Deny All Knowledge - Reading the X-Files (The Television Series)

Television and Popular Culture

by David Lavery

The "X Files" is as complex and controversial a phenomenon as the television series "Twin Peaks" was in the early 1990s. Mysterious and macabre episodes, led by fictional FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, captivate devotees week after week. Contributors to this volume examine the same intricate storylines that challenge viewers. Theoretically sophisticated, however, this book provides a forum for the creative process and a discussion of the state of popular culture as a whole. Part police drama, part horror story, and part science fiction, the show has dared to suggest with great seriousness the incredible charge that the United States government is involved in a vast conspiracy with former Nazi and Japanese scientists to assist alien beings in peforming experiments - including genetic hybridisation - on American citizens. Why does a hit series happen when it does? Is there a connection between the coming and going of "Twin Peaks" and the Bush presidency? It the "X Files" a Clinton-era phenomenon, a product of historical, cultural and psychological factors operative in the mid 1990s? Armed with an arsenal of critical methodology, contributors deal with these and many more topics, among folklore and myth; the development of cult TV; the show as a manifestation of a major sea of change in the nature of mass communication; cultural dialogue about law and order, freedom and safety, truth and lies; various feminist interpretations; and finally, drawing on sources as diverse as Foucault, Sartre, and Lacan, the essays examine the show from adaptations of body invasion and vampirism and modern horror films to psychoanalysis and semiotic structuralism.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published November 1, 1996

Reviews

[dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was OK. I read it after binge watching the X-Files for the first time on NetFlix. If I had read it after watching only the first three seasons, I might have liked it more. The characters and the "unknown" changed so much from season 3 to season 8 that some of the chapters seemed well, wrong.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

scholars can get sloppy and silly when they're writing about their own cult obsession.

[Hope Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an age of not 3, not 9, but 11 seasons of the X Files, some of this book is pretty outdated. However! It is very informative for people who weren’t alive for the original run (myself) and kind of filling in the gaps of the kind of discourse that was surrounding txf at that time. So, useful, if not entirely relevant.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of academic essays on The X-Files, albeit one that is necessarily limited because, at the time of publication, only three seasons had been aired. This does lead to some cross-over between the essays, with the same examples (and quotes) turning up again and again. That being said, it's still an interesting read (my favourite was the chapter by Leslie Jones on the mythological X-Files).

Unfortunately, in most chapters the turgid nature of the prose suffocates the main points of interest. Academic writing can be painful to read, and it's a shame the editors didn't get their contributors to tone down the worst of the excesses here.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wandered into a bookstore that we never frequent and happened upon this gem. While never a believer in conspiracy theories (except for a brief period in Japan when each new bicycle I bought would mysteriously disappear), I have always loved the X-Files. Even more pleased to discover that the TV show was a worthy subject matter for academics.