Imaginary Worlds - The Truth Is Out There

Episode Date: October 7, 2015

FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are reopening The X-Files in January. And the Internet couldn't be more excited. Every casting update, every on-set photos has sparked a dozen tweets or blog posts. Is this just nostalgia? Or is concept behind The X-Files tapping into the zeitgeist again? With Lindsay Ellis, Joe Uscinski and John Lumiere-Wins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Order now. Alcohol and select markets. See app for details. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. There are two ways to go when extending a franchise, reboots or revivals. I'm a sucker for picking up where we left off, even though it really doesn't work a lot of the time. Because after so many years, very often actors can't relate to some old character they played a long time ago. Or, you know, the style of filmmaking and storytelling has just changed. And it's sort

of weird to try to pick up where you left off. But I just love the idea that these fictional characters have been going about their lives, even when we're not watching them. So I will tune in with cautious optimism when The X-Files resumes for a limited run in January. They police us and spy on us, tell us that makes us safer. We've never been in more danger. Then do something about it, Mulder. In case you never watched The X-Files,

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson played Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, FBI agents that were assigned to paranormal cases. He was the believer. She was the skeptic. They were also on a quest to unravel a massive conspiracy between shady government officials and mostly unseen aliens that were preparing

the Earth for colonization. Who is this Deep Throat character? I mean, we don't know anything about him. He's in a delicate position. He has access to information and indiscretion could expose him. He's toying with you, rationing out the facts. You think he does it because he gets off on it? No, I think he does it because he gets off on it? No, I think he does it because

you do. So at its height, The X-Files averaged 20 million viewers a week, which was a huge number even before television audiences got so fractured. And I was so obsessed with the show, I had action figures of Mulder and Scully on my windowsill donning little FBI badges with their little plastic guns and flashlights. And that show had some great flashlight scenes. But I was not a fan to the end. When David Duchovny left after seven years, I thought they just should have wrapped things up, but they just kept going and going until they just kind of went out with a whimper instead of a bang. So I was surprised how much buzz there's been around this new miniseries. Every morsel of information, every photo, every casting update, sparks a dozen tweets or blog posts. I mean, is it just nostalgia? Or is the concept behind the X-Files speaking to our time

again? Lindsay Ellis, a pop culture critic, wrote a really interesting piece for the website Tor, where she argued the real legacy of the X-Files was that Fox Mulder made it acceptable, even romantic, to be a conspiracy theorist. Because I think Mulder, you know, he's weird, but just weird enough because, like, he was good looking. He was kind of loner and quirky. He had social problems. So he was relatable. But at the same time, he was also kind of a hero, especially by nature, the fact that he does get vindicated so constantly. And he never really feels the need to give Gully the benefit of the doubt. But in the end, he didn't need to because he was usually right. Now, Mulder also sometimes consulted with a group

called the Lone Gunman. And they were supposed to be a very clear contrast to the tall, handsome David Duchovny. What do you know about the Gulf War syndrome? Agent Orange of the 90s. Artillery shells coated with depleted uranium. What about UFO activity during that period? Yeah, UFOs caused the Gulf War syndrome. That's a good one. That's why we like you, Mulder. Your ideas are weirder than ours. But Lindsay pointed out something which I forgot. In the spring of 2001, there was a short-lived spinoff series starring the lone gunman. Yeah, the pilot for the lone gunman involved a government conspiracy to fly airplanes into the Twin Towers. The Cold War cold war's over john but with no

clear enemy to stockpile against the arms market's flat but bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of new york city and you'll find a dozen tin pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility i mean that's eerie right know, there was a period after 9-11 when conspiracy theories seemed unpalatable. And we were willing to grant the government massive new powers. Then came Abu Ghraib, Edward Snowden, and conspiracy theories seemed to come back with a vengeance. But Lindsay doesn't think much of conspiracy theorists for one big reason. It's becoming more and more impossible to actually keep the lid on something. And it's like, and we know this and we see it every single day.

And yet this sort of persists with certain things like 9-11 or the moon landing and stuff like that. Like it was like there is no way we could keep a lid on this. You can't even keep a lid on our cell phone surveillance. Because, you know, as a journalist, you do believe the truth is out there. And so, you know, that should be the objective. Yeah. The truth, not decorating your weird belief with selective evidence, half of which isn't true anyway. Yeah.

Mulder. I know. That's a sad thing is that that's actually what Mulder was not doing. Yep. You're not doing your job, Agent Mulder. I know. That's a sad thing is that that's actually what Mulder was not doing. Yep. And that you're not doing your job, Agent Mulder of the FBI. You have one job. Find evidence for the thing. That's bad police work. Don't you listen to serial? Yeah. I mean, when the X-Files first came out, Mulder was a lone wolf. I mean, if it was a brand new show today, it would be hard for him to cut through the din and let people know that his

conspiracy is the real one. You know, the fact that we have these figureheads that have like hundreds of thousands of followers, people like Alex Jones and David Icke, and the fact that me even saying their names is going to put me on a bunch of Twitter lists.

