The Truth Is Out There

Some people think The X-Files is about UFO-chasing and urban vampires and government conspiracy. I think it is television’s sharpest and most consistently rewarding exploration of epistemology.

Okay, okay, I hear the protests–but whaddya expect on commercial TV? Richard Rorty squared off against Alvin Plantinga? Of course, Fox-TV’s highest-rated program features strong storytelling. It’s got a chic, dark ambience. It’s got some mystery and suspense and pg doses of violence. And protagonists Dana Scully (played by attractive redhead Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (played by attractive brunet David Duchovny) have potent sexual chemistry cooking at a slow simmer, the restraint of which only increases the excitement, to the point that the (very) occasional use of one’s first name by the other has as much charge as a blitzkrieg bedroom scene. (Mulder and Scully may be popular culture’s best argument that Marabel Morgan is right and chaste people really are sexiest–but that’s another article.)

So, yes, the standard elements of sex and violence and curiosity appeal are there. But I still say the show is fundamentally about epistemology–about knowing, and how hard it is to know, and probing how we can know what we think we know.

The X-Files is now ending its fourth season as one of the most discussed programs on television–not just in the United States, but in Australia, Norway, and Ireland as well–yet it is conceivable that some B&C readers haven’t seen the show. So here, in a theremin-scored interlude, is what you have been missing:

FBI agent Fox Mulder, an Oxford graduate in psychology, is one of the agency’s best and brightest. But he is also–different, let’s say. Mulder is convinced that his sister was abducted by aliens when he and she were little kids. Consequently, he is hooked on the bizarre, inexplicable cases most agents tuck away and forget in the bureau’s “X-files”: unsolved crimes with evidence that points to the credibility of UFOs, reincarnation, werewolves, psychic powers, and the stray episode of stigmata. The FBI powers-that-be, who regard “Spooky” Mulder as stranger than anything since J. Edgar Hoover last slipped into a skirt, sequester him in a basement office and try to ignore him.

The powers don’t fire Mulder, though, because high-placed, enigmatic figures with monikers like Deep Throat and Cancer Man, obscurely linked to a secret and possibly governmental outfit called The Syndicate, won’t let them. For some reason, they want this FBI agent alive and well and poking into lots of abandoned warehouses after midnight. So the bureau does the next best thing to firing Mulder and sics a fresh young agent with an M.D. on him. Dana Scully is assigned to tag along with Mulder, report on his activities, try to leaven his occult flights of fancy with scientific skepticism, and persuade him occasionally to track a garden-variety serial killer.

Still don’t see the connection to epistemology? Well, whether or not you believe intelligent alien life really would travel millions of miles to ram tiny gadgets up human nasal passages, it truly is a crazy world out there. You can talk about the transition from industrial to postindustrial society, from modernity to postmodernity, or whatever you want to call it: Peter Drucker says we are living amid the most profound societal change in human history. You can talk about lessened confidence in government, the clergy, the media, and just about any other institution that tries today to set itself up as an authority on anything. Along that line, you can talk about how science, and the applied science of technology, was supposed to be the twentieth-century messiah, and then came atom bombs and oil spills and the Cancer-Scare-of-the-Month Club.

Talk about it all, and what do you get? For one thing, you get plenty of people suspecting truth is stranger and less predictable than it used to be. And you get bodacious ratings for agents Mulder and Scully.

Amid all this cultural upheaval, some folks are tempted right on into relativism of the crassest sort: everything’s true so nothing’s true. Not our intrepid agents. They stoutly believe, as the show’s motto insists during opening credits, that “The Truth Is Out There,” and weekly they coach us in a rough-and-ready critical realism fitted for the twilight zone of this millennium’s waning days. That’s right, Mulder (and not just Scully) is an epistemological objectivist. Mulder, after all, operates with a street version of the scientific method. He pays attention, records details carefully, avails himself of all sorts of high-tech equipment, posits hypotheses consistent within themselves and attempting to account for all the evidence, and he does his best to test those hypotheses. In this sense, he is not unscientific; he is just allowing for a wider and more diverse band of “evidence” and causal agents than do more conventional scientists.

