Hey Frank!
The other day I watched an X-Files episode from season one and I noticed how Mulder’s “office decoration” changed over the years. That in early years there were more images of crime victims while in later seasons images of the cosmos, etc., became more prominent. As if in early years the question was more “How could someone commit this crime?“ and in later seasons there were more metaphysical questions (“Biogenesis” ftw!) to be answered.
Also: there is this debate on child abuse in institutions (schools and the church) in Germany right now. And I feel there are many non-saying statements been given right now. It really makes me miss The X-Files. I thought of I Want To Believe and Father Joe again (and of the Millennium series actually). Like after a school massacre society is uneasy and anxious to find answers. “How could this happen?” “How could anyone do this?” As if all these irrational actions don’t fit into the picture that society has drawn of itself. And now they feel that maybe they missed to place a dark spot into that painting.
We try to stay in control and act rational, so negative events like this draw attention. After the fact. Because irrational behaviour and emotions are not easy to explain with rational terms. And what we can’t explain we tend to ignore. Society has experts for that somewhere. Now and again society faces some of the big “why” questions together.
And so I thought how I miss The X-Files and Millennium because they dealt with those irrational and unexplainable elements of human behavior, human emotions and life (cosmos office-decoration!) in general. How they wouldn’t judge hasty and instead explore the dark, the abyss. Mulder tried to understand the monster-of-the-week in order to prevent potential future crimes. The show also illustrated that we can’t simply point the finger at the monsters, because the line between rational and irrational, the good and the bad are not always that clear.
“All these people putting bars on their windows, spending good
money on hi-tech security systems, trying to feel safe.”
- Mulder in “Squeeze,”1993
“You know, when I, uh… I first came to work at the FBI, I worked at Violent Crimes, and I saw,
I saw the worst of humanity.
I saw monsters and I wondered how they became that way,
how these men became so evil.
I know there were psychological explanations– victims of their environment, victims of their parents–
but the scientific explanations were never truly satisfying.
And I began to think about evil like, like a disease. You know, that it
goes from man to man or age to age.
Most of us walk around thinking we’re incapable of any acts of evil and we are.
You know, we can stifle that momentary urge to kill or to hurt.
We have some kind of immunity to it. But I think it’s possible that there’s… an
occurrence in somebody’s life, a tragedy or a loss that leaves them vulnerable, hurts their
immunity to evil, and all of a sudden at that point in their lives when they’re weakened,
they’re open to evil and they can become evil.”
- Mulder to Doggett in “Empedocles,” 2001
I don’t mean to give the impression that child abuse isn’t a horrible thing. I just think that condemning violence and crimes won’t make them go away.
In that sense… my thanks again to the writers and the cast & crew of the 1013 shows.
They should know that they are still loved and missed.
I wish them all good luck with their current projects.
Ulrike
Germany
