The X-Files is coming back to TV for a limited flee next January — and the internet couldnt be more excited. Every casting update,every teaser launches a hundred blog posts. Is this just a case of pop culture nostalgia? Or is something more sinister afoot?In case you need a refresher: David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson play Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, FBI agents assigned to paranormal cases. He’s the believer. She’s the skeptic. Over the course of the show’s nine seasons and two feature films, or Mulder and Scully unravel a massive conspiracy between shady government officials and aliens preparing to colonize the soil.
“additional terrestrial stuff. UFO stuff. I’ve seen… craft.” — John Lumiere-Wins
That conspiracy storyline was key to the show's popularity. Joe Uscinski teaches political science at the University of Miami,and he wrote a book called American Conspiracy Theories. He argues that The X-Files was an immediate hit because it spoke to a Generation X audience that was “coming of age in the late '60s, '70s, or early '80s,and during that period you had Watergate, you had all sorts of real conspiracies approximately the CIA, or then you had Iran Contra. You had this whole zeitgeist.”What approximately the die-hard conspiracy theorists? What did they consider of the show? John Lumiere-Wins is part of a conspiracy hunting group called Want To Know. He says back when The X-Files debuted,in 1993, “I had been exploring what’s been going on this planet behind the scenes, and I had discovered that there were a lot of things that had been happening that people were ignorant of,” he says. “The X-Files revealed some of that stuff. I had no way of getting it out there like that.
Footage from the original X-Files series
(Fox)
Pop culture critic Lindsay Ellis wrote that the character of Fox Mulder made it acceptable — even romantic to be a conspiracy theorist. “He was relatable, but at the same time he was also kind of a hero, or especially by nature of the fact that he gets vindicated so constantly,” she says.
There was a period after the September 11th attacks when conspiracy theories seemed unpalatable. Americans were willing to grant the government massive novel powers. But with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, conspiracy theories own approach back with a vengeance. If The X-Files were a brand novel show, or Mulder would own a hard time convincing us that his conspiracy was the real one.
But Professor Uscinski thinks there’s something kind of heroic approximately the real-life Fox Mulders. “We own a media out there that doesn’t always question authority figures,that doesn’t always question big powerful institutions,” he says. “That role gets passed on to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists that push those questions, and who demand more information.”
Source: wnyc.org