paying attention to the events, it's actually telling us that it is unlikely that Rose Mary Woods actually deleted the recording she did by mistake. This brings Watergate back into the show, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and draw on the significance that the show is juxtaposing 1) Samantha's abudiction 2) suggesting the ********* was by a criminal rather than aliens and 3) news drawing our attention to the Watergate scandal saying that the deletion of the recording was unlikely to be accidental. I would suggest that this juxtaposition could be seen as directing our attention again to the cover-up in the heart of the state. I would suggest you could interpret this as the show using a dream to indicate that the state is rotten to the core and the American dream is part of the facade.</p><p><b>4x11 El Mundo Gira (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Once again the show foregrounds one thing, namely the myth of El Chupacabra and the strange fungal growth. However again the American dream is in the background, namely in the issue of immigration, which has repeatedly come up as problematic in the show, and yet is a core part of the American dream.</p><p><b>4x12 Leonard Betts (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x13 Never Again (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x14 Memento Mori (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x15 Kaddish (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The criticism of the American dream in this one rather hits you in the eye. It is that in a country where the entire founding of the country was around escaping religious persecution and which has a written constitution embodying religious freedom and freedom of speech, you hit a contradiction when you find citizens who think other people should not be free (or even alive) to practice their religion and feel free to say this. It is essentially the same quandary as the one in which everyone has the opportunity to better themselves but not necessarily the ability and that some people will hoard resources while others are starving: ultimately some people will actively interpret their freedoms as an opportunity to persecute other people or disadvantage them.</p><p><b>4x16 Unrequited (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Once again we have the military-industrial complex forming the background to this episode. Helpfully in the foreground the show gives us an actual real-life government cover-up conspiracy, once again indicating that the justice and freedom from fear which are part of the dream may not be as real as you would hope.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 25 (with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men, Anasazi, The Blessing Way and Paperclip.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 64 (with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, Syzygy, Home, Teliko, and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p></div><div class="post-bottom" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;"><div class="post-footer float-container" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; -webkit-box-ordinal-group: 2; clear: left; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); flex-wrap: wrap; flex: 1 1 auto; margin: 0px; order: 1; width: inherit;"><div class="post-footer-line post-footer-line-1" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 1 auto;"></div><div class="post-footer-line post-footer-line-2" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 1 auto;"><span class="byline post-labels" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 24px; margin-right: 1em; margin-top: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span class="byline-label"></span><a href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/search/label/90s%20TV" rel="tag" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border-radius: 15px; border: 1px solid rgb(247, 247, 247); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); display: inline-block; margin: 4px 4px 4px 0px; padding: 3px 8px; text-decoration-line: none;">90s TV</a> <a href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20American%20Dream%20in%20The%20X-Files" rel="tag" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border-radius: 15px; border: 1px solid rgb(247, 247, 247); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); display: inline-block; margin: 4px 4px 4px 0px; padding: 3px 8px; text-decoration-line: none;">The American Dream in The X-Files</a> <a href="https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20X-Files" rel="tag" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border-radius: 15px; border: 1px solid rgb(247, 247, 247); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); display: inline-block; margin: 4px 4px 4px 0px; padding: 3px 8px; text-decoration-line: none;">The X-Files</a></span></div></div><div class="post-share-buttons post-share-buttons-bottom" style="float: right; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 16px; position: relative;"><div class="byline post-share-buttons goog-inline-block" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); display: inline-block; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: top; width: 24px;"><div aria-owns="sharing-popup-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" class="sharing" data-title="The American Dream in The X-Files: Paper Hearts, El Mundo Gira, Leonard Betts, Never Again, Memento Mori, Kaddish, Unrequited" style="float: right;"><button aria-controls="sharing-popup-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" aria-label="Share" class="sharing-button touch-icon-button" id="sharing-button-Blog1-byline-108210100239745170" role="button" style="appearance: button; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px;"><div class="flat-icon-button ripple" style="background: 0px 0px; border-radius: 50%; border: 0px; box-sizing: content-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; line-height: 0; margin: -12px; outline: 0px; padding: 12px; position: relative;"><svg class="svg-icon-24"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_share_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></div></button><div class="share-buttons-container"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><section class="comments embed" data-num-comments="0" id="comments" style="border: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 20px;"><a name="comments" style="background: transparent; color: #f20e1f;"></a><h3 class="title" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px); color: #666666; font-size: 16px; height: 1px; line-height: 28px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 1px;">Comments</h3><div id="Blog1_comments-block-wrapper"></div><div class="footer"><div class="comment-form"><a name="comment-form" style="background: transparent; color: #f20e1f;"></a><iframe allowtransparency="allowtransparency" class="blogger-iframe-colorize blogger-comment-from-post" data-resized="true" frameborder="0" height="66px" id="comment-editor" name="comment-editor" src="https://www.blogger.com/comment/frame/2544891478970373535?po=108210100239745170&hl=en-GB&skin=contempo&blogspotRpcToken=8134773" style="margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 20px;" width="100%"></iframe></div></div></section></article></div></div></div></main></div><footer class="footer section" id="footer" name="Footer" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 0 auto; margin-top: auto;"><div class="widget Attribution" data-version="2" id="Attribution1" style="color: #666666; margin-bottom: 16px; margin-top: 1em; text-align: center;"><div class="widget-content" style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 0.5em;"><div class="blogger" style="line-height: 24px; margin-top: 0.5em;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #f20e1f; text-decoration-line: none;"><svg class="svg-icon-24"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_post_blogger_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg> Powered by Blogger</a></div><div class="image-attribution" style="font-size: 0.7em; line-height: 24px; margin-top: 1.5em;">Theme images by <a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/loops7?platform=blogger" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #f20e1f; text-decoration-line: none;">loops7</a></div></div></div></footer></div></div></div><aside class="sidebar-container container sidebar-invisible" role="complementary" style="background-color: white; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 3px; inset: 0px auto 0px 0px; max-width: 284px; overflow-y: auto; position: fixed; transform: translateX(-284px); transition-duration: 0.3s; transition-property: transform, -webkit-transform; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.6, 1); width: 284px; z-index: 101;"><div class="navigation" style="line-height: 0; padding: 16px;"><button class="svg-icon-24-button flat-icon-button ripple sidebar-back" style="appearance: button; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-color: initial; border-radius: 50%; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: content-box; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: 24px; line-height: 0; margin: -12px; min-width: 24px; outline: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 12px; position: relative; width: 24px;"><svg class="svg-icon-24"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_arrow_back_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></button></div><div class="sidebar_top_wrapper"><div class="sidebar_top section" id="sidebar_top" name="Sidebar (top)" style="overflow: auto;"><div class="widget Profile" data-version="2" id="Profile1" style="background: 0px 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 16px; width: 284px;"><div class="wrapper solo"><div class="widget-content individual" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907" rel="nofollow" style="background: transparent; color: #f20e1f; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="My photo" class="profile-img" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr23RvxJIhODPfslv9v0CY7hGAtYf0p8D50TK1pt9JrQWq4NB3L13zHeWPPJcyMVL2UjhTSZgasAT_Wj3KrTzjbHoISROmj3GibaDa__MpAHGWT2Ca3MB296gwSqa-30JUxyu1BXuPn6fVtHlYgTNuMfPR-5GOMY3mhVJFGVns6_eClw/s220/IMG_20230830_152408.jpg" style="border-radius: 50%; border: 0px; float: none; height: 120px; max-width: 100%; width: 120px;" width="120" /></a><div class="profile-info"><dl class="profile-datablock"><dt class="profile-data"><a class="profile-link g-profile" href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907" rel="author nofollow" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; background: 0px 0px; border: 0px; box-shadow: none; color: black; cursor: pointer; display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-size: 0.9em; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 1em; opacity: 0.87; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 1em; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: uppercase; width: auto;">JOHN BERRY (HE/HIM)</a></dt><dd class="profile-textblock profile-snippet snippet-container r-snippet-container" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.537); font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 16px; max-height: 192px; overflow: hidden; position: relative;"><div class="snippet-item r-snippetized" style="line-height: 24px;">This is the blog of my love for TV, mainly old and mainly British. This blog is for enjoyment not a chore, and you'll have noticed shirts are definitely an encumbrance and chore. This blog is mirrored at culttvblog.substack.com where you can still subscribe by email. https://wesayenough.co.uk/ tactical.vote https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/photo-id-youll-need</div><div class="snippet-fade r-snippet-fade" style="background: linear-gradient(to left, rgb(255, 255, 255) 0px, rgb(255, 255, 255) 20%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 100%); bottom: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; height: 24px; position: absolute; right: 0px; width: 96px;"></div></dd></dl><a class="profile-link visit-profile pill-button" href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907" rel="author" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; background: 0px 0px; border-radius: 12px; border: 1px solid; box-shadow: none; color: #f20e1f; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; flex-direction: column; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; opacity: 0.87; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 5px 20px; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: uppercase; width: auto;">VISIT PROFILE</a></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="sidebar_bottom section" id="sidebar_bottom" name="Sidebar (bottom)" style="padding-top: 16px; width: 284px;"><div class="widget BlogArchive" data-version="2" id="BlogArchive1" style="background: 0px 0px; margin: 0px 16px; padding: 0px 0px 16px;"><details class="collapsible extendable" style="overflow: hidden; transition: height 0.3s cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) 0s;"><summary style="cursor: pointer; display: block; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px;"><div class="collapsible-title" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex;"><h3 class="title" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; -webkit-box-ordinal-group: 1; flex: 1 1 auto; font-size: 16px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px; order: 0; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; text-wrap: nowrap;">Archive</h3><svg class="svg-icon-24 chevron-down"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_expand_more_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></div></summary></details></div><div class="widget Label" data-version="2" id="Label1" style="background: 0px 0px; border-top: 1px dashed rgb(200, 200, 200); margin: 0px 16px; padding: 16px 0px;"><details class="collapsible extendable" style="overflow: hidden; transition: height 0.3s cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) 0s;"><summary style="cursor: pointer; display: block; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px;"><div class="collapsible-title" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex;"><h3 class="title" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; -webkit-box-ordinal-group: 1; flex: 1 1 auto; font-size: 16px; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px; order: 0; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; text-wrap: nowrap;">Labels</h3><svg class="svg-icon-24 chevron-down"><use xlink:href="/responsive/sprite_v1_6.css.svg#ic_expand_more_black_24dp" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"></use></svg></div></summary></details></div></div></aside>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-48126305624012656542023-09-13T20:35:00.009+01:002023-09-13T20:39:39.596+01:00The Avengers: Box of Tricks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXmtHAKeb_wUn2Q2qO6lvoct1QwTvAQ2A2K6xp4jBa8Ct7rq96kOXXAxPgeWupZ3dSqbnjC2qxzGhGG3iDzSfIoLcYpCXhnuK64tXygvUq2WYa6m5P4md1lWpSOAtG7O4TYyiHuu2pjyZhnxLcrQAVY7aT0oRHZZpKfKPpsG_B6_TknQtjZBuVEQAyGw/s1500/imgonline-com-ua-collage-a8yQ26v2Wf.