The American Dream in The X-Files: Fire and Beyond the Sea

The introduction to this series of posts about the American dream as it appears in The X-Files, can be found here: https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-american-dream-in-x-files.html?m=1

There has been a pause in these posts, because I have been trying to get my head round three books which I thought would help in this pursuit. I think it will, although they have brought into focus how little I know of the subject.

The first, and an absolute lodestone as far as I am concerned, is Jim Cullen's The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003). It is a wide-ranging history but for the purposes of these posts, he perfectly brings out some of the contradictions within the American dream, which The X-Files takes hold of and runs with, with added aliens. The book is a procession of arguments and conflicts among people who wanted: freedom but only the right sort and only under authority; individualism but conformity; equality, but not so much equality that it would stifle freedom; to live in a frontier colonised country but to benefit from the labour of the cities, resulting in the via media of the suburbs; freedom from want and fear but these were felt to be too much and replaced with freedom of enterprise; freedom of speech but the right of the government to prosecute those whose speech is a clear and present danger; freedom for all men, but only the men legally defined as men and not the ones owned by other men; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (changed from Locke's version of 'the pursuit of property', strangely in the wealithiest country in the world); democracy vs republicanism; equal right and opportunity for all, but also a clear priority of merit, defined as you will; and so on. No wonder Martin Luther King said the American dream was unfulfilled: my reading around it has literally made my head spin and in the time available to me I have no likelihood of getting my head round everything involved. 

In fact he isn't slow to point one massive contradiction out right at the start:

'Agency, in turn, lies at the very core of the American Dream, the bedrock premise upon which all else depends. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, the Dream assumes that one CAN advance confidently in the direction of one's dreams to live out an imagined life. One of the greatest ironies - perhaps the greatest = of the American Dream is that its foundations were laid by people who specifically rejected a belief that they did have control over their destinies. In its broadest sense, you might say that the narrative arc of this book begins with people who denied their efforts could affect their fates, moves through successors who later declared independence to get that chance, to heir who elaborated a gospel of self-help promising they could shape their fates with effort, and ends with people who long to achieve dreams without having to make any effort at all.' (Cullen, op. cit., p. 10)

I am left with the inescapable impression that The X-Files could only have been made and had such impact in the USA, and it is the complexity of the Dream that makes it so. Merely setting a show in this setting, taking some of the aspects of society that it would like to forget and introducing conspiracy theories and aliens, is like the bit in A, B, and C, when different characters are introduced into Number 6's chemically-induced sleep.

And then we have the real history, particularly of unethical medical experimentation. For this, Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and Co, New York, 2019) is like wandering round inside Fox Mulder's head, and I don't say that lightly. Much of it is about Project MK-Ultra, which I suspect alone is a major inspiration for much of the government's behaviour in the X-Files and places it in the Cold War context contemporary with Mulder's father and cigarette smoking man. However it also has information about Project Paperclip, unethical experimentation in other countries, such as Project 731 in Japan, etc. In fact I would like to think that the writers of the show travelled forward in time to use the book as a source. Hey, look, I've been reading about weird experiments with hympnosis.

Finally a book (and an author I can't recommend highly enough, especially her other book about her uncle) excellent for the trauma which underlies much of American society and which is used in The X-Files in both its real form and fictionalised form involving aliens, is The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal by Mary L Trump (St Martin's Press, New York, 2021). You will understand how much I love Mary Trump when I say that in the very first pages of this book she says that for years whenever people heard her surname and said 'Any relation?', she would always answer No. That is, until she couldn't do that any more. Whatever you think of Donald, that's some cool shade right there. I haven't got very far through this one yet (it's sharing my trips onto the canal bank to sun myself with Poisoner in Chief so far), but she is a clinical psychologist and talks about the many traumas that underlie American society. And, for the purpose of these posts, underline the essentially flawed nature of the Dream.

1x11* Fire (Monster of the Week)

No apparent reference to the American dream.

*Helpfully there are two different ways of numbering the episodes, including or excluding the pilot, but I will now stick to the numbering on the box set in which Fire is Episode 11 of Series 1, and the twelfth episode including the Pilot.

1x12 Beyond the Sea (Monster of the Week)

I was going to say that this episode doesn't directly reference the American dream but I think it could in one of two ways. Perhaps I should say that this episode closely mirrors real history in that Boggs is modelled on Henry Lee Lucas and his appearance is modelled on Richard Ramirez, both prolific killers sentenced to death, and neither of whom actually got executed. Jim Cullen comments that one of the features of the dream is that everyone theoretically could participate in it but not everyone can or should have the opportunity. It would therefore be part of the dream for society to be kep safe from serial killers like these. The other way is that the show naturally brings up the question of justice and the death penalty - again, building on Henry Lee Lucas, of whose case Texas rangers made a terrible dog's dinner, right up to letting him read the case files of victims he was suspected of killing, so of course he could reproduce personal details and make false confessions. So the show once again raises the question for the viewer of whether the justice which is part of the dream can be relied on and particularly in the context that if they get it wrong you could well find yourself dead and beyond appeal.

The episode directs our attantion to Boggs's antics manipulating Scully and allows us not to notice the American dream references going on in the background, but this question of justice, safety, and the classic X-Files questioning of whether the dream is really happening, means that I am going to include this in the list of episodes with significant American dream content.

Happy 4th of July! Shall I? Should I? No no stop me, I can't help myself...

As I go through these posts I am going to keep a tally of how many episodes of Core Mythology and Monster of the Week types have significant content making the American dream in effect part of the plot rather than the omnipresent setting, and so far we have 

Core Mythology: 4 (2 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat and Fallen Angel.)

Monster of the Week: 9 (2 with significant content relating to the American dream: Eve and Beyond the Sea.)

As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.