So, for example, people keep dying violently in the proximity of an odd fellow who has apparent motives for murder but never leaves any physical evidence whatsoever of harming a soul. The conventional cops think, Can’t be this guy, no matter how it looks; gotta look elsewhere. But Spooky Mulder thinks: Could be it’s not him. But could be, too, that this suspect has psychic powers and knocks people off telekinetically. Let’s investigate the hypothesis.

Yes, Mulder–no less than his medically trained colleague, who is always trying to drag him back into more conventional boundaries–is an objectivist. And he is an old-fashioned, which is to say Cartesian, objectivist. Like Descartes, Mulder and his creators believe doubt is the royal road to truth. Descartes shut himself up in a hot room and tried to question everything until he arrived at something he could not doubt, and then rebuilt from there. Similarly, Mulder discounts all sorts of taken-for-granted wisdom; another of the show’s mottoes is the doubt-enhancing “Trust No One.”

After sweating it out, Descartes thought he actually had arrived at indubitable and foundational truth. Mulder, and Scully too (after seeing all sorts of weird mayhem, and her sister killed in her stead), really do trust no one–except each other. From this precarious foundation, they are trying to construct a world of knowledge that can include liver-eating mutants and fluorescent bugs that suck all the liquid out of your body. (No wonder Mulder apparently never goes to bed but only dozes on the couch in the blue glow of his TV.)

Now, lest you think I’m the only one who believes The X-Files is prime-time epistemology, let’s be good objectivists and refer to authorial intention. Executive producer Howard Gordon affirms that Mulder and Scully are “tour guides” to the current “chaos that we’re having to navigate.” More to the point, X-Files creator Chris Carter refers to a poster hanging in agent Mulder’s basement exile. “The ‘I Want to Believe’ poster in Mulder’s office sums up a personal longing. I’m a skeptic, and I want to be challenged. I want to believe in something. That’s the heart of the show and what infuses the characters.”

But wait, creator Carter goes on. He goes on beyond Descartes, to, well, Alvin Plantinga. That is to say that he affirms faith, and not doubt, as that which lies at the bottom of all knowledge. That is apparently what he has in mind by having Mulder wanting to “believe” rather than flatly to “know.” Listen to the non-Cartesian Carter speak, then: “To me, the idea of faith is really the backbone of the entire series–faith in your own beliefs, ideas about the truth, and so it has religious overtones always.”

Whoa! So The X-Files can take not only flying saucers and killer computers seriously, but religious faith too? Even, say, Christianity? Yes. In one especially interesting third-season episode, entitled “Revelations,” a little boy manifests stigmata, with blood inexplicably welling out of his hands and side. There’s a twist. This time Mulder is the materialist skeptic, suspecting hysteria or some such. It’s Scully, reared a Catholic and wearing a cross around her neck, who insists they consider the possibility that God is displaying the wounds of Christ on this bewildered child. She is so shaken by these events that, at the end of the program, she retreats to a confessional for the first time in years. In the show’s trademark darkness, she tells the priest she is afraid, afraid most of all that “God really may be speaking. And no one’s listening.”

Before you solicit Donald Wildmon’s endorsement of the show, I should add that “Revelations” loses momentum with a hokey subplot that has Satan’s emissary stalking and trying to kill the boy. And at one point our heroes confidently refer to Saint Ignatius as a biblical character (shouldn’t have trusted a Sunday-school teacher on that one). And, remember, “Revelations” is just one episode out of dozens: next week we’re back in the middle of labyrinthine conspiracies beyond Oliver Stone’s fever dreams, where the “other,” whether extraterrestrial or bureaucratic or merely the quiet guy across the street, is always malevolent.

That, finally, is the real problem with The X-Files. Yes, it explores the unexplainable, the wondrous, the awesome with rarely faltering storytelling panache. In the way only good storytelling can do, it turns the world as we think we know it inside out and renders it oddly anew. (Thus actress Gillian Anderson, perhaps learning from the travails of her character, told David Letterman that her hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is both “normal” and “strange.”) For that we should be properly grateful. But ultimately, it seems, in the world of The X-Files the ineffable is evil–and viciously so. The truth is out there. But it is swaddled in darkness, and it wants to destroy all things bright and beautiful.

That said, I stand by my initial assertion. The X-Files is television’s sharpest and most consistently rewarding exploration of epistemology. And it’s almost as much fun as reading Rorty or Plantinga.

Rodney Clapp is the author of A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity).

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