indefinite articles

It’s been six years since The X-Files, the proto-Lost that never managed to figure itself out, went off the air. And as far as I can tell, it’s been ten years since anyone actually watched it, or could bring themselves to care. And yet, on Friday, the second film spawned by the show, is coming out in theaters.

The subtitle, I Want to Believe, reads to me as a reluctant admission to the questionable timeliness of it’s release. At this point, the show seems like a relic, its deadpan seriousness from an era when TV was seemingly divorced entirely from style. Clearly, there is something deeper going on here, some invisible hand with a hidden agenda silently pulling the strings in the shadows. But who? And why?

Looking to the past might provide some clues towards finding the root of this conspiracy. The X-Files clearest source of inspiration was Twin Peaks, which also blended the FBI and the supernatural, albeit as a Northwestern gothic soap opera rather than monster movie police procedural. Perhaps not coincidentally, David Duchovny appeared in some later episodes of Peaks, playing Dennis Bryson, a cross-dressing DEA Agent who investigates Special Agent Dale Cooper after the Canadian mounties bring drug charges against him.

It’s well-known that Twin Peaks creator David Lynch considers many of his films to take place in the same bizarrely askew universe. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine other shows and films occupying the same narrative galaxy, is it? So let us suppose, now, that FBI Agent Fox Mulder and DEA Agent Dennis/Denise Bryson are, in fact, the same person, not two characters, but one. And further, that the world of The X-Files and Twin Peaks, are, in fact, one in the same.

Perhaps it would be more of a stretch to argue that Mulder/Bryson is also none other than Jake Winters, David Duchovny’s role in ’90s softcore porn film and TV series, The Red Shoe Diaries. But taking a step back, examining the bigger picture, seeing the parallels and the coincidences pile up, it’s not so far-fetched a theory.

Twin Peaks‘ protagonist, Agent Dale Cooper, was played by Kyle MacLachlan, star of his own controversial softcore film Showgirls, where he played smut peddler Zack Carey. Is it just happenstance that we have two government agents moonlighting as simulated sex porn czars?

The cover to the first season DVD set of Californication. Note that the network, Showtime, also produced The Red Shoe Diaries. Yet another link …

Clearly, no. It seems self-evident, that, given the facts, The X-Files has been, all along, a black helicoptor ballet constructed to memetically advance the interests of the softcore pornography industry. With the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming video, softcore porn’s audience of young teenage boys quickly migrated to the pixelated Hedonism of the Internet. Very quickly, softcore porn seemed precariously close to disappearing.

Only the persistence of The X-Files, through subconscious imagery and the interwoven tapestry of Jungian archetypes like Mulder/Bryson/Winters and Cooper/Carey/Muad’dib, keeps us tuning in at 3 AM on Friday night. And so, as the softcore market grasps desperately to existence, so too does The X-Files.

Believe.