The American Dream in The X-Files: Dod Kalm, Humbug, The Calusari
2x19 Dod Kalm (Monster of the Week)
No apparent reference to the American dream (but would have made a mean Sapphire and Steel).
2x20 Humbug (Monster of the Week)
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
2x21 The Calusari (Monster of the Week)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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: 13 (4 with signifcant content relating to the American dream: Deep Throat, Fallen Angel, E.B.E., and Little Green Men.)
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.)
As always, I'm totally unequipped to do this so if I've missed anything corrections are very welcome in the comments.