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1500" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCXmtHAKeb_wUn2Q2qO6lvoct1QwTvAQ2A2K6xp4jBa8Ct7rq96kOXXAxPgeWupZ3dSqbnjC2qxzGhGG3iDzSfIoLcYpCXhnuK64tXygvUq2WYa6m5P4md1lWpSOAtG7O4TYyiHuu2pjyZhnxLcrQAVY7aT0oRHZZpKfKPpsG_B6_TknQtjZBuVEQAyGw/w400-h134/imgonline-com-ua-collage-a8yQ26v2Wf.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>It's a strange world of mirrors, the cult TV blogosphere. We all plant ideas in each other's heads and bounce ideas off each other. This blog post was inspired by two coincidences, for example.<p></p><p>The first was that Mitchell Hadley commented how much he likes early Steed. Well, so do I. I love that early Steed is a much more mutable character than the later bowler-hatted agent employed by the ministry: we never really know who he is, he comes across as louche and could even be a criminal. Particularly he treats Venus Smith like dirt and she hates it but he carries on. In fact I think this is one of the reasons the Venus Smith episodes are unpopular.</p><p>Then I came across something else which reminded me of this episode (more anon). I see that I last opined about this episode nearly a decade ago (you can see the post in a series I did about Venus Smith by clicking the relevant tag in the menu). It's a pretty good blog post, even if I do say so myself, and reflects when I was younger and had more energy for these sorts of things. I particularly commented that I think viewers are made uncomfortable by the way Venus Smith looks positively childlike and yet is placed next to dodgy, possibly even criminal, Steed, and we all wonder where her mother is. Venus's role in this one is very much that of the inquisitive child, who insinuates herself where she's not welcome and says things she shouldn't, yet strangely sings with a mature woman's voice.</p><p>I commented before that I didn't really have much to add to the standard criticisms of this episode, namely that it's blindingly obvious what is going on and that the number of blondes and boxes get very confusing, and that is still the case. I don't think this episode half deserves the critical drubbing it gets on the internet but I think all the criticisms are realistic.</p><p>What made me think of the episode, though, was that in reading a book by James Randi I think I found a possible inspiration for Dr Gallam and his little boxes, in the shape of Dr Albert Abrams (1863 to 1924), who was actually a real doctor but instead became a millionaire practicing his self-invented pseudoscience called radionics. I don't think I have seen this possible inspiration anywhere before so in line with the usual high standards of this blog you may again be getting original research here. Abrams was far from being the only one to practice similar pretend therapies, in fact they continue to day in all those magnetic bracelets you see and in any pseudo science referring the 'energy', but he was the inventor of the approach. Most significantly with relevance to this episode he made his money by leasing out a succession of little boxes (one of them is pictured including the Radio Disease Killer which I think might be by someone else but is the same idea) he invented, some used purely for diagnostic reasons and others that the patient actually had to carry around with them. They looked different to the little box in the episode but nonetheless the idea is there. In fact I would highly recommend reading about his ideas for a frisson of amusement mixed with embarrassment at our fellow humans and disgust at Abrams. He thought he could 'diagnose' people, including their religion, from a sample of their handwriting, and the most bizarre was a set-up where you would have to have a subject deemed healthy as well as the patient. They would both be wired up to one of his boxes, facing west (that was absolutely essential) and Abrams would diagnose the 'ill' one by listening to the abdomen of the 'healthy' one. Not gonna lie, but rather than have Steed as a masseur this episode would have been much improved by dramatising this procedure, possibly in the nightclub.</p><p>Actually on watching this again I'm finding I like it better. The things I appreciate are the contrast between the rather seedy nightclub and the General's world. I particularly like that the nightclub set is much more like a theatre behind the scenes than I would have expected, and you can't beat a theatre for an illusion.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-67507470572896739062023-09-12T07:16:00.000+01:002023-09-12T07:16:43.696+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, Tunguska and Terma<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB0o8-YrK3h_y46Nkb78KdTLLOYQrWzz7rNmKgR0OOx5rnpQy9joqV5oy-T1Ct1V3bdUoDcL3ftWpxcjbvEKXMrf7v7au7p5FLWS-ZFYe9anVZc-ql3vjBHH0WXGuqXHmiNmMtXGCj1C2db9_zbNYyl1W8tvtV6E-RGqxfv_iTipVNFoRE88M0RSISiMc/s1160/x-files.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1160" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB0o8-YrK3h_y46Nkb78KdTLLOYQrWzz7rNmKgR0OOx5rnpQy9joqV5oy-T1Ct1V3bdUoDcL3ftWpxcjbvEKXMrf7v7au7p5FLWS-ZFYe9anVZc-ql3vjBHH0WXGuqXHmiNmMtXGCj1C2db9_zbNYyl1W8tvtV6E-RGqxfv_iTipVNFoRE88M0RSISiMc/w400-h173/x-files.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>4x07 Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>This is another complex, highly-layered episode, which apart from its brave attempt to place Cancer Man at every major historic event of post-war US history, is rather difficult to understand. According to the episode's wikipedia page the main problem its complexity causes in understanding is that viewers tend to miss that the events depicted in this episode are the fictional story written by Cancer Man. Even within the narrative of the show, what we see in the episode is not intended to be seen as real. I'm sure you will understand that it has provided me with this handy getout clause so that I don't have to go through the entire history and can just wave my hand suggestively at the entire plot.</p><p>The question of reality and perception is of course one which has come up repeatedly in the show in its depiction of the American dream. In fact in my reflections after series 3 of the show I hatched up a little theory that in the show's world view, the American dream could actually be seen as part of the conspiracy: the ideas of freedom, unrestrained capitalism, aspiration, betterment, can certainly all be seen as distractions from the realities of the military-industrial complex, massive wealth/poverty divide, repeated mass shootings, and so on.</p><p>Obviously I am not the first external observer to have noticed this:</p><p>'But it took another observer-this one, like Tocqueville a century before, a foreigner-to crystallize the untenable size of the gap between ideals and reality. Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal doesn't use the term "American Dream" in his massive two-volume 1944 study An American Dilemma, but it looms large over Myrdal's work. What he does talk about is what he calls the national "Creed," which, as he defines it in his introduction, encompasses "liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody." (Note that "equality" and "fair opportunity" are not considered one and the same any more than "liberty" and "justice" are.) The dilemma Myrdal referred to was the conflict between this Creed and the way Americans were actually living their lives.' (Jim Cullen: The American Dream - A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, p.117.)</p><p>If you read the episode through this interpretive lens: that the show is telling us that the American dream is part of the cover up, there are three themes which most strongly make the point that the American dream is a lie.</p><p>The first is Communism, the spectre of which has kept appearing in these posts. Perhaps most in the references to Project MK-Ultra, set up by the CIA thinking that defectors to Communist countries must have been brainwashed so they started a decade-long programme of torture to understand why anyone could be persuaded to leave the USA. The lack of self-awareness slaps you round the face here. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man makes this opposition clear: 'Communism is without doubt the most heinous personification of evil that mankind has ever confronted.' As an outsider I cannot understand why US citizens are so frightened of another economic and political system which has never pertained in their country and is never likely to, and make out that anything unAmerican is communist. Meanwhile, that Capitalism is doing really well in making sure that three individuals own all the wealth on the planet. Make this make sense to me. Talk to me as if I'm a small child.</p><p>The second is related to Communism, which is the need for enemies. The idea of the state's enemies runs through this episode like ore. It highlights the accent placed on defending the dream, defending the American way, which tends to make other ways and nations enemies. In fact, I would suggest that the show is saying the point of the American dream is to divert attention to the wrong enemies. In this episode, the enemies are internal. Their importance is shown in the shock when Gorbachev resigns: 'There's no more enemies'. How is it possible to live without enemies?</p><p>Finally, the third theme hammers home the show's point that the dream is fake: and that is the theme of patsies which keeps coming up. It's explicitly referring to the practice of distracting from the reality. Cleverly the show once again builds on real history because Lee Harvey Oswald did claim to be a patsy, and while this was never substantiated apparently there was a wider conspiracy than just him.</p><p>So I would suggest that by using Cancer Man's storyline, the show heavily suggests that key themes of the American way of life are used as distractions from the reality. Within the show's mythology these distractions could be part of the broader conspiracy to cover up the alien thing, by suggesting that the alien cover up is part of a broader cover up and there isn't a great deal that is real.</p><p>SInce this episode drips Americanness from every frame I will include it in my list of episodes with significant content relating to the American dream.</p><p><b>4x08 Tunguska and 4x09 Terma (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>The episode picks up on the last one's references to communism as the enemy of the American dream by depicting presumably Soviet Union-era Gulag scenes inspired by the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. However if you're looking out for criticisms of the American dream and have noticed all the other references to unethical medical experimentation in the US, the experiments with the black oil aren't that different to the experiments the US government has done on its own citizens at various times.</p><p>Krycek makes explicit that he knows about all sorts of things going on which are in direct opposition to the American dream, specifically that there are men who do not face justice the way others do. The show paints a confusing picture of Krycek's motives about this, at times showing him as the all-American hero who wants to do the right thing (and actually helps to get the rock onto US territory) and also as a liar or a murderer. This could be seen as a more nuanced approach to the American state and dream.</p><p>You could of course also see Skinner and Mulder's treatment of Krycek (presumably a US citizen, son of Cold War immigrants) as indicative that justice might be quite arbitrary in the US, since they spend most of Tunguska, beating him up, humiliating him, tying him to things and actually treating him like a dog. To be frank you'd think they'd have got a room but who am I.</p><p>As the double-length episode progresses it continues to complicate what's happening and ensure we can't quite be sure what side everyone is on.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 24 (with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men, Anasazi, The Blessing Way and Paperclip.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 58 (with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, Syzygy, Home, Teliko, and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-69445957678575653912023-09-10T20:53:00.001+01:002023-09-10T20:56:33.303+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: The Field Where I Died and Sanguinarium<p>The introduction to this series of posts on the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1</p><p><b>4x05 The Field Where I Died (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The Field Where I Died is reminding me of why I like to blog about things which interest me or I think I know about, because there is just so much in this one that I'm almost certain to make several howlers. In fact, watching the episode with more attention, it's apparent why it's usually had rather lukewarm reviews, because frankly it's a bit of a mess. It's also got plot holes you could drive a Cadillac Series 62 through, because obviously nobody in their right mind would have questioned Melissa in the mental state she was in and Scully clearly has a professional duty to go to Skinner and tell him Mulder has finally lost it.</p><p>As always there is a foreground to the episode: the dissociative personality vs past lives and past life regression, but also so much in the background that references important stuff to the history of the US:</p><p>1. The Civil War (1861 to 1865). It's only used as the setting for Mulder and Melissa's past lives in the episode, but there is a relevance to the American dream. I will maintain that to live the American dream you have to be in the USA, and reading about the Civil War made me realise why people get antsy when southern states talk about seceding from the union, because I hadn't realised that the Confederacy states had actually seceded from the US and that was what the war was about. This is here just to prove that this episode has given me endless trouble and I've really had to work on it, not because it's wildly relevant to the plot.