04/25/03’s illustrious band:

Paranormal Bouquet

Brought to you by the fact that I’m a big geek.

I’ll spend much of this weekend as I spent part of last weekend: watching the first two seasons of The X-Files on DVDs on loan from Sister-san. The show debuted in 1993, the same year I moved to the Twin Cities, and it saw me through some good times and some strange ones. However, we parted ways around the middle of Season 8, when things X got too weird even for me (resurrection of dead FBI agent), and I’ve been on my own since then. I believe the series ended with Season 9.

I like X because I like “out-there” stuff, like science fiction and fantasy, good mysteries and the occasional horror movie. X incorporates all those things, along with interesting characters, snappy dialogue and almost-plausible supernatural storylines. The show was ground-breaking TV when it first aired, broaching subjects with, as lead character Agent Mulder put it, “a distinct paranormal bouquet.” It never shied away from scaring or grossing out its audience, or from confusing the heck out of it, or from demonizing the U.S. government in conspiracy theories so outrageous that some of them might actually be true.

X was born at about the same time the Internet was becoming a household word and tool, so X fandom grew up online. Devotees of the show, called X-Philes, have dissected it to death, expanded it with endless megabytes of fanfic (fiction written by fans), even scripting a few “virtual” seasons to tell their own stories. In some, it’s straight-up detective work and UFO chasing or monster-of-the-week stuff; in some, lead characters Mulder and Scully fall in love with each other, in varying degrees of graphic detail; in some, they become attracted to other people and have sexually explicit adventures with them; in some, the “slash” subgenre, same-sex characters become involved; in some, the self-defense-impaired Mulder just gets beat up a lot. There’s a story for every fan and a fan for every story. Not only is everybody a critic, now everybody is a writer, too.

So there’s plenty to enjoy beyond the confines of the TV screen. The list includes a movie, Fight the Future (1998), a few novels more poorly written than some of the fanfic, fan conventions, DVD-ROM games and all the usual T-shirts, caps and keychains. There’s a sense of us-versus-them: “us” is the Believers, and “them” is the poor, propaganda-blinded Nonbelievers. X-Philedom is a strange sort of club where any crackpot can feel right at home. In short, it’s a lot of fun.

So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend: sniffing that paranormal bouquet. And working in the yard and reading in the hammock and practicing T’ai Chi and doing the grocery shopping and the laundry and the ironing, of course. Because you can’t ignore the real world, no matter how intriguing the make-believe one is. The truth is out there.

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