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Posts tagged Science Fiction

Fringe is a front!

I was a geeky teenager in the 1990s, so I could hardly avoid being at least casually familiar with the X Files. But, for whatever reasons, I never really dug into the show at the time. I watched stray episodes here and there, had a basic idea of how the show worked, knew some of the major recurring characters, but never really got into the major plot arcs or followed the show regularly. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is catching up a bit in my off hours; thanks to the wonders of Netflix Watch Instantly, I’ve been going through the early seasons. One of the things that going back and watching it has reminded me of is just how really influential the X Files has been on the development of pop TV. It’s obvious with Fringe, of course, or with lesser imitators like EUReKA and Warehouse 13. But you can also see interesting points of contact with more conventional spaceship fare like Stargate SG-1,[1] or in other gimmick-based buddy-cop procedurals like Bones.[2] Just looking at it structurally, and sticking with the sci-fi for right now, since the X Files hit it big, it’s been pretty easy to find science fiction that revolves around a heroic team of scientists and investigators or soldiers, working for a special branch of government security, and constantly in search of a secret — hidden — truth in a universe much larger than anyone in civilian life dares to imagine.

Like the X-Files, it’s important that all these other shows are supposed to take place in the present day and the real world we’re familiar with, not in a spaceship future or in a galaxy far, far away. Our heroes have to live in our world but they are always encountering marvels and dangers from this much larger universe.[3]

Shows like Fringe and SG-1 follow in the X Files tradition of treating the conspiracy theories and fringe communities they riff on with ironic affection. Within the show, these theories are reality after all; just seen as through a glass, darkly, by those who are weird enough and obsessed enough to catch the right rumor or grasp the deeper truth.[4] The fact that all this is happening in the here and now of our real world makes the paranormal both fascinating and poignant and a bit disturbing; there’s a whole extraordinary universe beyond our ken, and in spite of our lingering doubts about conventional wisdom, we just really don’t know about it. Specifically, we don’t know anything about it because government security agents have made a concerted effort to keep the whole thing secret from us. The shows pretty much always have a longer arc above and beyond the individual episode’s mystery; the longer arc is always caught up in the fact that this mind-blowing universe might not be secret anymore. (Either the truth is about to be revealed, or some world-threatening crisis is looming that nobody but the heroes and villains have even begun to imagine.)

But of course if you are looking at obviously similar things, it’s usually more interesting to talk about where and how they differ. Usually the potting of Fringe that you hear is that it’s X Files without the aliens, but that’s only a difference in the least interesting way possible. Getting back into X Files after all this time has reminded me of what the real, big difference between the X Files and Fringe, or all the other secret-knowledge shows that have come along, is. In the X Files, Mulder and Scully work for the government, but they are constantly trying to expose a massive government conspiracy that’s hiding vital truths. The Truth Is Out There, both about the aliens and about the government cover-ups and we’re supposed to be fighting for it — against shadowy villains well-placed within a security state that obscures, manipulates, and destroys evidence in order to keep mind-blowing truths secret and lie to people for their own good, to keep them from finding out truths that the security state decides they Aren’t Ready For.

What about the bizarre, world-threatening Pattern investigated in Fringe? What about the secret history and vast alien universe of SG-1? In every single post-X-Files esoteric sci-fi show I can think of, the team not only works for the government; they’re part of the conspiracy; they’re in on the cover-up. Fringe Division investigations routinely end with Broyles, acting as both boss and fixer, telling the team, with a wink and a smile, what this week’s cover story is; in SG-1 the team themselves often have to take extraordinary steps to destroy damning evidence or convince witnesses to remain silent about alien encounters, hyperadvanced technology, and even our own origins as a race, even though the lies that they tell constantly leave everyone outside of a tiny military-government cabal oblivious to the constant, overwhelming danger of enslavement or extinction that looms over every one of us.[5] When they think of the X Files, everyone remembers Trust No One; there’s another early episode of the X Files about covered-up government experiments on human subjects, where Mulder and Scully briefly get into a conversation with a local dairy farmer about rBGH; Scully insists that he shouldn’t worry, because rBGH has been declared safe, and the farmer snorts back Where’d you hear that from? The gov’ment? In the world of Fringe and SG-1, the heroes of the story are the gov’ment, and they expect the rest of the world to believe what they hear when they declare the world safe — nothing to see here, everything’s alright. Even though they know for a fact that it’s all a massive lie. The Truth Is Out There — and we’re going to make sure you’re not ever going to find it.