</p><p>2. The Jonestown Massacre (1978) which although it took place in Guyana, was a mass suicide/massacre by a religious group founded in the US by Jim Jones. I think the group described in the episode is intended to make the viewer think of the Jonestown group, The People's Temple, founded in 1954, was partly marked by Jones's liking of communism and opinion that communists were unfairly persecuted in the US. And we all know how significant the fight againt Communism (and frequently 'Communism') is to the American dream, don't we? </p><p>3. Melissa's alter ego mentions the McCarthy hearings (1954) to investigate the army's accusations about Senator Joseph McCarthy, which he said were motivated in retaliation for his recent agressive investigation of suspected Communists in the army.</p><p>4. The Waco Siege (1993) is the closest reference in time to the broadcast of the episode, and was a raid of a ranch belonging to a religious group called Branch Davidians (led by David Koresh), which wound up being a lengthy siege and resulted in dozens of deaths and highly conflicting reports of what actually happened. Waco is referenced directly by Skinner but we are more intended to be reminded of Jonestown by the Temple of the Seven Stars.</p><p>I am going to discount the Civil War aspect as relating to the American dream, because its use in the episode is to provide a setting for the past lives, which are the foreground the episode. Although it has a very important role as a sort of bogeyman for the American dream I am also going to ignore the references to Communism because they are purely incidental and distant. </p><p>I think the religious aspect is more what is related to the American dream in this aspect: in fact when I think about the depictions of religion in The X-Files, I can count on one hand the depiction of peacful, mainstream religions, just getting on with their lives and doing good as inspired by their divinity. I have not seen any evidence that this is a conscious criticism of religion by the show and perhaps it is simply that you can't expect a show whose subject is weird shit to depict religion as a normal thing.</p><p>The relevance of the show's depiction of religion as a fearsome thing to the American dream, is the same tension that keep appearing the dream. Here, that if you are 'free' in religion, of course some people will take the opportunity to make dangerous cults, and of course other people will happily sign up and give generously. In this the show is indicating a weakness in the dream (in the background of the episode) about what happens when you just let people get on with it religiously. You could even say that there is an implicit warning about the separation of church and state because obviously gods don't tend to like not having their way in the public sphere. I will not be including the episode in my list of ones with significant content about the dream because the references are all solely in the setting.</p><p><b>4x06 Sanguinarium (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The implicit criticism of the religious freedom in the American dream continues in this episode, because if you incorporate it pretty much anything can be a religion, whether witchcraft, satanism, etc.</p><p>There is also a reference to the dream's capitalism when Scully talks about how a new cosmetic surgery set-up can support a whole hospital (and make lots of profit for shareholders).</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 22 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 57 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, Syzygy, Home, and Teliko.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-83163108173379701842023-09-05T21:43:00.001+01:002023-09-07T00:05:45.519+01:00The BBC/Big Finish Remake of The Prisoner<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpCiXwAYcERNBW2UbLH5cje42kr2R6JMdBuslGBV92LGGD4RlA5IKkEcb3C9uEpcnTuyqeYz6cZnEy4edPHX8M2rUXwFLunHvqtUsZE3kuEGQpkQoZgA6T0wcyy4TCKXBlewoXd88Y860OI4fQRxVwnO1EFXj55itVNsOvOrVFHmTw8Dqxg7IzYpM4kM/s550/prisonercoversnap_image_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="549" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNpCiXwAYcERNBW2UbLH5cje42kr2R6JMdBuslGBV92LGGD4RlA5IKkEcb3C9uEpcnTuyqeYz6cZnEy4edPHX8M2rUXwFLunHvqtUsZE3kuEGQpkQoZgA6T0wcyy4TCKXBlewoXd88Y860OI4fQRxVwnO1EFXj55itVNsOvOrVFHmTw8Dqxg7IzYpM4kM/w399-h400/prisonercoversnap_image_large.jpg" width="399" /></a></div>I have been listening to the BBC/Big Finish audio version of The Prisoner, that series which is so idiosyncratic, completely dependent on the personality of its creator and of its time that it can't possibly be remade.<p></p><p>Witness the 2009 AMC remake. Why on earth would mere mortals think that they can just remake such a legendary series? I have started watching this remake once and soon turned it off, and while it is referenced in The Prisonersphere, it isn't popular and everyone's gone back to arguing over the original.</p><p>Which is why it gives me such pleasure to say that I have been enjoying watching the BBC/Big Finish version very much. In fact you'd better sit down because I'm about to alienate any remaining readers of this blog after offending everyone by being provocative about the American dream and utter the ultimate heresy in the world of The Prisoner, namely...</p><p>The BBC/Big Finish remake is the best version of this show and in my opinion is actually better than the original.</p><p>I can't believe I just said that. </p><p>Now that I am officially a heretic and schismatic, I suppose I ought to be able to justify this opinion. I don't actually have my 39 Articles to put forward, because as usual I know what I like when I hear and see it, and only come to reasons for it when I come to write them down.</p><p>I think that if you were to update the original series very lightly indeed, by updating the technology but still setting it in the sixties, removing the unfortunate fact that the production was riven by disputes and this shows in the programme, remove the reality that the full projected series was never made and the reduced number of episodes was never quite right, remove the distinct impression the show gives that even McGoohan was perhaps slightly fed up with it and so came up with a rather trite ending, remove the obvious fact that nobody in the production knew what was going on, and enjoy the luxury of not having any visuals, this remake is exactly what you would have. I honestly think it corrects all the shortcomings and criticisms of the original show that I have ever noted, and tones down the weirder stuff slightly so that it is more even and slightly less idiosyncratic.</p><p>Of course the obvious problem with remaking this show is that nobody can possibly be Patrick McGoohan. I'm delighted to say that without having to have visuals, Mark Elstob does such a good job of being Number 6 that you wouldn't know it wasn't McGoohan. It's actually an incredible feat: he has the attitude exactly right. It is very difficult to get the dripping resentment just right without continually crossing over into being a stroppy teenager, but he does it. Remarkably, he also sounds exactly like McGoohan. It's actually uncanny, and this series would be worth listening to just for this remarkable achievement. The only different I can identify in his voice is that I think Elstob perhaps sounds slightly older than McGoohan did in the TV series, but that just helps the impression that McGoohan has stepped back into the studio.</p><p>The series is not a direct remake, and some of the episodes are only based on their namesakes. However I think every alteration is an improvement. You all know how critical I am and honestly this is where you would all expect me to get really critical isn't it. </p><p>I do have two criticisms. I have never been too happy with the idea in the original series that 'I am a free man'. It's perhaps a more philosophical view but in my humble opinion we are none of us free, and freedom (without essential qualifiers) is not something to be desired. However in this remake, in Free For All, the Number 2 is American (I love her and every time she spoke I had a picture of Dolly Parton in my mind, y'all), and both she and Number 6 campaign on a platform of 'Freedom'. For me personally this was carrying a less happy element of the the show over into the political campaigning, which I think possibly made it sound more USA based than it would be. My other criticism is that I think sometimes Number 6's accent is more like the accent McGoohan had in Danger Man: one of those which could be American, Irish or British, and is never quite clear. I feel perhaps these two things make the show more transatlantic than I would have liked it to be. I personally wouldn't identify a singly reference to the USA in the original series, and we all know that despite the suggestions of Lithuania and Morocco, actually The Village is in Wales. You can tell by the light, apart from anything else.</p><p>I have been listening to the show in a rather haphazard way while walking to the supermarket, but pricked up my ears and have been listening in a more systematic way since I noticed a comment which indicated that Number 6 knew more about The Village than he was letting on. I know it's not a popular way of reading the show, but my next walk through The Prisoner is going to be based on the theory that Number 6 is a plant. It's a bit of a nebulous theory, but the idea is that the authorities who run The Village have put him in as a sort of mystery shopper because there are concerns about the running of the place. It's an idea I like enormously, and have found several possible references to the theory in this show.</p><p>The other reason I want to mention the show here is that the Big Finish site says that stock is running low on the three series of the show and it will go out of stock when it's sold out, and at about �100 all in , it's already very expensive, but I think may become even more so in the near future. If you want to try before you buy you can download the first episode for free on their site.</p><p>In fact there's a very strange coincidence which will tell all true fans how good this remake is. We all know how the question of which order to view the original episodes just goes round and round forever, well, I was very impressed to see that the show's Wikipedia page has somehow managed to get the episodes out of order. If that's not an indication that this is actually The Prisoner just carrying on, I don't know what is.</p><p>I recommend this series unreservedly.</p><p>https://www.bigfinish.com/ranges/v/the-prisoner</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-1620087224017368752023-09-02T20:32:00.001+01:002023-09-02T20:32:26.194+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Home, Teliko, Unruhe<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1xcIU7QjNca835j-RgMTn6a7rd2Sx9ZKljsFCxFSwIr7A-60uUOmxD3Z11ZNpmD5a-rugCnip8jCrU9ROhhSLLUTOwIIb2K-PdGtmEtSWtFB1UUQ1bJDkr5TgLbjv1wENAdcS89RRtt40_15_cT86ysedvMZu1k8LAxbhG7ns34xaJgFiygR9LJt8WPs/s619/PL459_Pensamento04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="619" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1xcIU7QjNca835j-RgMTn6a7rd2Sx9ZKljsFCxFSwIr7A-60uUOmxD3Z11ZNpmD5a-rugCnip8jCrU9ROhhSLLUTOwIIb2K-PdGtmEtSWtFB1UUQ1bJDkr5TgLbjv1wENAdcS89RRtt40_15_cT86ysedvMZu1k8LAxbhG7ns34xaJgFiygR9LJt8WPs/w400-h364/PL459_Pensamento04.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the American dream as depicted and criticised in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p>I am delighted that we are now hitting a couple of episodes where their relationship to the American dream will pretty much write itself with no help from me: apart from anything else this is a bit of a relief because at times I've been wondering whether I was imagining that the show featured the dream.</p><p><b>4x02 Home (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Luckily I'm not the only one who says this episode references the American dream: it is even gets on to the episode's Wikipedia page! I was going to say that you could say this episode is criticising the dream; that in a society where if you work hard everyone can get as far as their God-given ability will take them, there are bound to be casualties. Some of those casualties are bound to be found among people (who obviously exist internationally) who don't know that there are reasons you don't sleep with your mother. These sort of people would have a natural disadvantage.</p><p>However the commentary by other people about this episode focuses on it as a parody of the aspect of the American dream which is the family and family values. I'm glad to have found someone else talking about this because the family is something which is a bit of a blind spot for me, and in the 74 episodes of the show I've opined about so far I haven't found family values to be referred to once. The idea is that the town of Home represents the positive values of the nuclear family, which is embedded in the American dream, but the Peacock family blow this ideal apart. It's basically the same idea I had about opportunity and inclusion, only in the area of family life.</p><p>I would particularly recommend this review of the episode, which, while it doesn't explicitly mention the American dream, nonetheless drips the Americanness of the episode from every full stop: https://web.archive.org/web/20130824061747/http://www.munchkyn.com/xf-rvws/homervw.html</p><p>Since Home is even described by other people as referencing the family values aspect of the American dream I will include it among my list of episodes which particularly refer to it.</p><p><b>4x03 Teliko (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Much of the commentary on this episode has tended to revolve around its depiction of the other, as personified by - supposedly - illegal immigrants, and the normalisation of (white) US culture and Black aliens being seen as the other. I think that possibly this episode may be even more of a hot potato than it was when originally broadcast, with racial and immigration tansions becoming more hot topics.</p><p>In this, of course, the show is once again reflecting and criticising the American dream, because it is showing the dream of immigrating (legally, I can't honestly see how anyone is an illegal immigrant in this show) to the US for a better life. It criticises the dream by reminding us of the entrenched systemic problems of racism and hatred of immigrants by the immigrants who are already there.</p><p>Now don't look at me like that, it's not actually me saying this at all. I just knew this show was about the American dream of immigration for self improvement, and it's Mulder that says it!</p><p>'...the reasons anyone comes to this country: liberty, the freedom to pursue your own interests...'</p><p>So interestingly Mulder gives liberty as the first reason anyone would go to the US, which is exactly what was placed highest in priority for the American dream in the poll of US citizens I quoted a few posts back.</p><p>Since Mulder gives an abbreviated version of what the American dream is all about I am going to include this among my list of episodes specially referencing the dream.