The X-Files and the Aesthetics and Politics of Postmodern Pop

Abstract

The X-Files is generally acclaimed as the television cult hit of the 1990s. Its excursions into the occult, paranormal, and supernatural have touched a responsive chord in an era when belief in the fantastic, aliens, and government conspiracies is accelerating. Featuring the exploits of two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Armstrong), the series articulates a panorama of contemporary fears, anxieties, and fantasies, drawing on classic figures of the occult, present-day horrors, and political conspiracies as material. It thus uses conventions and iconic figures of media culture and references to contemporary historical individuals and events to comment upon present day issues and to represent salient disturbing aspects of the current era. In so doing, it raises questions concerning dominant institutions, ideologies, and values. In this study, I argue that The X-Files deploys the aesthetics of postmodernism, drawing on its characteristic representational strategies and thematic tropes, and thus can serve as an example of a popular form of postmodernism that engages in pastiche of plot-lines, genre conventions, iconography, folklore, and bits of history found in the forms of previous media culture. Further, in my reading, its implosion of generic boundaries enacts a postmodern subversion of the categories and aesthetic forms of modern media culture; it mixes a heavy style and high seriousness with irony and parody, and its combination of the standard postmodem aesthetic strategies and themes of postmodern culture produces a pop postmodernism that enables us to interrogate both the aesthetics of television and postmodernism. ' I. TELEVISION AESTHETICS