Of course, I watch Fringe and SG-1 and all that because they’re fun shows — sometimes even really good shows — and I enjoy them a lot. I don’t know if there’s any broad sociological lessons to be drawn here; pop culture is weird, and niche TV writing is even weirder. But I do think it’s hard not to notice the fact that the X Files first came on the air in September 1993, just two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and just half a year after the massacre at Waco, while the U.S. intelligence aparat and the military-industrial complex were still reeling from the collapse of the Junior G-Man mindset and a very real possibility that they might be judged necessary evils that were no longer necessary. The story of war and intelligence politics since the mid-90s has been the story of the National Security State trying to develop a convincing rationale to justify its own continued existence in a world without hostile superpowers — to revive the state of perpetual emergency and the Cold War mindset that justified it by looking the other way and trusting in the good faith of the chain of command — a sort of cultural reconstruction that they never really accomplished in any stable way until the unveiling of the Great Patriotic War on Terror. Keeping that in mind, it’s interesting to be reminded that Fringe is a story that basically takes place in the fictional world of the X Files — but while Mulder and Scully spent about half of the X Files acting as rogue agents, in Fringe, the Bishops and Agent Dunham are basically working for the Smoking Man. It’s hard not to see just how much it is a show of the Bush-Obama decade.

  1. [1]And not just because Scully’s dad is in every episode of the early seasons.
  2. [2]Besides the dynamic between Booth and Brennan, Bones frequently runs plots that are basically the X Files in reverse, where the hyperrational red-headed corpse-examining scientist always wins the argument: a corpse turns up in a bizarre condition that seemingly can’t be explained by any known phenomena; within the first half of the episode, Brennan identifies natural causes for bubbling bones, devil horns, and even corpses that look like Roswell Grays. Meanwhile, one of the supporting characters, Dr. Jack Hodgins, is obsessed with conspiracy theories and government coverups, and frequently offers them as explanations for the case.
  3. [3]Usually about one marvel or danger per episode, and usually following a canonical set of scenarios. most of them well established within the first couple seasons of the X Files — a bizarre, hyperadvanced technology is uncovered that nobody knows what to do with; inscrutable aliens show up with mysterious, dubious, or malevolent purposes; blowback from government fringe-science experiments on human subjects; an ancient or alien disease is accidentally uncovered through man’s folly and now threatens our heroes, or even life as we know it; prodigies with psychic powers cause inexplicable crimes; shape-shifting or mind-controlling infiltrators destroy our heroes’ ability to trust their senses; the discovery of new forms of life and cryptozoological monsters; sudden real-life, modern-day confrontation with a creature out of ancient legend.
  4. [4]X-shows pretty much always end up doing episodes where the team meets up with a conspiracy theorist or fringe enthusiast, usually a lovable weirdo, where the humor of the situation revolves around the fact that the weirdo enthusiast is dimly grasping at an amazing secret that the serious-and-grounded-heroes would never have believed, except that they now deal with it every day.
  5. [5]The fact that our heroes are constantly engaged in the Big Lie is either taken as a matter of course, or, if it is ever brought up, with a line that could have come straight out of the mouths of the Syndicate: Can you imagine if this got out? People just aren’t ready to know. The human villains in X Files are always players well-positioned within the government, acting on orders handed down from the highest levels, while Mulder and Scully often have to operate well outside of FBI approval; in the post-X shows, the big human villains are evil industrialists plotting to build private empires, or else rogue agents now operating outside, and against the wishes of, the National Security State that our heroes serve.