</p><p><b>4x04 Unruhe (Monster of the</b> <b>Week)</b></p><p>Unruhe again criticises the dream by depicting what happens with people who can't manage to improve themselves, and we specifically see the example of Gerry Schnauz, who is doing the best he can while struggling with schizophrenia and, incidentally his tendency to kidnap and lobotomize people. Given that he's already been under treatment for his schizophrenia there is an implied criticism of society that nobody has got to the bottom of what is going on with him or else isn't monitoring him properly.</p><p>Incidentally, as an aside from the theme of this post, the real history that this episode draws on is something that fascinated me as a child: the thought photographs of Ted Serios. It's strange that Mulder quotes the case as if it's fact when the tests that Serios were subjected to by psychologist Jules Eisendud were possibly the worst-controlled scientific tests in history, and Mulder would have known that. Serios could only produce the photographs with the use of a 'gizmo', a small tube which he held between his face and the camera. Obviously if he couldn't do it without the gizmo, that was the answer, but strangely Eisenbud didn't investigate the tube or take it off him and conclude that he was a fraud. As yet another aside I note that in many of the pictures of Serios (and in fact many of the pictures on the internet of poor people) they show the same no-nonsense approach that I do to shirts. I suspect that it is a way of showing poverty or that these people aren't socially acceptable: I really hope that's how I come across. What an schievement. The key difference between me and Ted Serios is I'm not an alcoholic and don't have a diagnosed personality disorder.</p><p>I would, however, note that all three of these episodes contain themes of family, home, foreignness, international identity, and the difficulties of immigrating to the US and flourishing there if the best of your ability perhaps isn't quite as good as everyone else's. In this I maintain these three episodes are like a reflection of the hope of self improvement encapsulated in the dream and a criticism of its negative side.</p><p>Is it really a dream if people get left out completely?</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 22 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 55 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, Syzygy, Home, and Teliko.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-46519601676452591402023-08-30T17:39:00.003+01:002023-08-30T17:39:59.470+01:00Ripping Yarns: The Curse of the Claw<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnZwOKHbsovdDjf_qzegZiVJ1jOtWuOQCST7QdvAVwWJle1KNih9jNF7CTd0QnHKfBpoY_u3Lh-FZTwFcxHsCo-qFzqvzVHulSpBl-U2LJKUEX8c181gtc_QBc-B3VP2GGEtzQSqPoJIastfTO3W97W7wBsV3HUHn1jpXd7GA1yvL8LLBqedAsZlnOu0w/s640/vlcsnap-2023-08-30-17h30m01s850.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnZwOKHbsovdDjf_qzegZiVJ1jOtWuOQCST7QdvAVwWJle1KNih9jNF7CTd0QnHKfBpoY_u3Lh-FZTwFcxHsCo-qFzqvzVHulSpBl-U2LJKUEX8c181gtc_QBc-B3VP2GGEtzQSqPoJIastfTO3W97W7wBsV3HUHn1jpXd7GA1yvL8LLBqedAsZlnOu0w/w400-h300/vlcsnap-2023-08-30-17h30m01s850.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I suspect that our culture has a thing about newness and novelty, which naturally the classic TV blogosphere contradicts directly by not feeling the need always to be watching something new or blogging about the latest thing. When periodically I worry whether I will ever run out of cult TV to watch and blog about here I remind myself that I can of course blog about everything all over again if necessary, since it isn't necessary to have new classic TV continually found in a TV station in Ghana. There is nothing wrong about writing about an established 'canon' of TV shows. There is also nothing wrong with noticing the shows that I don't tend to write about here, and Ripping Yarns is one of them.<p></p><p>I'm not sure how it has somehow managed not to appear here, but this is an omission which needs to be corrected instanter. In the unlikely event that any readers of this blog haven't heard of the show, of course it was written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and parodies the gung ho, boy's own genre of literature between the wars. A similar sort of parody may of course be found in the wonderful cartoons and books of Glen Baxter, and if you don't follow him on social media, you should go away and do so immediately.</p><p>The Curse of the Claw is a first series episode, broadcast in 1977, about a curse brought on to Sir Kevin Orr by the gift of a claw taken from the Naga tribe of Burma, by his Uncle. Kevin runs away with the claw on the Greasy Bastard in an attempt to return the fateful claw to the tribe.</p><p>And this is one of those occasions when I will say that you should put down this blog and watch the show instead because it will improve your life much more than reading my witterings.</p><p>I love the confusion of Burma for Birmingham ('Burma is a town in the Midlands, in Warwickshire'). I love the way Grover the butler is a dirty old man. I love Uncle Jack's approach to his incredible illnesses: 'Those are buboes, my boy'). I love the way Sir Kevin doesn't notice that the majority of his crew are women, and offers to rub something on the Chief Petty Officer's strange growths on his chest. I love the way the Naga tribe lose some people on the way to his house by getting on the wrong train (should've changed at New Street, obviously).</p><p>If you particularly want a criticism, it may be that if you're watching this for the plot, it may not be that coherent, but if you're watching this for the plot, you've missed the point, I'm afraid. The plot does actually work out because the claw has a final trick to play.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtlcLJ24uVP5NJNpL70odF1h_uzN1usjgrvk128F8AQpz9uIqZh3VDgKcoifH4P0DAqZ3l-u-r2mM1ZE_wCfq_Di_CmE5kbkugVgITF6A1Gv_OLurxzoB8k7GK1ErKKJqKEbCuCza8mLNVMkPsfnLgpOqW4W-zpaF7fyMKkptOftB9y369eHDizWYiRN4/s1600/IMG_20230830_152408.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtlcLJ24uVP5NJNpL70odF1h_uzN1usjgrvk128F8AQpz9uIqZh3VDgKcoifH4P0DAqZ3l-u-r2mM1ZE_wCfq_Di_CmE5kbkugVgITF6A1Gv_OLurxzoB8k7GK1ErKKJqKEbCuCza8mLNVMkPsfnLgpOqW4W-zpaF7fyMKkptOftB9y369eHDizWYiRN4/w300-h400/IMG_20230830_152408.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>My absolutely favourite bit is the collapsing house that Uncle Jack lives in.<p></p><p>You really should watch this show. It's all over the internet if you want to try before buying, but I have read that the authorised releaases have extras, although I don't know what they are. It's not something you'll often hear me saying, but the guest cast in this show (which changes in every episode) really are one of the things that make it. I think the reason is that the guest cast are all top notch actors and are therefore so good that you notice their acting rather than their celebrity.</p><p>In other news I have a new profile picture, and this time I'm wearing a shirt. Just kidding, of course I'm not wearing a shirt, that would be ridiculous.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-66623494172056765622023-08-27T22:08:00.001+01:002023-08-27T22:08:10.463+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Herrenvolk<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwA7XsAwYCRniQLKLVttC8Xfmo4qyQ2h2gS8CCoE0ffRxo-HwTH9XEaD-TusJZ1mYIw3ynMElJ41evrZex3kLvSRX1JIR4sEtkcMClglURlHKiJu-Von07V4SzV_Y9Fogmt_VtDaYe6s3twOJIIf9WSPPTX6MqHf1BBrqM6L7CWw47X-W-ypXJe5QVsTk/s1100/tuskeegee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="1100" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwA7XsAwYCRniQLKLVttC8Xfmo4qyQ2h2gS8CCoE0ffRxo-HwTH9XEaD-TusJZ1mYIw3ynMElJ41evrZex3kLvSRX1JIR4sEtkcMClglURlHKiJu-Von07V4SzV_Y9Fogmt_VtDaYe6s3twOJIIf9WSPPTX6MqHf1BBrqM6L7CWw47X-W-ypXJe5QVsTk/w400-h296/tuskeegee.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the American dream as depicted and criticised in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p>Now you may say that it is slightly ridiculous that I left this series of posts for a break and since then have only managed one general round up post and have come back again. All I can say is that it was like that time Patsy Stone gave up drinking: it was the worst eight hours of her life. And also like heavy drinking, I think I will need another break after this one.</p><p><b>4x01 Herrenvolk (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>Of course the reason I've returned to these posts is that the events of the last week made me think of one aspect of this episode in particular. That aspect is the alien bounty hunter, and since the phrase 'I hope the bondsman has a good bounty hunter' has been rather thrown around the internet in the past week, it made me look the subject up.</p><p>I had assumed that bounty hunters were purely historical or fictional, going by the understanding in my head that a bounty was a sum paid as a reward for capturing or killing a person. I rather pictured this happening in the Wild West or other relatively undeveloped society, where there wouldn't be the statutory forces in place to implement the law. I would have said that in a developed country the family of a crime victim or organisation might possibly put out a reward for information leading to the capture of a miscreant, but that catching them would still be up to the police (hollow laugh).</p><p>For nearly thirty years I have been seeing the alien bounty hunter through this lens: I guessed that someone was paying him to exterminate the evidence of the alien invasion and that that was kind of his job, although he's obviously got some very special qualifications in terms of being able to shape shift. And that, I thought, was it for the bounty hunter outside of films and history.</p><p>How wrong I was.</p><p>As always during this series of posts, I have so much to thank the defeated 45th president of the USA for. He's educated the entire world about the fifth amendment, the third section of the fourteenth amendment, the fourth amendment, the speedy trial clause of the sicth amendment, and now the fact that you not only have to pay to be bailed for a crime, but that you still have actualy bounty hunters. Only now you call them bail enforcement agents or fugitive recovery agents. What the hell. Not for the first time doing this series of posts has slapped me around the face and left me reeling.</p><p>The connection between the alien bounty hunter, the USA, real fugitive recovery agents, and the American dream, is of course that in many states in the USA you have to pay a sum of money to get bailed for a crime. Obviously this is liable to mean that only people with money can get bail so there is a whole industry of bail bondsmen, who for a commission put up the money for you to get bail. The fugitive recovery agents apprehend the ones who've skipped bail. I think the mere fact of having to pay for bail and that there is a whole industry around this is the most American thing I've ever come across, is completely nightmarish, and I just can't believe that anyone was fool enough to put up the bail money for 45. (In the UK, money hasn't been a necessary part of bail since the Bail Act 1898, which was explicitly to stop the inequity that only people with money could get bail.)</p><p>This whole nightmarish scenario is reflected in the show in the way the alien bounty hunter is a bounty hunter. The connection is tenuous, obviously, but he doesn't really need to have that title: he could just be some random alien who pretends to be different people and is still mysterious. By giving him the title, the American ?dream is projected onto him. It's almost as if he can't just be an alien shapeshifter: in true capitalist style he has to be paid for doing what he does.</p><p>Then the show introduces the misnamed Smallpox Eradication Program, which is really a cover for mass nonconsensual tracking of citizens. Once again the show cleverly weaves things inspired by real historical events into the fictional events, to create the scenario that the US government is covering up the alien conspiracy. Once again the connection to the dream is the essential part of freedom, civil rights, and justice. I suspect the most similar real world historical government atrocity which may have inspired it is the Tuskegee Study, in which for decades African American men who had syphilis (and a control group who didn't) were told they were being treated for 'bad blood', not informed they had syphilis and not given treatment for it, so that the progression of their syphilis could be observed. </p><p>The similarity is that health professionals and government officials carried on these unethical experiments for decades: and this goes both for Herrenvolk and Tuskegee. It's US citizens doing it, and they must have known, and nobody said. What kind of dream is that?</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 22 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 52 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, and Syzygy.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-85104896094720843912023-08-23T00:57:00.000+01:002023-08-23T00:57:06.353+01:00What Else I've Been Watching<p> I do like this blog to bear at least a resemblance to the TV I'm actually watching, and while I've obviously been watching a lot of X-Files recently, the other things I've been watching haven't really appeared here, so this post is by way of a catch up.</p><p>I've been watching odd episodes of The Prisoner. This is partly because I've been reading Ali Jaffer's Official Prisoner Companion on the canal bank on rare sunny afternoons and he's got me thinking about the theory that Number 6 is placed in the Village by the authorities as a plant to test the security measures. You may even find this approach being tested out here in the form of a series of blog posts at some point. I'm also interested in applying Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey template to the series (helpfully there's even a version with seventeen stops); although I have so far not resolved the problem that I'm not sure which order to follow for this one. And that's even without the series of posts I've projected for literally years to examine the different viewing orders; again I'm not sure how I would do this, since a single post for each viewing order may prove cumbersome.</p><p>I have been watching two series starring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson all the way through, even thought I can recite whole passages of the scripts from memory: Filthy, Rich and Catflap, and Bottom.</p><p>While I've been posting about The X-Files I have also watched all the way through Monty Python's Flying Circus several times. I have been making a point of paying more attention to it than I normally do; and as with all quality television I'm noticing even more things I've never noticed before, with each repeated viewing. What's on the telly? Looks like a penguin.