I've been running a Google News search for the last four years. So I've been getting everything that comes across the Internet with the word conspiracy theory in it. I also talked to Joe Yuzinski, professor of political science, University of Miami, who wrote a book called American Conspiracy Theories. conspiracy theories. And then I sit down and I read the articles with my research team and we code them for which ones treat the conspiracy theory positively, neutrally, and negatively. And the vast majority of them, I think about 70%, tend to treat conspiracy theories incredibly negatively. So I agree with you that, yes, we are talking a lot more about conspiracy theories, but we're treating them like zoo animals. So what was it about The X-Files that just connected with so many people?

The X-Files started in the fall of 1993, which is a really neat time for conspiracy theories. You know, only two years prior to that, JFK came out, which was a huge movie, and it broke a lot of ground in terms of conspiracy narratives. The magic bullet enters the president's back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees. It then moves upward in order to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck. Wound number two.

Fox was sort of a fledgling network, and they were trying to reach younger viewers at that time who were Gen Xers. And those people grew up in a time when, you know, they were coming of age in the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s. And during that period, you had Watergate. You had all sorts of real conspiracies coming out about the CIA. You had Congress looking into the JFK and MLK assassinations, and then you had Iran-Contra. So you have this whole zeitgeist taking place during Gen X's formidable years. I mean, there was a poll that came out of Gen Xers in the early 90s and said,

which is more likely, that you will receive a Social Security check when you retire or that you will see aliens? And the majority said aliens. I mean, I totally fit that demo. When I was in high school, I had these two sets of trading cards, which I bought at Newberry Comics in Harvard Square. And they had satirical cartoons of all the figures in the Iran-Contra scandal and the Kennedy assassination.

And by the time the Oliver Stone movie came out, I already knew all those facts by heart. And then the X-Files showed us that JFK was really assassinated by their main villain, a character that fans were calling Cigarette Smoking Man or Cancer Man. It is official now. President Kennedy is dead. You know, one of the things we do in the book is that we look at, you know, who are conspiracy theorists and what kind of behaviors do they have and what do they look like?

So if you were to imagine, you know, your prototypical conspiracy theorist, it's probably a middle-aged white guy in his mother's basement with a ham radio. And he might be on the right and have some sort of anti-government views. And he probably has a few cats. But what we find in the book is that that's not really the case. And I'll give you a very good example of that. Look at The View. Most of the people who have hosted The View have been conspiracy theorists. I mean, Jenny McCarthy with the anti-vax conspiracy theories, Whoopi Goldberg believed that the moon landing was faked. Why is the

flag rippling? There's no air. Because he touched it, supposedly. Is it always in a ripple? Was it starched in a ripple? But I wanted to know, people who are really deeply invested in uncovering conspiracies, what did they think of the X-Files?

So I went to a website called wanttoknow.info, and I asked if there was anyone there who would do an interview with me. They recommended John Lumiere Wins. I was kind of hoping that John would meet me in a dark alley wearing a trench coat, and when I asked him, why are you talking to me? He'd be like, trust no one, Mr. Malinsky, and then disappear into a black car. Which is how Mulder learned like most of the exposition on that show. But John's office was in the very sunny Bay Area of Northern California. He works in alternative medicine at a place called the Quiet Mind. There was mood lighting and all sorts of stuff to relax you the minute you step in there.

And that's why he likes working with this group, Want to Know. They're not trolls. When I regard somebody as evil, it triggers animosity, hatred. My experience is really negative. And that has no effect whatsoever on them. But he still gets pretty worked up. We start talking about what's going on in the world. Since Occupy Wall Street, the 1% has become a meme, but it's actually 1% of the 1% that control most of the decisions that are occurring on this planet that affect everybody. That's one of the reasons why the X-Files spoke to him. I had been exploring what's been going on on this planet kind of behind the scenes and behind the corporate media. And behind the corporate media.

And I had discovered that there were a lot of things that have been happening that people were ignorant of. And the X-Files revealed some of that stuff. So that I really liked. Because it was getting out into the public in a way that I couldn't. I had no way of getting it out there like that. Like what kind of stuff? Oh, boy. Extraterrestrial stuff, UFO stuff. I've seen craft that were unidentified,

and it was very strange, very strange experience that's what i was wondering whether you saw something that made you you know i i was uh working with a spiritual group and we were in michigan and one night it was it was like by a lake. It was way out in the country. It was very dark. One night I said, I want to see extra UFOs. And I looked up. I didn't see anything. But the next night I looked up and I saw four craft, five craft in a V pattern slowly fly in a direction across the sky right above me and a moment later i saw

five more in the same pattern in the same direction slowly five fly in over me no sound um i'd never seen anything like it before i I took it. It was unidentified to me. Beyond that, I don't know. Yeah. It's inevitable that there are many, many species of intelligent life in this universe. It seems obvious to me that that must be so. The X-Files had two slogans. I want to believe, which was a poster on Mulder's wall.

