The X-Files, and the Cosmic Horror of Bureaucracy

Teenagers from the same high-school class are turning up dead with a strange mark on their lower back; they claim to have been abducted by aliens, but the sheriff refuses to believe them. So begins the pilot of the X-Files, the show that would run for eleven seasons and kick-start the grand-paranormal-mystery genre for the likes of Lost and Fringe. While monsters, aliens, and ghosts are the ostensible stars of the show, the things to be feared, what characterises the X-Files is a horror of larger proportions. The enemy is not the unknown, but the Unknowable. This is what makes it truly scary in a way that more recent shows are not.

Calling something unknown implies some future resolution, or even just the possibility of an explanation: Scooby-Doo and his gang will unmask the terrifying villain. The resolution may be mundane, explainable without recourse to greater forces, or supernatural – the point is that the answer is graspable, even if it requires a suspension of disbelief as to the laws of nature. The Unknowable is, on the other hand, like looking at the sun. The answers are suggested, never revealed, and only available through peripheral vision. Episodes of the X-Files end with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Having glimpsed the edges of a resolution to the paranormal events, Scully and Mulder, and the viewer, never quite get to the core of them. The agents deal with the fringes, not just of science, but of the conspiracies. They investigate test pilots, not the UFOs that they fly¹.

The series in this way is almost Lovecraftian. While Scully and Mulder don’t run around calling everything “indescribable” and “unnameable”, the sense of scale-mismatch is the same. It’s not that they’re outmatched by the forces they investigate – it’s that they’re irrelevant. This is true cosmic horror, and it is generated in part by the realism of the series. In television criticism now the word realism has become synonymous with ‘gritty realism’: undercurrents, dark spaces, muffled thoughts, the sinister human condition. But the X-Files is different. The agents often reside in trailer parks and cheap motels. The predominant colour is brown. Investigations move slowly via microfiche and long-haul flights, the agents seeing half-truths but lacking the speed to prove them. This is a realism of the mundane.

The opposition they confront is very often human: the parents of the abducted teenager, the local sheriff, rival agents – these are the true foils, not the paranormal entities they investigate, entities which are beyond the scope of true opposition. The real enemy is bureaucracy – a shadowy state-machinery to which they, personally, are a minor annoyance, a gnat. There is a cosmic horror to that too.

In his distinction between modes of horror, Mark Fisher describes the eerie as “fundamentally tied up with questions of agency”:

What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? …the perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured.²

Fisher goes on to name capitalism itself as the ultimate force of the eerie – the unseen, Unknowable invisible hand of the market. Bureaucracy is very similar. It is a force, an often irresistible one, which is fundamentally human. It is created and perpetuated by leagues of normal people. But when one reaches out for an agent, something responsible and motivating, something to blame, it evaporates into shadows. Scully and Mulder throw themselves up against the wall of bureaucracy time and time again, and are blocked and tossed aside just as often. The very premise of the series is bureaucratic: Mulder has been consigned to a basement after falling foul of acceptable thought within an organisation; he is being punished for rocking the boat. This is why the X-Files resonates, and scares. We will most likely never encounter an alien abduction or mermaid – but we encounter bureaucracy, the stifling mundane, the truly eerie, every single day.