</p><p>I must have seen it because I have definitely watched all the way through the first series but the Murder She Wrote episode Murder Takes the Bus. It's a glorious pastiche of And Then There Were None, Psycho, Murder on the Orient Express, and even manages to get in some hints of The Cat and The Canary. Best of all it features Rue McLanahan as an unlikely librarian. Sadly her role as Blanche Devereux was still in the future, otherwise they'd have probably had her sit on all the men's laps.</p><p>It's one of those shows which I find it very difficult to blog about but I love the youth and exuberance of The Monkees.</p><p>The show which has perhaps most insinuated itself into my attention recently has been the 1987 to 1988 US TV show about Max Headroom. I swear our politicians watched it as kids and decided to make that dystopia the future. What particularly interests me is the way there are people who are 'blanks', who have disengaged from the record keeping and monitoring and effectually don't have an identity. I like this idea, especially as I'm now not economically productive. Of course this idea that if you're not working you're not productive is nonsense: even the most hardcore self sufficiency freaks of the 1970s would have traded things with other people. But it's interesting this brings up a weakness in capitalism: it depends on you being paid and spending, so to sabotage capitalism, even if you can't stop buying things at all, you can buy much less and decide where your money goes. </p><p>I haven't just been watching TV though, I have been involved in a history project at the museum I volunteer at and they've even let me write a post for their blog about what not to do with ancient buildings. You can read it here: https://www.sellymanormuseum.org.uk/news/2023-08-21/whats-wrong-with-selly-manor</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-32049775972074489262023-08-19T20:31:00.000+01:002023-08-19T20:31:03.689+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files Reflections After Season Three<p>The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1</p><p>I have now gone through three series of the show in detail, looking out for possible references to the American dream. I am going to pause after this post to decide on whether or how to continue, because I'm finding it very difficult and really don't understand the subject. I would also predict that fewer episodes from now on might reference the dream, so may just do selected episodes. Here, therefore are some impressions and conclusions that I have drawn so far.</p><p>I have been surprised in my reading to find that the idea of the American dream is endlessly mutable, and its nebulousness is one of the things which has made this series of posts difficult. I have also been surprised to find that the show deals with the idea of the American dream I had to start off with (details below) and so I have also been forced to conclude that my own idea of the American dream has come from seeing US society depicted in The X-Files which is why it makes me think of the dream. Don't you love this TV blogging lark?</p><p>However despite its formative influence on me, I have concluded that the show - while never once even using the phrase 'American dream' - manages to depict the dream in great detail and criticise it. In fact it rather drives a bulldozer through the American dream and depicts the country as a hellscape. I would theorise that this is as a result of the show being set in the USA and in the FBI. It therefore tends to focus on things like government corruption, injustices, unethical medical experimentation, mistreatment of its own troops, all the things which are closest related to the show's storyline. More implicit reference and criticism is made to subjects less directly related to the show's subject matter, such as the treatment of native Americans or Hansen's disease sufferers.</p><p>I am going to suggest a theory about another aspect of the American dream in The X-Files. This is that given that the show is set in the USA and naturally reflects many aspects of the society and culture, and also given that the show's premise is that the government and others are involved in a mammoth conspiracy to hide the reality of aliens, and also given that the show weaves this mythology and reality together... what if the American dream, as depicted and criticised in this show, is actually part of the conspiracy depicted by the show? What if the dream is actually designed to distract you from the reality? What if the show doesn't say it explicitly because if it had it would have got taken down by the network for revealing the secret? I actually think this is a valid way to read the show well in line with its narrative of weaving reality into the show's mythology. (Look, don't look at me like that, I've been watching a lot of The X-Files recently).</p><p>This was brought home to me by a comment Mitchell Hadley of itsabouttv.com made on one of my posts in which I commented that the US is both a colonial country and extensively engages in activities which could be defined as colonialism, and he said,</p><p>'[...] I think a key part of the dream might not be colonialism per se, but the desire to export democracy to other countries, with the belief that the ability to attain the dream comes from having the freedom that Americans believed in. Therefore in (for example) Vietnam, the average American believing in the dream would have said that the goal was not to make South Vietnam a colony, but to enable them to govern themselves through a democratic government.'</p><p>That's quite some power: if the dream can make you think an act which might be widely perceived as colonialism is an act of benevolence. But that's what the dream does: you see the dream but not the reality.</p><p>That's what they want you to see!!!</p><p>I have identified the shows which in my opinion significantly depict or criticise the American dream and there is a list of them below. There were quite a lot of them in the first series with the number tapering off in the second. I suspect that is because the show found its feet and spent less time setting the scene and focused more on its subject matter: in The X-Files the dream tends to be in the setting rather than in the subject.</p><p>There are two very characteristic aspects of the national ethos of the USA which have surprisingly little mention in the show: one is that there is a relative lack of mention of religion (although the religious people who appear are divided between well-meaning seekers and obvious frauds) and there is barely any mention of the constitution. I'm particularly surprised at both of these when they are prominent in the society the show is reflecting.</p><p>If there is anyone still reading the blog and I haven't offended the entire world (I don't even get the hits from Russia I used to get) I may return to this subject after a break and reconsideration of how to deal with it.</p><p>The episodes I have identified as having significant content relating to the American dream:</p><p><i>Core Mythology: 21 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 52 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, and Syzygy.)</i></p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-9090833378825849452023-08-19T19:32:00.001+01:002023-08-19T19:32:29.519+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Hell Money, Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', Avatar, Quagmire, Wetwired, Talitha Cumi<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWA3rLyBQQpPliOORhVeD6_I6ykNIdkLMPOg1FQiX0x9ai5wwfQgf_TDkYiUNezMtSaoyoJ-QfG-TygfDiXd4rbLOlUy7lQACNSK6pYpi5eKDb2ceedESdQsY-EuqG5vr3hn-3uJWY21MAnkxgATxVW700rI2sNbkmpSksGxKhm-40kmiMLWDRnZ3f0Rw/s800/3_yellow-peril-today.633a126.9b2339336c405efe002b4ce5aceaef8a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="652" data-original-width="800" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWA3rLyBQQpPliOORhVeD6_I6ykNIdkLMPOg1FQiX0x9ai5wwfQgf_TDkYiUNezMtSaoyoJ-QfG-TygfDiXd4rbLOlUy7lQACNSK6pYpi5eKDb2ceedESdQsY-EuqG5vr3hn-3uJWY21MAnkxgATxVW700rI2sNbkmpSksGxKhm-40kmiMLWDRnZ3f0Rw/w400-h326/3_yellow-peril-today.633a126.9b2339336c405efe002b4ce5aceaef8a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p>I am delighted to announce that Mitchell Hadley of itsabouttv.com describes this series of posts (or possibly me, I do hope so) as provocative, which is one of the nicest compliments I could have. To undershoot and merely be controversial would be such a waste. He also made me realise something in the comments he helpfully left on my last post which I'm going to have to try to weave in.</p><p><b>3x19 Hell Money (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The obvious connection to the American dream here is that of immigrants going to America so that they can improve themselves. However the episode also depicts Chinese immigrants in that exact position who are also at risk from the perceived danger of their home culture. I am a bit surprised that I haven't seen this in any of the commentary on this episode so I am actually getting this out of my own head but there is a problem with this episode that it is racist. The fact that it is specifically Chinese culture which is perceived to be dangerous draws on the idea of Yellow Peril (far from unique to the USA of course) which combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxiety, and a fear that the West would be overpowered by East Asians. Specifically in this episode the show makes the fear of being burned, punished, etc, safer for the viewer by placing it in a culture which is perceived to be alien and keeping it within that culture. This 'othering' and subconscious racist ideology is actually as American as apple pie (that's another thing I don't understand, we do have apples and even pie in Europe) and so I think the episode is reflecting a racist aspect of immigration to the American dream without meaning to. </p><p><b>3x20 Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>3x21 Avatar (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>3x22 Quagmire (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Probably nobody will agree with this but I think you could say that this episode does reference the American dream in terms of the nature of the country, and of course you have to be in the USA to have the American dream. By defintion a country with climate varying from tropical to subarctic, is bound to have a huge variety of natural terrors and some of the them in that country are very frightening. In classic X-Files style the fictional fear of this episode builds on the real fear of the real natural hazards of the country.</p><p><b>3x23 Wetwired (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>We have more unethical stuff going on, although it's not clear who's doing it. The suggestion would be that it is some authority, and of course it contravenes the liberty and rights of the American dream. I am not aware of a real-life example of unethical medical experimentation sanctioned by the US government which could be the direct inspiration for these devices.</p><p><b>3x24 Talitha Cumi (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>I badly wanted to connect the title, which is a quotation from the New Testament, and religious themes to the dream in this episode. But of course the real connection comes in the conversation between the Jeremiah and Cancer Man, which is the closest the show has come so far to explicitly expressing the terms of the dream. They're all there: Cancer Man describes giving people happiness and Smith counters that he is taking away their freedom under the guise of democracy. Cancer Man implies the aspect of the dream where 'success' has a moral element by saying that they will never be free because they are corrupt, weak and worthless. He then brings up a religious aspect by saying that their religion is science.</p><p>It's almost as if the American dream is part of the cover story (more of this in the next post).</p><p>SInce we are now at the end of Season 3 the next post will be some reflections prompted by the episodes up to here, then because I am finding these posts very difficult to do and am not sure how to continue I will probably pause for a bit.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 21 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 52 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, and Syzygy.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-9909176692925946922023-08-17T21:06:00.001+01:002023-08-17T21:06:27.416+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Grotesque, Piper Maru, Apocrypha, Pusher, Teso dos Bichos<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1XUy7Ftcrfz0IT4jOTiga34Y7yCR5nQNf0ihRPHjunfVILlM9eYAQMJNOKe1gHJ-Clsszm5sq6As9LOLT71GDW9B1ndxiQbmcUyN08U9hQObnpq3I4Oqyj1O0IQ7WcR_-75kDmb7RBPo55Du5LcMpGZO1aXLyUgGbY3y77V1zAFApgEa1u0MyfyBU3sg/s649/37803176-0-Jacob_Anthony_Chansley_was_moved_from_the_DC_Department_of_Corre-m-2_1612473575097.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="649" data-original-width="634" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1XUy7Ftcrfz0IT4jOTiga34Y7yCR5nQNf0ihRPHjunfVILlM9eYAQMJNOKe1gHJ-Clsszm5sq6As9LOLT71GDW9B1ndxiQbmcUyN08U9hQObnpq3I4Oqyj1O0IQ7WcR_-75kDmb7RBPo55Du5LcMpGZO1aXLyUgGbY3y77V1zAFApgEa1u0MyfyBU3sg/w391-h400/37803176-0-Jacob_Anthony_Chansley_was_moved_from_the_DC_Department_of_Corre-m-2_1612473575097.jpg" width="391" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>3x14 Grotesque (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>3x15 Piper Maru (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>The episode reflects badly on US justice with the suggestion of government complicity or corruption when the investigation of SCully's sister's death is halted despite new evidence being uncovered.</p><p>At this stage I'm not clear whether Krycek is supposed still to be an FBI agent but he and Jeraldine are selling government secrets so there must be some source within the government for them.</p><p>Once again we have the impact of the US military-industrial complex on its own citizens: I'm not sure whether this model for military being exposed to radiation was publicly available in the nineties but again a real world example of this actually happening would be the veterans of the cleanup at various Atolls after US nuclear tests.</p><p><b>3x16 Apocrypha (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>The episode then again brings the horror of US treatment of its own military home for Mulder by revealing (to us) that his own father was involved in questioning, with a young Cancer Man, a surviving sailor of the nuclear testing. The nuclear testing is cleverly mixed up, as is the show's wont, with the show's fiction of the black oil, which increases the fictional content of the episode as it progresses and changes the focus from the subject of these posts.