And the truth is out there, which would flash in the opening credits. I want to believe covered all the wondrous stuff. Ghosts, extraterrestrials, ESP. Phenomenon that I want to believe in because it just means the world is so much bigger than what we can see in front of us and almost defies death. But then there's always this scully character in my head, this skeptic who's pulling me back,

saying, don't be a sucker, where's the evidence? The other slogan, the truth is out there, covers the horrible stuff, the things that we wish we didn't know, like the truth is out there, covers the horrible stuff. The things that we wish we didn't know. Like the Tuskegee experiment, or Abu Ghraib, or the NSA. There's been enough of the alleged conspiracy theories that have turned out to be pretty obviously true. That people suspect, they don't believe the mainstream media anymore. At the end, I asked John what he thinks about the term conspiracy theory,

because, you know, it can be very dismissive, and I am using it in this episode. Well, that was a well-engineered meme to create the term conspiracy theory as a derogatory term. And just because it is a conspiracy theory doesn't mean that the person espousing it is crazy or that it's not true. You would think that Joe Yasinski would disagree, since he's an academic that studies conspiracy theories. But no. In fact, he thinks the real-life Fox Mulders can be heroic. You know, as a scientist, you have to question everything. So when a new finding comes out, you have to go retest it and check it and put scrutiny to it. go retest it and check it and put scrutiny to it. And in that sense, conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories do us a service. The 9-11 Commission would not have been

out there in 2003, 2004, 2005, unless it was really driven by conspiracy theorists who were asking questions about, hey, what really happened and how come we haven't been told everything? theorists who were asking questions about, hey, what really happened and how come we haven't been told everything? So that was a good thing. And Nixon would never have been caught if it wasn't for two cheeky conspiracy theorists working at the Washington Post who said, hey, I have a conspiracy theory. We think that the president might be involved in covering up some stuff. It's funny. A lot of fans lost interest in the X-Files when Mulder and Scully broke the romantic tension and hooked up. But I lost interest when they broke the conspiracy open and we learned the truth, or enough of it, to piece the whole thing together. Spoiler alert, after nine seasons, this was the big conspiracy that they unraveled.

Aliens are mass-producing black goo, which turns humans into slaves when we're infected. The only way to infect the entire population at once is to load the virus into genetically enhanced bees, which can find us because smallpox vaccines are actually tracking devices. And to make sure the evil cabal of humans who are assisting the aliens stays quiet, the aliens took one of their children as collateral, including Mulder's sister because Mulder's father was one of the conspirators. In the meantime, the aliens are fighting a rebellion in their own ranks against good aliens who think that earthlings should be left alone.

That's the story. I mean, that's pretty huge. I mean, that's huge and very evil. But something about laying it all out like that, it just kind of makes it sort of disappointing. Because, you know, I could relate a lot better to the early episodes when the truth was still out there. There's an episode called Jose Chung's From Outer Space

where you see an alien abduction from several different points of view. So the girl was put under again to see if she could confirm any of the boy's story. And as I suspected she might under such conditions, she did. And at the end of the show, the question comes up for everybody involved, you know, so what really happened? And the answer is, how the hell should I know? That's my favorite episode, too. And it's an unusual one because we're not following Mulder and Scully. We're actually hearing about them through a journalist. And his last line is the best. For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet, we are all alone.

When I imagine a world without conspiracies, I actually feel more alone. Because in that world, people with great ambitions are undone by petty flaws. Arrogance, jealousy, unresolved personal issues, which lead to unexpected catastrophes that they can't clean up and we all have to live with. To me, the scariest story is the one where the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Then again, that's just the kind of thing Scully would say. Right before Mulder proves her wrong. Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening.

Next week, I'm actually going to keep looking at the alien invasion genre, but from a very, very different perspective. Special thanks this week to Peter Knight, Lindsay Ellis, John Lumiere-Wins, Fred Burks, and Joe Uzinski. Where did you grow up, by the way? Grew up in New Hampshire. Okay, because I grew up in Massachusetts.

I can hear a New England accent in there. It's getting wiped out. If I have a beer or two, then all of a sudden... I used to shop at Jordan Marsh and go to Papa Gino's. Oh my God, of course. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook, a tweet, and email in ski. Joe's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. you can like imaginary worlds on facebook i tweet Panoply. I'm so glad.