“As a storyteller, I am fascinated how a person’s sense of consciousness can be so transformed by nothing more magical than listening to words . . . mere words.” (José Chung)
Donna Haraway, in her 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” discusses both technology’s liberatory and terrifying potential in its interaction with humanity. Fueled by the discourses of postmodernism, feminism, socialism, and popular culture, Haraway theorizes “the possibilities for our reconstruction [that] include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.” Haraway engages the goal of the modernist project, but combines it with her figuration of the cyborg, in a ironic, blasphemous, and ludic articulation. Haraway illustrates that we cyborgs are wrapped up in both the discourses of postmodernism and modernism, looking both forward and back in an attempt to explain our life experiences and (re)write our own realities. Our explanations become the narratives that articulate and give meaning to our individual and diverging realities.
The Enlightenment project, even though bludgeoned and staggering by the theories of postmodernism, still maintains much of its hold on the western mind. Its mythologies of reason have bolstered our faith in the discourses of science and pseudo-science alike that attempt to offer us guidance in the reliability of fact, rationality, and faith in a knowable, orderly universe created by a beneficent, omnipotent God. While poststructuralist thought has attempted to decenter the subject, calling into question the notion of a knowable reality at all, these dicourses still firmly rely on language for their articulation. I suggest that the current popularity of abduction mythology in the west is symptomatic of the collision of postmodern and Enlightenment discourses: while Haraway’s potential recombinations attempt to provide new myths for this cyber age, old Enlightenment certainties are still present and attempt to explain psychological uncertainty and physical trauma. Roger Luckhurst, in his article “The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction,” locates abductee mythology at the cultural intersection of (1) memory and trauma, (2) the quotidian and the technological sublime, (3) new ageism and scientific discourse, and (4) apathy and governmental control.
What I call the “X-Files Effect,” then, is similar to the notion that Luckhurst examines in his article: the science-fictionalization of trauma; i.e., it is a person’s attempt to explain postmodern trauma through recourse to “genre stories”: abduction scenarios, new ageism, conspiracy theories, and the technological sublime. These stories, usually uncovered through regressive techniques like hypnotism, are created to explain holes in memory — they are accounts of lost time during which one experienced some sort of trauma. The story of this trauma is then (re)constructed by using the popular mythologies of forces out there acting on the individual for some unknown, hostile purpose. I submit that the success of The X-Files, a television series that David Pirie recognizes as “a major genre turning-point” supported by the audience’s approval, is a major force in the popular imagination that has succeeded in mythologizing Luckhurst’s genre stories as tenable explanations for postmodern trauma. This “X-Files effect” is not only a product of the social imagination begun by the mid-40’s coining of flying saucers, but continues to normalize these explanations of contemporary trauma by making them readily accessible in popular discourse. While the drive of The X-Files “places agency and responsibility out there,” (the show’s tag line is “the truth is out there”) it often comments on its own participation in the creation of these genre stories through self-reflexive, meta-fictive episodes like “José Chung’s From Outer Space,” where the truth seems to be located very much in how the individual locates the out-there internally.
“José Chung’s From Outer Space” ironically posits an alternate motto at its outset: one of the episode’s narrators, novelist José Chung, states that “truth is as subjective as reality.” His plan, he in forms the show’s other narrative participant, Dana Scully, is to write a “new genre — a non-fiction science fiction” which is demonstrated by the unfolding of the show’s narrative events: a Faulknerian intertectuality that searches through the various stories of the event’s “experiencers” — a term Chung prefers to “abductee.” Centered around a trauma experienced by two teenagers, this investigation attempts to lace together the multiple narratives of the participants and represents what Janet Murray, in her work Hamlet on the Holodeck, calls a “multiform” story, where different points of view about the same event form the story line. These narratives are all the result of experienced traumas of some kind that center around what appears to be the abduction of two teenagers by aliens. These traumas are characterized by both physical and psychological scars, the failure of technology, inexplicable visual experiences, missing time, and immobility — essentially they have the characteristics of Luckhurst’s narrative of abduction that has found it way into the American cultural consciousness. The “experiencers” each exhibit hopes and expectations that end up coloring their trauma: the level-headed Chrissy Giorgio, who shows signs of both a physical and psychological ordeal; Harold Lamb, her boyfriend caught up in romantic notions about love; Air Force Lieutenant Jack Sheaffer, dubiously dressed as a big-eyed, gray alien; Roky Crikenson, an electric company employee who witnesses the abduction of Harold and Chrissy which precipitates his own revelation; and Blain Faulkner, the unemployed conspiracy theorist who wants to participate in his own otherworldly experience. Each of these characters’ narratives are replete with images of popular culture intricately combined with a genre story, and each of these stories is then narrated by one of the episode’s two narrators, further separating the actual event from the audience.