</p><p>The shadow government agency, the Syndicate, features highly in this episode, suggesting that they are behind the leaks of secret information.</p><p><b>3x17 Pusher (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>I was having trouble identifying a connection to the dream for this episode, although I was convinced I must be able to find one. Then I found on the episode's Wikipedia page (of all places) a reference to Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson's book Wanting to Believe, in which they say that despite Modell's ability he is in reality a loser who wants to be special rather than cured of his brain tumour. So the connection to the dream is that, as so often in The X-Files, Modell represents an inversion of the dream. He is another example of the reality that the dream means that people don't achieve Bill Clinton's description of being given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you, as long as you work hard and play by the rules. Modell further inverts this because the ability he does have is given by a brian tumour rather than by God. If he actually fulfilled the dream he would have been an FBI agent or Navy Seal (a phrase which never stops striking me as being absolutely hilarious).</p><p><b>3x18 Teso dos Bichos (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The obvious reference (and therefore criticism) in this episode to the dream is obviously to colonialism. Strangely, you will never see this subject mentioned in any of the definitions of the American dream I have so far quoted, but it is actually an essential part, because you have to be in America to have the American dream, and as has appeared before, the reality is the majority of inhabitants are descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves. In this episode we see what bad things happen when Westerners interfere in other cultures and of course the American dream conveniently ignores the consequences of building a new country on top of an Indian burial ground.</p><p>There is an interesting cultural aspect to this episode because the body is described as that of a shaman, which is of course an ancient cultural phenomenon which is widely appropriated. I feel as if I should be able to connect the idea of cultural appropriation to the American dream, largely driven by the famous image which illustrates this post, but have tried and failed. Interestingly Mr Chansley's tattoos depict many of the images of northern European heathenism, which of course may well be his own ethnic origin or religious beliefs. As it happens these images were the ones appropriated by the Nazis and it has not gone unnoticed that many of his tattoos (eg the valknut, the sonnenrad, and I think he might have an othala) have a Far Right interpretation, so we have a full circle of cultural appropriation, colonialism, and degradation of the concepts appropriated. I haven't been able to find out the significance of the head thing and horns, but if they are Native American then obviously they can be connected to the American dream.</p><p>Don't worry, not all men with bare chests and tattoos are Nazis.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 20 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 47 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, and Syzygy.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-39016705733041003292023-08-17T00:05:00.000+01:002023-08-17T00:05:59.779+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Nisei, 731, Revelations, War of the Coprophages, Syzygy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrWdcwlbIrggqEHBBdAyMQFu7UCm9W-M5EBGU98QnipSHp8v8XB6KlLbeH-B3LnJSxm3pbfn7Nroz-Zf-B-k1mg9hj-L4FqI9yb1DU8KWE5Yi2C_2Ln-ZSojKoH92rjkFxk6RXxaWi2oINzYVrpupFb9ip0-Q2rSl8HNlbP8NoQFChMki8icYTnfyWa70/s700/alice-ball-larger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="700" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrWdcwlbIrggqEHBBdAyMQFu7UCm9W-M5EBGU98QnipSHp8v8XB6KlLbeH-B3LnJSxm3pbfn7Nroz-Zf-B-k1mg9hj-L4FqI9yb1DU8KWE5Yi2C_2Ln-ZSojKoH92rjkFxk6RXxaWi2oINzYVrpupFb9ip0-Q2rSl8HNlbP8NoQFChMki8icYTnfyWa70/w400-h400/alice-ball-larger.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files may be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>3x09 Nisei and 3x10 731 (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>These two series mythology episodes were intended to be a single Monster of the Week episode, based on the atrocities of the famous Unit 731 run by the Japanese in occupied China from 1937 to 1945. The experiments on humans were just as cruel as the experiments the Nazis were carrying out in Europe and of course you know the reason it's appearing on this show is that the US paid the scientists involved for their research and paid them stipends. We're back in similar territory to Operation Paperclip. As depicted here the experiments are adapted for the series mythology - an alienification if you like - to involve alien autopsies. Although the commentary on these episodes has tended to be that they depict the erosion of public confidence in scientists because of repeated cases of them going dramatically off the rails, but given that all of the experimentation referred to in the show has been at least in part supported by the US government, the criticism is as much of the US. This automatically erodes the rights and respect for human life you would expect the land of the free to have, and so instantly eats away at the American dream.</p><p>If you're not feeling discouraged enough, 731 then adds a kicker to this, by its depiction of the sufferers with Hanson's disease/leprosy. You may say of course that up until after the second world war it wasn't at all unusual for lepers to be quarantined for life in all sorts of places. However, remember the way The X-Files blends real history with its fictional version. Here the fictional version that 'lepers' are rounded up and shot because they are alien-human hybrids, comes in an episode directly referencing Unit 731. The specific incident of real history which is borrowed here is that while obviously Unit 731 didn't have many survivors from its experiments, the few that were left when World War 2 ended were rounded up and shot, the remaining scientists were sworn to secrecy and provided with suicide pills, and the buildings of Unit 731 rased to the ground. It was only after this the USA offered the director a deal where they wouldn't prosecute him for crimes against humanity if he gave them the secrets of his research so that they wouldn't fall into Soviet hands. </p><p>Even with its alienification of this real history, the show twists the knife in the wound of the USA's dealings with war criminals, evil human experimentation, and its attempts to defend the dream against all comers.</p><p>Is it really a dream if it's built on crimes against humanity?</p><p>There is another, more subtle, kicker here, in the use of a leper colony to stand in for Unit 731, which is that an earlier treatment for Hansen's disease was discovered by Alice Ball (1892 - 1916). Of course you know where this is going: it was discovered in the USA using ethical experimentation, by an African American woman, and stolen after her death by a white male doctor who put his own name to it. This association may not have been intended by the show's makers at all, but setting a show in the USA tends to reflect on the American dream in all sorts of ways, and you might as well add the treatment of African Americans into the references to dealings with human vivisectionists.</p><p>It may seem that the alien involvement in the plot may soften it by making it seem less real, however the show then even takes that possibility away by leaving the viewer to decide whether what is on the train is actually alien, etc. However it is clearly of interest to the government or people closely connected to the government because we see Cancer Man having the doctor's notes translated. </p><p><b>3x11 Revelations (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The only apparent reference to the American dream in this episode is to the combination of freedom of religion combined with that other part of the dream, capitalism, which can allow things like mega churches and so many fake stigmatics that they can be killed in multiples of eleven.</p><p><b>3x12 War of the Coprophages (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>3x13 Syzygy (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Syzygy points to several contradictions in the American dream - in fact I think this is the best way of understanding this relatively-unpopular episode. The first one is the obvious one that that community thinking a Satanic cult is operating in its midst is riddled all the way through with Christianity like the writing through Blackpool rock. Now you may say that part of the American dream is that there should be freedom of religion, but that wasn't the way it always was, and (I stand to be corrected on this) as far as I know was only formulated in ths constitution of 1789. In fact previous to this, different States even had established churches - just like in England! I keep returning to the theme of the American dream changing over time, and religion is definitely one of the areas it has most changed.</p><p>Syzygy also points to (and in the process re-enacts and warns against) the history of killing people perceived as 'witches' in the US as a result of mass hysteria. It's like this episode is actually acting out the sort of perceptions you would have come across in Salem in 1692 and 1693, tranposed to contemporary society. In fact I wonder whether one of the reasons this episode has tended to be fairly unpopular is that it is frankly uncomfortable viewing because of the reminder of how humans can get things terribly wrong and commit atrocities as a result.</p><p>You may of course say that the US was very far from being the only place in history to suffer from a combination of witchcraft fantasy and religious hysteria causing people to see 'Satan' everywhere, and of course you'd be right. But in the context of the American dream the Salem witch trials had a particular role in the development of the current perception of the dream and I can't put it better than this:</p><p>'More than once it has been said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered.' (George Lincoln Burr: Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648-1706 (Original Narratives of Early American History). Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1914, p. 197, note 1.)</p><p>I would therefore argue that it was the sort of Satanic hysteria we see in this episode that caused the separation of church and state which is so characteristic of the American dream, and I think that's about as entwined in the dream as you can get. I will therefore include this episode among my list of ones with significan content related to the dream.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 18 (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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 44 (9 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless, Fresh Bones, and Syzygy.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-90763438242283785162023-08-13T21:28:00.003+01:002023-08-13T21:28:30.537+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: 2Shy, The Walk, Oubliette<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzvyZNDPxCt54pttodzCw8GqCbWLqm6yonxTf07CS1N-x_AL-xTt39S4MAL447jb2eV9w20SUKED98XunWfr4Cem1O5-uFbgmL2qohE0EizXLVGUAZetmK888NAfrr0bJq6WcwJa3zMJF3Wb4MaZom_nyLwzdG9Wg_vuHrS3eP8hTe-vUMnmUXzgzXiw/s2256/imgonline-com-ua-twotoone-9Osn8ItA1dbvQIAo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1671" data-original-width="2256" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzvyZNDPxCt54pttodzCw8GqCbWLqm6yonxTf07CS1N-x_AL-xTt39S4MAL447jb2eV9w20SUKED98XunWfr4Cem1O5-uFbgmL2qohE0EizXLVGUAZetmK888NAfrr0bJq6WcwJa3zMJF3Wb4MaZom_nyLwzdG9Wg_vuHrS3eP8hTe-vUMnmUXzgzXiw/w400-h296/imgonline-com-ua-twotoone-9Osn8ItA1dbvQIAo.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">https://twitter.com/7Veritas4/status/1681421067737350150</td></tr></tbody></table>The introduction to this series of posts about how the American dream is depicted and criticised in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1</p><p><b>3x06 2Shy (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p><b>3x07 The Walk (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>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.</p><p><b>3x08 Oubliette (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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:</p><p>'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."</p><p>'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.)</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>That's the contradiction: it's not only a dream, but it's an experiment.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>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.)</i></p><p><i>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.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-8913087151796227892023-08-09T23:45:00.001+01:002023-08-09T23:45:26.040+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: The Blessing Way, Paper Clip, D.P.O., Clyde Buckman's Final Repose, The List<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oxopPDMq7rs" width="320" youtube-src-id="oxopPDMq7rs"></iframe></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about the depiction and criticism of the American dream in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>3x01 The Blessing Way and 3x02 Paper Clip (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>Anasazi, The Blessing Way, and Paper Clip are essentially a three-parter spread over the gap in two seasons, and I am going to include all of them among my episodes with significant American dream content because they cover the familiar territory already mentioned in bucketloads. To summarise: they all include the themes of government corruption, the government's involvement in a government conspiracy of silence about extra terrestrials, the shadowy Syndicate, the presence of native Americans and thus a reminder of how badly the settlers have treated them.</p><p>The Blessing Way draws on the dynamic I talked about in Fresh Bones, where the ancient traditions (or 'superstitions') here save one of the white immigrants who have treated them so badly. This kindness is contrasted with the government corruption and Scully being treated badly by the FBI. If this ain't criticising the American dream and indicating that it's a hollow sham, I don't know what is. The point is really hammered home by the depictions of the stars and stripes in the J Edgar Hoover building.