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the truth

27 jul 2023

this bullshit ufo congressional hearing shit where the bullshit ufo "whistleblower" has described the conspiracy from the x files before congress has popped up in the middle of an x files rewatch and now im inspired to write about it. not about the bullshit hearing, which is just bullshit, and obvious bullshit, but about the x files and its complicated relationship with the "truth" underlying conspiracy theories. so here goes nothing.

this is going to spoil how the show ends without, in my opinion, actually spoiling anything, so if you care about spoilers for a 30 year old series youve been warned, but again, for complicated reasons ill get into i dont think its *actually* a spoiler. to a normal person with a normal brain it might be.

as far as im concerned, every episode of the x files, and the series's arc as a whole, asks three questions:

(1) is it possible to know The Truth?

(2) if so, could it do us any good to learn The Truth?

(3) if it couldnt do us any good, is The Truth still worth searching for?

one of the deepest tensions in conspiracy theory ideology is that the level of complete authority over all of reality that the powers that be would need to have in order to preserve secrecy and accomplish its goals is also a level of authority against which you are hopelessly outmatched. if you believe there's a massive conspiracy that has embedded itself in every part of society and is constantly mediating the subjective experience of reality of every person on the planet, what does that get you? what horizon of struggle does that open to you? you're fucked. you might even be right! but if youre right, then youre fucked!

the conflict in the average episode of the x files is that some paranormal shenanigans or creatures are killing people, and mulder and scully have to (a) stop it from completing its goal of killing people, (b) catch it, (c) get proof that it is paranormal to prove paranormal shit exists, and (d) find out the truth about the paranormal shit this week.

these conflicts are almost invariably resolved as follows:

(a) they do not stop it from completing its goal, everyone it wants to kill dies.

(b) they do not catch it, it gets away. occasionally they catch it and then it gets away and more people die in the process. on rare occasions, it dies but in a way that they never fully understand and ensures there is no evidence it ever existed.

(c) they do not get proof. occasionally they get proof and it is destroyed or disappears as part of a conspiracy. scully *always* says something like "any claim that these events were supernatural cannot be corroborated" in her report. at the end of the ep. they get nothing.

(d) by the end of the episode, most of the time, there's an explanation for what it was, The Truth is found, or our heroes come to some kind of intuitive understanding of The Truth that doesnt necessarily tell them anything concrete about the outlines of what they were looking at.

see what they did there? by the end of the episode our heroes find the truth, the truth mulder is searching for, the truth referenced in the poster on his wall ("the truth is out there"), but they get nothing for it. the villain wins. mulder and scully survive because they have to bear witness next week, and the bad guy(s) survives because the bad guys have always won, they always do, and they always will.

which makes it an odd and striking choice to have our protagonists, and seemingly the showrunner, keep the faith, apparently seeing the search for truth as a reward sufficient on its own. sure the monster killed every guest star in the entire episode and then got away with it but at least now we know it was some kind of demon who was mad at the school pta board and its finished bc the whole pta board is dead, another x file closed! mulders character motivation is ultimately rooted in the alien abduction of his sister, but he doesnt want to do anything about that abduction, he just wants -- needs -- to know what the fuck happened.

and so it is for the overarching plot of the show, which is one giant conspiracy that runs for all nine seasons. after youve seen a few episodes, it should be no surprise that in the climax of the series finale, simply titled "The Truth", mulder gives a speech where he plot summarizes the entire conspiracy top to bottom, a conspiracy he is powerless to stop, organized by a cabal that is going to completely get away with it, a conspiracy so powerful that even the people pulling the strings couldnt stop it if they wanted to. and then the series ends.

i just told you that, and i don't even think it's a spoiler. think about that, i legitimately dont think its a spoiler to say that the bad guys win by the end of the series, completely and totally, no wiggle room, no silver lining. the series ends with no hope for anything at all, our government, our country, our planet, our species. the series ends with a game over. end of play. and i am convinced, and i confess im probably in the minority feeling this way, that that's not a spoiler *at all*, because it's just following the structure of every episode of the series, a structure you have figured out on an intuitive level by the time youve watched 5 episodes, to the point where in the last 10 minutes of the episode you find yourself wondering, "now hows this one gonna go wrong and kill literally everyone in the episode except mulder, scully, and the monster of the week?" so then when you see mulder handcuff the only witness to a railing in his basement and then leave, you already know "oh yeah ok mulder just killed this guy by accident lmao, obviously thats where this is going". so when i tell you "the bad guys win at the end of the x files", its not a spoiler because "the bad guys already won and you cant stop them" is baked into the very fabric of the classical formulation of conspiracy theorism. what *would* be a spoiler would be me telling you how they win, what their plan is, why theyre doing it, what they want, giving you the details and the bullshit stupid lore and mythology. in the x files, *that* would be a spoiler. because the forces of evil triumphing is an inevitability from the very beginning of the show, so all that remains is to catalog how they did it, to find the truth, and maybe, if we're feeling really frisky, give a speech where we triumphantly throw it in their face that we put the pieces together and figured it out, even if that doesn't begin to matter.

you can tell i obviously think that's foolish, though the protagonists certainly dont. curiously, the antagonists clearly do! the conspiracy lets mulder and scully keep digging around and investigating because they know that in the end it will all amount to *nothing*, which is how the show avoids the question of why the baddies don't just kill mulder and scully. but what does the show think?

to go back to the three questions i claimed the series poses at the beginning: (1) can we find the truth, (2) would it do us any good if we did, and (3) if not is it still worth it? the show answers two of them easily. sure, its possible to find the truth, but it won't help you. the show's answer to the third question is harder to pin down.

is it supposed to be ironic? the search for the truth is a pointless endeavor when you're staring down the hopeless reality that truth signifies. or is it hopeful? even if youre powerless to save yourself its not too late to find catharsis in identifying the root cause of your own impending doom.

i think the latter (i also think its the wrong answer), but thats an exercise for the reader, enjoy!