The X-Files could be coming back. It was teased this week that Ryan Coogler is developing a diverse “remount” of the sci-fi series according to shows creator Chris Carter.
I have mixed feelings about this, to say the least. On the one hand, Coogler is immensely talented and I imagine the cast and writing staff would be top notch. On the other hand, we’re absolutely drowning in conspiratorial bullshit and I don’t see how an X-Files revival in the 2020’s makes anything better. I loved the show back in the ‘90s. But I also was a conspiracy enthusiast . Not in any kind of remotely serious way, but in a kind of alternate comix anthropological way. I also loved Robert Anton Wilson and Kubrick’s take on the moon landing. But in the most ironic, twentysomething Gen-X way imaginable. If you’d told me that when I was middle-aged millions of Americans and people across the world would believe wholeheartedly in the “Deepest state”, I probably would’ve laughed in your face.
Conspiracy beliefs are always cyclic, and rise and fall in accordance with any number of economic and social trends. But it really feels to me that something in popular culture in the ‘90s really fed into and accelerated conspiracy thinking, rather than just reflecting it. Pop culture then tended to valorize fringe thinking to an unprecedented degree. You had all these movies in which a lone, disgraced scientist insists that aliens are coming or an asteroid is about to hit the Earth, and he (because it’s usually he) turns out to be right! And in the decades since then, we’ve seen lots of real-life “experts” adopting the style of those characters, presenting themselves as culture heroes, starting with Andrew Wakefield (the “vaccines cause autism” guy), who at one point was going to get his own biopic, with a script by Terry Rossio, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame.
Today, It’s a weird feeling rewatching The X-Files and realizing that Mulder would absolutely be into QAnon. Mulder was most of an empiricist, because virtually everything he believed in he (and we) saw immediate firsthand evidence of its existence. However, Mulder also believed in the existence of the monster of the week long before he had that evidence. He wanted to believe, and that’s actually a bad thing. Don’t even get me started about the Lone Gunmen. Good for occasional insight but mostly useless. The first episode of The Lone Gunmen series had a plan to fly a passenger jet into the World Trade Center – made and televised before it happened in real life which was … something.
Does Coogler have the chops to string us along for years, teasing grand conspiracies but never resolving anything, and finally making us become fed up with unending mysteries? I kid. I believe in projects he’d take on and if Coogler does a forreal-forreal reboot, like he genuinely updates it to the modern-day of UAP’s and conspiracies and bizarre monsters from Creepypastas and so on. That’s all it would take to get me to watch something like this. The original X-Files was very much informed by the 50s through 90s versions of those, but things have moved on. The “weird USA” of 1993 is not the “weird USA” of 2023