</p><p>The criticism of the American dream is then put on amphetamines and the volume cranked up by bringing up the way the US took in Nazi scientists after World War 2 to make use of their expertise, which meant they escaped criminal sanctions for what they did, and then bringing perhaps one of the least proud episodes of US history, as well as the show's ongoing lies and cover up, right into Mulder's family. Mother of God, I thought I didn't do subtle, but this is sledgehammer subtle. Once again i've been listening in to the conversations on the internet and I keep hearing how an American value is that the law is even handed for all, and there shouldn't be two tiers of justice. Protecting Nazi scientists is a slap in the face for this idea.</p><p>The episode expounds both possible approaches to Operation Paperclip very well; again something which isn't easy for a TV show, particularly as we are naturally intended to think that it was an evil thing for the US government to do, and are supposed to be horrified. But the US made a decision that it was better to take these men in and have their ability than potentially have them working for the other side in the Cold War and lose their talent. In retrospect, like so many historical decisions, this sounds absolutely insane, but it is intended that this reality will sink in to the viewer and that the US government did this. It let actual paid up Nazis off their crimes to gain their knowledge. Gulp. This is also one step on in crimes against humanity from the common medical textbook ethical quandary I have mentioned before, of whether or not it is OK to use the findings of unethical research, for example by Nazis. This is some heavy stuff for a TV show.</p><p>Paper Clip also introduces the iconic series idea that the US government isn't just doing random unethical experiments on people but on the entire population and keeping some now very old-fashioned looking records in filing cabinets. Once again, the series weaves things which could happen, based on the known history of the government not exactly being above board, with the series mythology, and making a potent combination. If I had to pick a way this crashes through the dream I suppose I would have to say that in the dream citizens would expect to be free to consent to or refuse medical experimentation. Did you like the way I managed to shoehorn the idea of freedom in there?</p><p>Finally the 'ancient technology' of the Native Americans is used by Skinner to gain the upper hand on Smoking Man, returning to the complex dynamic between the indigenous population and the white people I mentioned above.</p><p><b>3x03 D.P.O. (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream.</p><p><b>3x04 Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The only possible reference to the American dream is of people making their living and promoting themselves through psychic businesses which may or may not be genuine. Was Miss Cleo contemporary with this episode? She'd be the perfect real-life example. You could also say that the episode's focus on fatalistic determination is the opposite of the freedom to make yourself what you want.</p><p><b>3x05 The List (Monster of the</b> <b>Week)</b></p><p>Another kick in the teeth for the dream here, because if America is land of the free it's strange hat it has 5% of the world's population but a whopping 25% of the world's prison population (who by definition are not free) and is one of the countries which retains capital punishment. Let's just say that most of the other countries which have capital punishment are not exactly shining beacons of civil liberties or democracy, so this episode goes straight to one of the immense contradictions of the American dream.</p><p>As so often it then twists the knife in the wound by the way Neech is, of course, Black, highlighting the disproportionate presence of Blacks in the justice system. We are reminded of the historical and ongoing poorer status of Blacks in the US, from slavery, through segregation, to things like redlining, more advantageous loans, mortgages, etc given to white people enabling them to accumulate more wealth, etc. I highly recomment Mary Trump's book for further horrifying details of the reality under the dream, or rather fantasy, which is barely touched on in this episode. The reality is, of course, present at all times like ones sking colour.</p><p>Finally on behalf of the rest of the world I would like to thank the defeated 45th President of the United States of America for the way he's giving the entire world the civics lessons you all get and which we don't normally. They might even be useful for these posts. Certainly, coming from a country without a written constitution (we make up for it by having the Bearing of Armour Act 1313, which makes it illegal to wear a suit of armour in Parliament) I couldn't have told you what any of those Amendments were about (except possibly the second). But thanks to Mr Trump I learned about the Fourth Amendment this week, about the Sixth Amendment last week, and learned what the First Amendment doesn't protect the week before. He can be very proud of this achievement.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>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.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 38 (8 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless and Fresh Bones.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-16474305509637412842023-08-07T21:24:00.001+01:002023-08-07T21:24:39.736+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Reflections after Season 2<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiztKzK_pEkxFkcrwQQBEjhOGkDmVutuXp8Yn3Bn8Zb1nYtKHJ3gxBoCgqKBPysfl3yTxTpiVCsoimrwNztHemlnZxBnTZrCkGrFI2anZaztxqJHlq78YghS2qme0YO6vlnwrH7GpWCcTZlHczQcyoYQu907P3nYuhcQugAVZmriatsU4Dbv6wgLBFYDA/s650/american-dream-650x553.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="553" data-original-width="650" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiztKzK_pEkxFkcrwQQBEjhOGkDmVutuXp8Yn3Bn8Zb1nYtKHJ3gxBoCgqKBPysfl3yTxTpiVCsoimrwNztHemlnZxBnTZrCkGrFI2anZaztxqJHlq78YghS2qme0YO6vlnwrH7GpWCcTZlHczQcyoYQu907P3nYuhcQugAVZmriatsU4Dbv6wgLBFYDA/w400-h340/american-dream-650x553.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts about how the American dream is depicted and criticised in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p>Another pause for reflection now that I've got to the end of Season 2.</p><p>When I started this series of posts I adopted a definiton of the American dream taken straight from the relevant Wikipedia page, of the national ethos of the US including representative, democracy, rights, liberty, and equality, in which freedom is interpreted as the opportunity for individual prosperity and success. I have since added to this another one I found, where the national ethos is defined as the rule of law, equal opportunity, equal justice, hope for the oppressed, and human rights.</p><p>I was subsequently a little surprised to find that this isn't necessarily how citizens of the USA see it themselves and that the definition of the dream is apparently endlessly mutable. The table from a survey which illustrates this post is the exact opposite of what I would have listed myself and different from the narrow definition of freedom on Wikipedia: I think a broader idea of personal freedom as a more primary characteristic of the dream is probably more representative of the people who scream 'You can't tell me what to do because of my God-given freedom!' on the app formerly known as Twitter.</p><p>This mutability has made this series of posts quite difficult to do and all I can say as an outsider is that if as a country with a written consitution you can't define your dream in the constitution then you're just making life unnecessarily difficult for TV bloggers.</p><p>I have, however been surprised to realise that the version of the dream The X-Files criticises is the one I had in my head to start off with: that the dream is prosperity, opportunity, justice, rights, democracy, safety, transparent government. Of course this may merely mean that my impressions of the US, which I've filed in my mind under the label of 'American dream' because I'd heard it) may have been absorbed from watching The X-Files rather than, say, Fox News. I've also watched a lot of The Simpsons and I suspect that show's criticism of the nation's ethos is even more pointed because it doesn't have the softening fiction of aliens.</p><p>Of course the aspects of the dream that The X-Files criticises are also ones that are specifically woven into the mythology of the show: government secrecy, lack of justice, racism, the military-industrial complex, the treatment of native Americans, unethical experimentation, and so on. </p><p>Since so much of the core mythology relates to government cover up etc, i was expecting to find a majority of the American dream episodes I have identified among the Core mythology episodes. In fact this hasn't happened, and in fact I have identifed 35.7% of core mythology episodes as having significant content relating to the American dream in my opinion, but 40% of Monster of the Week episodes.</p><p>I was also surprised to find a run of episodes in the middle of Season 2 which apparently had no connection as far as I could see to the American dream and I began to wonder whether I was imagining my perceived depiction of the dream in the show. However Chris Carter said that it was in the middle of Season 2 that the show started getting into its stride so I would imagine that it is because the show started the exposition of itself and the previous exposition of the US ethos was part of the scene setting.</p><p>There are just another couple of things that have come up which I am not sure are directly connected to the American dream, however you may find it, but have been interesting.</p><p>One is Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, which I suppose being part of the American ethos is actually part of the dream. Perhaps the most obvious reference to these freedoms in The X-Files is the freedom from fear, because of the ongoing thread of fear: fear of the government, fear of aliens, fear of the unkown, and so on. Perhaps the most obvious fear to an outsider is the freedom to bear arms. Yes, you read that sentence right and I have equated two things which are likely to be different in many Americans' minds. However what I'm getting at is that if you are sitting there thinking you are glad you have the freedom to bear arms so that you can defend yourself in case one of the other people around you with guns attacks you or the government tries to take away your freedom, then what you are living in is fear. That is not freedom. </p><p>And the reality is that carrying arms increases the likelihood of the thing you're frightened of, namely being shot. Strangely this is illustrated by a scene in Anusazi, the one where Scully has taken Mulder's gun off him and Mulder finds Krycek at his apartment building. If you watch this scene carefully, in the early moments before Mulder expresses his intention of killing Krycek and Scully gets involved, because Krycek is armed but Mulder is not, Mulder's initial priority is to disarm Krycek. Because the unarmed man doesn't want to get shot his priority is to disarm the other man. Had they both had guns, it would have escalated quickly to a standoff. Despite his stated intent to kill Krckek, Mulder disarms him with neither of them getting shot. Had he left it at just wanting to disarm him there would have been no need for Scully to shoot Mulder. She had to shoot him because of his intent to shoot Krycek. In other words, The X-Files actually has a scene showing how not having arms means people don't get shot. But you all knew that, of course.</p><p>I can't remember what season it comes in but I'm looking forward to the future references to the reds under the beds scare. Of course this is necessary because Communism (even when it was 'Communism') was the perceived enemy that led to so much of the totally unethical things that went on during the Cold War in defence of the dream. I have also been interedted by the mention of Nixon's secretary: the show really isn't pulling any punches in its depiction of the dream being a hollow front is it?</p><p>And surely everyone is thinking of Nixon this week, aren't we?</p><p>And in case you're wondering what I mean by 'Communism', watch these interviews with people in California who thought a ban on drink driving was 'undemocratic' and 'Communist' in the 1980s. Perhaps that is the best criticism of the untrammeled 'freedom' to do whatever you feel like, that some people think is the essence of the American drem, to the extent that making it illegal must be Communist.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xSDniOoR3Lw" width="320" youtube-src-id="xSDniOoR3Lw"></iframe></div><br />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 <p></p><p><i>Core Mythology: 14 (5 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men and Anasazi.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 35 (8 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless and Fresh Bones.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-39768400274514369592023-08-06T22:15:00.003+01:002023-08-06T22:15:44.627+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: F Emasculata, Soft Light, Our Town, Anasazi<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAryIKnyhngYxkVYNGWZgGLc2J50wSdKN-SoMBN3ACTlglDo0wqj8-szM5JuuSF3s8G6evPupsmvkxyAIQYaJqBgmIoLYLtGwc33DpamY9dwOl0EWyRsnXkToBNey5IDzmS5OhjT6zq2HPxJEpm2wdWIzumMywe8ZT0DXa1cBGSuoBjW4CYR4x0FgSlrI/s1280/origin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAryIKnyhngYxkVYNGWZgGLc2J50wSdKN-SoMBN3ACTlglDo0wqj8-szM5JuuSF3s8G6evPupsmvkxyAIQYaJqBgmIoLYLtGwc33DpamY9dwOl0EWyRsnXkToBNey5IDzmS5OhjT6zq2HPxJEpm2wdWIzumMywe8ZT0DXa1cBGSuoBjW4CYR4x0FgSlrI/w400-h225/origin.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The introduction to this series of posts on how the American dream is depicted and criticised in The X-Files can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>2x22 F Emasculata (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>The deeply-flawed F. Emasculata introduces a new aspect of the American dream which hasn't appeared before. Remember how a part of the dream is that capitalism should be pretty much uncontrolled to allow the opportunities that people need to better themselves? Here we see this principle attached to healthcare, and as we know the US healthcare system is therefore driven by profit for companies rather than promoting the health of the population. Specifically in this episode 'Big Pharma' comes under criticism - the criticism is that in a capitalist system, Big Pharma wants to find remedies for purposes of profit and either isn't bothered by the damage it does or covers up the damage when it happens.