One of the difficulties in discussing this episode lies in the countless visual and narrative allusions to UFO culture. From mashed-potato sculptures of the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to the men in black played by Alex Trebeck and Jesse Ventura, to the accoutrements of abduction scenarios, to edited footage of the alien autopsy, to posters of Star Wars and Space: Above and Beyond, to police detective plots and interrogations, to Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creatures, the narratives are intertwined and become inseparable from these iconic representations of American popular culture. This pastiche of pop-culture suggests The X-Files‘ own existence within this matrix, shows the inseparability of this popular discourse (what we associate with the trivial, fantasy, or ludicrous) from that of reason (the true investigation into what happened to Chrissy and Harold), and visually reminds us that we are participating in this postmodern intertextuality. From the very outset of the episode, we are being set up to participate in this parody of culture that we support by even turning the show on. [Here, I showed the opening sequence of the show.]
Yet, despite the obvious parody here, the show centers around a human trauma that is very real. While some of the “fantasy prone” characters involved in this episode seemingly may be dismissed as proponents of genre stories — Roky’s new ageist manifesto about Lord Kimbote and Blaine’s role-playing dreams of adventures beyond the mundane — Chrissy’s and Shaeffer’s physical wounds show a trauma that they both attempt to explain in various ways. In his interview with Mulder — which we hear about through Scully — Schaeffer explains his confusion: “I am absolutely positive me, my copilot, and those two kids were abducted, but I can’t be absolutely sure it happened. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.” Chrissy undergoes hypnosis twice, and each time her story is different: first, she narrates a typical abduction scenario, but her second story suggests a government cover-up that was made to look like a UFO encounter. Ironically, both of her stories visually mirror the placement of the participants of her hypnosis sessions, suggesting that this investigative procedure is as potentially invasive and terrifying as an alien abduction. Her physical trauma might also be explained by rape; Harold confesses to Mulder and Scully that he and Chrissy had consensual sex, yet his reluctance to betray this information suggests Chrissy’s lack of consent. To Scully, this trauma becomes simply one of sexual abuse rather than alien abduction or government conspiracy, yet Mulder remains dubious since Chrissy’s story still does not match Harold’s.
Government conspiracy remains a likely explanation for the incidents in Klass county. Sheaffer’s copilot, Major Vallee, is found dead, dressed as a gray alien, Sheaffer admits a conspiracy to Mulder but maintains that he cannot be sure of anything, and both Sheaffer and the body of Vallee disappear accompanied by government looking men, only to be found planted at the crash of an experimental plane outside of town, the former now dead as well. This fabricated evidence suggests the complicitous participation of government-like agencies attempting to cover up a Roswell-type incident, but their ministrations, while they might explain Chrissy’s moments of lost time, do not shed any light on the trauma received by Sheaffer.
Any unified reading of this episode cannot explain all of its events — a final genre reading is as allusive as the men in black. Interestingly, the men in black provide a link into every narrative in this episode, they represent the postmodern and intertextual thread that keeps any one reading from being the final one, and they link the individual crash into trauma with that of popular culture. In this episode, there are actually four men in black: agents Mulder and Scully are seen by Blaine as intimidating and mysterious figures, and the popular icons Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek play both themselves and men in black. They link the ineffable and terrifying to the quotidian and familiar, causing glimpses of understanding mingled with moments of confusion and fear. The men in black symbolize problems with human perception: their very appearance causes trance-like states, visual confusion, and obfuscating language that resist any closure to traumatic experiences — much like watching too much T.V. Their unpredictable appearances deepen an audience’s involvement with the story, suggesting a complexity that perpetually leaves the event unexplained and offers a polyphony without giving any one voice the last word.
The episode’s end shows Mulder asking Chung not to publish this book, for the incidents cannot be described in realistic terms, no matter how well adept he is at writing, and his recounting will only make the participants look foolish, further dis crediting Mulder’s pursuit of truth. Chung refuses Mulder’s plea, and using language implicated in genre stories, publishes his book. Chung’s narration, presumably from his book, closes the episode on a note of pathos, of a yearning for meaning in a meaningless time. All participants in this episode are shown to be still searching for meaning in their otherwise empty lives, except Chrissy Giorgio, who, Chung narrates, “has come to believe her alien visitation was a message to improve t he condition of her own world, and she has devoted herself to this goal wholeheartedly.” Chrissy is shown at her computer writing; under “Greenpeace” and “Amnesty International” posters, she works, interrupted by Harold one last time with a message of his love. Shutting her window on him, she returns to her work, saying: “love — is that all you men think about?” While Chung interprets Chrissy’s new direction as a positive, life affirming change, it might be mor e ambiguous than that. However, she, after the failure to communicate with the people around her, she does seem to be reaching out to a larger community through her computer, even while eschewing the local.
Donna Haraway suggests that “if we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets.” The self-perpetuating X-Files effect attempts to pool all of the resources of Ame rican culture to explain the postmodern world, but at the same time, it resists the genre stories that try to neatly present the reality of any event. What “José Chung” seems to suggest is that the language that we need, the language that Haraway advocates above, will always remain a part of our culture and its desire for closure, but, at least at present, it resists that closure by remaining fluid and playful, by suspending the finality of genre stories in parodic references to them, and by remaining in service of the X-Files effect. At the end of a recent episode entitled “X-Cops,” in a metafictive moment, Mulder comments on the filming of recent events by looking directly into the camera — implicating the episode’s camera crew, the writers of popular culture, and the audience that keeps it going — and states: “It all depends on how they edit it together.”
GRL Archive 