Friday Lazy Linking

  • Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-10). A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my "Chomsky's Augustinian Anarchism" gripes into a question. So I did. Here's my question for Chomsky: Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless… (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • DAVID T. BEITO: Rand Paul is No Libertarian. Liberty & Power: Group Blog (2010-02-10). “This first advertisement for his U.S. Senate campaign … is quite simply terrible. It not only panders to the darkest side of American conservatism but to the basest emotions of voters.” Like pappy, Ron’s boy Rand has chosen to emphasize absolutely the worst parts of his platform in his early campaign advertisements. Here, the current poster-boy for Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution comes out for “strong national defense,” an immigration police state, and overseas legal black holes for “enemy combatants.” (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • How to split up the US. pwarden, PeteSearch (2010-02-06). As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in… (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-11). So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a… (Linked Friday 2010-02-12.)

Monday Lazy Linking

  • Anarchists in Space. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-07). Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin's personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn't stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually… (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)
  • Comment on Anarchists in Space by Roderick. Roderick, Comments for Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-08). Back in 1980, when Broach came out, perhaps Kolko's Triumph of Conservatism or Railroads and Regulation, and then follow it up with stuff from Left & Right and the early years of Libertarian Forum. If it were nowadays, Kevin Carson's books would obviously be essential. The crucial point is this:… (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)

Monday Lazy Linking

  • We Need More Truants. Andrew B. Watt's Blog (2009-12-13). “There's no way that the educational system, a monoculture if there ever was one, is going to manifest the kind of reform needed at every level. We've designed our schooling system to clamp down on unorthodoxy in a big way. Even if we allow the unorthodox to thrive in our monolithic system, it becomes a cult of personality. … These kind of polymathic geniuses can really make a school hum, but once they go, a program often dies with them. … Maybe what we need in order to reinvigorate American school systems is a broad-based buy-0ut, a sort of inverse-voucher program, where parents say, ‘this school has failed my kid for the last time. I'm going to plop him down in front of Sesame Street reruns and YouTube videos, and give him a library card, and see if those stopgap measures can do better.'” [R.G.: I’d just like to add that the notion of an “American school system” is probably part of the problem; what ‘we’ need is to stop thinking about what ‘we’ need, and start thinking about how this here individual child or adolescent or adult can live a better, smarter life in the near-, middle-, and long-term. The answer often isn’t going to be the same from one person to the next. And it often isn’t going to be institutional schooling in any recognizable sense. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • The strange consensus on Obama’s Nobel address. Glenn Greenwald, Salon: Glenn Greenwald (2009-12-11). (updated below – Update II – Update III) Reactions to Obama’s Nobel speech yesterday were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum, and there were two points on which virtually everyone seemed to agree: Â  (1) it was the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; and… (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Today in Rape Culture. Shakesville (2009-12-13). “Why is it always more important to lecture women on what they should be doing to avoid rape than to talk to men about the fact that they do not have the right to women’s bodies without explicit consent?” (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails. Commondreams.org Views (2009-12-13). Left flank (cont’d): “The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president's guarantee of their future profits.” (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Art Interpretation and Climate Change. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-09). Jens Galschiot's sculpture Survival of the Fattest features an obese white goddess of justice on the shoulders of a frail African. There's an inscription: "I'm sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his… (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Protecting America's Borders Against Musical Miscegenation. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-13). La Migra Vs. Cultural Exchange. “The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music…[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons,” Therefore, you can’t come to the U.S. to play your bastard music, I guess. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • The Thin Blue Line That Protects Us From Canadian Science Fiction Writers. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-12-13). Peter Watts writes: If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car… (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Nevada trucker wants confiscated $550000 back – Las Vegas Sun. 89119 – Google News (2009-12-13). In which the Shawnee County Sheriff is trying to keep over half a million dollars in cash that it stole from Eduardo Arencibia — even though he never consented to a search of the cab, and even though the government prosecutors never introduced any direct evidence at all to indicate where the money came from, and even though Eduardo Arencibia was never convicted of any crime, and had all charges against him dropped. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Magic Highway USA. Daring Fireball (2009-12-13). The tomorrows of yesteryear. Technological civilization is awesome, even if it hasn’t quite realized the specific forms of awesomeness that Disney might have thought. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • On Baked Potatoes. ongoing (2009-12-08). I recently remarked "There are very few foods indeed that compare with a high-quality Russet potato, properly baked." A voice in the comments wondered "And what do you call !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;properly baked'?" A harmless enough question, but then aluminium foil was mentioned; shudder. Please don't do that. Here's how to bake… (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
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