</p><p>This fear of Big Pharma makes no sense to me at all (remember I'm a former health professional), ironically because while we do know that there have been disasters through inadequate testing, in a competitive capitalist economy if you make drugs for profit you have to make sure your customers come back to you. The aspects of the American dream which make medication commercial, are the same ones which make it competitive and mean that a company which keeps on killing people will run out of business. The show is making a popular criticism of an aspect of the dream, but the same aspects would prevent the fear happening.</p><p>Additionally we have all the double-dealing by various government agencies (including by Skinner), which ensures that the show is criticising the nature of the world's most exceptional country with liberty and justice for all.</p><p><b>2x23 Soft Light (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>More double-dealing by, presumably, the government, in the shape of X.</p><p><b>2x24 Our Town (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>Another reference to what happens when you allow the market to be pretty much free, with minimal controls, as it is in the capitalism which is part of the American dream. This time to what happens when you don't impose strict controls on food manufacturers and they start doing things like they do here. It's the freedom to improve yourself which is the problem: it makes you cut corners.</p><p><b>2x25 Anasazi (Core Mythology)</b></p><p>It's a bit daunting even to know where to start with the references to the American dystopia which the show has so far delineated.</p><p>For a start it is partly set on an Indian reservation, so makes the unsubtle point that the immigrant nation of persecuted religious people seeking freedom, treated the indigenous population incredibly badly to colonise the land. The entire underpinning of the American dream is in other people's suffering.</p><p>Despite that the fact that native nations also have made a significant contribution to the life of the US is made, by the use of the code talkers, who were the people responsible for using native American languages as a form of encryption.</p><p>The poisoning of Mulder's water with LSD or some other chemical which has made him psychotic may be intended to make us think, yet again, of the activities of the CIA in its unethical MK-Ultra experiments to find out how people could be persuaded to want to move to Communist countries, and specifically the leader of the project, folk dance enthusiast Sidney Gottlieb. The poisoning here is actually very reminscent of the sort of things he did, in terms of being irresponsible verging on the psychopathic. Despite MK-Ultra being presented as science it was far from the controlled, recorded, resproducible experiments characteristic of proper science: at times CIA agents wouldn't even drink coffee around Gottlieb in case he had felt like putting LSD in it as was his wont. Most reminiscent of this episode was the plan which never came to fruition, of distributing LSD in aerosol form through San Francisco (in fact the experiment was done with a substance thought to be harmless but which ended up killing several people). The point, as always, is that rather than being the country of justice and what have you, the government will screw you over and keep silent about it.</p><p>This secrecy, reaching over well into duplicity, corruption, crime, you name it, is of course the main substance of the episode. Of course it complicates it that we don't know who is and who isn't representing the government here.</p><p>Cancer Man was originally presented as if he was a CIA fixer, and certainly has access (but not unconditionally) to AD Skinner's office. However here he is more than suggested to be a goevrnment agent by the use of military. I think elsewhere his role is probably more ambiguous but here it is very clear that the government is in on the conspiracy.</p><p>The tests on 'merchandise' once again refer to multiple unethical experiments carried out under government aegis, only manoeuvred to fit the series mythology to be with aliens rather than humans.</p><p>The act of setting fire to the alien remains in the buried boxcar is reminiscent to many a US veteran of the burn pits they were required to preside over or be near, and which have left many with ongoing health problems. </p><p>I wasn't expecting to, but because of all this I am going to include Anasazi among the episodes which make significant reference to, or criticism of, the American dream.</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 14 (5 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., Little Green Men and Anasazi.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 35 (8 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless and Fresh Bones.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2544891478970373535.post-24936923667887247812023-08-03T22:10:00.004+01:002023-08-03T22:10:50.000+01:00The American Dream in The X-Files: Dod Kalm, Humbug, The Calusari<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtgbhUs-_5GKyKsmv00mfTvlqAuLz4YPGsueYgop9g9ZPc1jE6nfbTiFbZYyVVTD7RgM6lPp3JsbEPowX1YddVt-qj69G3xxcl7SLTHZPf9t0QGwYjCYmJ0AHqRka-i9K3Ww23ilai4N_pNCojpfvT2xjHcGixc0jYZ-0UbQrQxTmz2QnNVt0nvtfhZ0/s1024/Travel-Advisory-USA-683x1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="683" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtgbhUs-_5GKyKsmv00mfTvlqAuLz4YPGsueYgop9g9ZPc1jE6nfbTiFbZYyVVTD7RgM6lPp3JsbEPowX1YddVt-qj69G3xxcl7SLTHZPf9t0QGwYjCYmJ0AHqRka-i9K3Ww23ilai4N_pNCojpfvT2xjHcGixc0jYZ-0UbQrQxTmz2QnNVt0nvtfhZ0/w266-h400/Travel-Advisory-USA-683x1024.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>For the introduction to this series of posts about the American dream as it is depicted and criticised in The X-Files see here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1<p></p><p><b>2x19 Dod Kalm (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>No apparent reference to the American dream (but would have made a mean Sapphire and Steel).</p><p><b>2x20 Humbug (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>For my original post on this episode which made me think about The X-Files and the American dream, see here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/circus-season-humbug-x-files.html?m=1</p><p><b>2x21 The Calusari (Monster of the Week)</b></p><p>It may not seem that this episode, which is about an apparent secret mystical or magical society originating in Romania, has an immediate relevance to the American dream, I believe there is a possible distant connection, which may only be in my head as an outsider.</p><p>In recent posts I have reflected on the way the USA, as a nation composed of a majority of immigrants or descendants of immigrants, can still be surprisingly negative about immigration and 'foreigners'. I have previously suggested that there would naturally be a very human motivation that if you have achieved the dream you wouldn't necessarily want just anyone getting in on it, to ensure that any opportunities aren't further spread out than they would need to be.</p><p>But there is also the phenomenon of American exceptionalism, which describes a world-view where America is seen as special, different, or pre-eminent, in comparison to other nations. This isn't something which has explicitly been mentioned in the show, however it has kept appearing in the reading I have been doing about the American dream. Part of the dream is the idea of belonging to a special sort of nation. It would naturally therefore follow that if you think you are special, this must have some impact on your view of other nations, and I wonder whether negative views about immigration in the US originate in American exceptionalism: even though people may identify as another ethnicity + American, I wonder whether some people feel as if they have become American and left their origins behind in some way?</p><p>It would not be true to say that The X-Files always places the world of magic, the mystical, and anything fearful outside of America (given the purpose of the show it wouldn't have got much beyond the first series if it had tried to). In fact both Mulder and Scully would probably point out that because magic is a pretty much universal human activity there are naturally magical systems unique to the USA: and so we have hoodoo, pow-wow, and other systems of magic which share roots with other cultures but originated in the USA since its founding among different groups of people. However in The Calusari and Fresh Bones we have two episodes close together which place human magical activities in other ethnic groups which are not noticeably 'Americanised' and present exactly the sort of cultural norms which would be abhorrent to the 'When in America speak English' crowd: they are not noticeably Americanised, aren't speaking English and are maintaining the cultural norms of their places of origin, rather than, say, joining a Southern Baptist church.</p><p>I am suggesting that in these two episodes the series is placing the frightening magic in the context of people who are already objects of fear for some Americans and thereby, in these episodes at least, could be placing Americans' fears in the world outside the USA and thus reinforcing a cultural norm of American exceptionalism.</p><p>Oh look, I cunningly worked the word 'fear' into that last paragraph. To be fair this wasn't exactly difficult since both episodes essentially include all the classic Hollywood bogeymen of 'primitive' foreigners doing scary things with magic and being frightening, but fear is another thing I have been thinking about a lot while reading about the American dream and watching y'all talking to each other on the internet.</p><p>Freedom from fear was one of Roosevelt's original four freedoms, and he defined it quite narrowly in his speech as referring to a world-wide reduction of arms to a point where no nation would be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any other nation. Leaving aside the contradiction that he was president of the nation which now has the highest single defence spending of any country in the whole world, there is also the contradiction that the US also has one of the higher rates of gun deaths in the world (and is only really behind a list of countries including places like El Salvador, Colombia, the Bahamas, and Mexico, which really isn't an achievement. In 2019, the US's rate of gun deaths was 3.96 per 100,000; in the tinpot banana republic failed state with an unelected fascist government that I live in, ours was 0.04 in the same year. In 2023 the USA has had more than 400 shootings so far this year (according to CNN); our last one was on 13th March 1996. Amnesty International has had a travel advisory about the USA because of the high level of gun violence. While we're on the subject of fear that's bloody scary. Roosevelt's narrow definiton of freedom from fear is something which just isn't happening.</p><p>I have been thinking about this in terms of fear, and specifically freedom from fear. The idea that I am about to express will be abhorrent to many Americans and so I'm just going to insert a warning that comments are very welcome but I will not platform dangerous or irresponsible views and comments are always moderated: this is my blog and my policy is that guns SHOULD be heavily controlled because people without guns don't shoot people. But the contradiction I see here is this: in the USA the most frequently named thing that people see as part of the American dream is freedom (I quoted a survey to that effect a few posts ago). Many (but not all) Americans read the second amendment of the constitution to mean that they have the freedom to bear arms, and this is the contradiction for me.</p><p>I have been reading the sorts of things that Americans write on social media about arms, and I can't help but think that if you are thinking you have to be free to bear arms to defend yourself in case someone attacks you or to protect yourself from the government in case of 'overreach' you are not free. If you can't sit in your own home or go shopping without such fear that you feel you have to be armed, then the contradiction is that you believe (rightly or not) that you are living in a country where the rule of law does not obtain, and the dream is completely void. Similarly if you don't trust the government (with reason or not) to operate following the rule of law, you obviously don't think you live in a country where the rule of law pertains and at that point the American dream is really out of the window.</p><p>To make it clear I am saying that to an outsider's view, if you feel you won't be safe and the government may not follow the law so you have to be armed against the government, then that is not freedom, that is not a dream, and you are actually living in fear. The exact thing that in the American dream you should have the freedom to be free from. Freedom from fear is being able to go about your daily life and not feel you have to be armed, because you know you are safe.</p><p>There is an additional contradiction that feeling the need to be armed necessarily ends in the country being compared with much less stable and developed countries with even higher levels of violence, where you would reasonably expect a greater need to be armed because, well, they're not safe. The perceived need to be armed shoots down both the American dream and American exceptionalism with one bullet by meaning people live with the levels of fear you expect in some very unstable countries.</p><p>I wanted to say that this American nightmare fear isn't present in the show at all, but I think it may be more subtle in the 1990s and have become much louder in the years since. Perhaps it's best represented in the figures of the (ironically named given the subject, although I don't remember them actually shooting anyone in the show) Lone Gunmen, who certainly have no confidence that the government will follow its own laws. In fact perhaps this fear could even be said to underlie the entire series mythology, since the overarching theme is that the government are covering up all sorts of shenanigans with aliens, experiments, conspiracies, etc.</p><p>There is probably a whole study in what became of X-Files viewers who took it more literally than a fictional show should be taken, and the views they now hold...</p><p>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 </p><p><i>Core Mythology: 13 (4 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., and Little Green Men.)</i></p><p><i>Monster of the Week: 31 (8 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Miracle Man, Shapes, Blood, Sleepless and Fresh Bones.)</i></p><p>As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.</p>John Berry (he/him)http://www.blogger.com/profile/17980394612113328907noreply@blogger.com