As a relatively new fan to the show, I’ve sometimes struggled to understand the level of vitriol the fandom harbours towards the show’s creator, Chris Carter, but 12 hours from the premiere of S11, I think I’m finally starting to get it. It’s not about any one episode, or a character arc that is less successful than the show at its best. It’s not about the anticlimax of years of rose-tinted revival.
It’s about disrespect and misogyny masquerading as creativity.
It’s about a man who has created a project and with it a person, offering it to us as one thing - a journey for truth starring a woman of integrity and worth, uncowed by impossible odds and stalwart in a world determined to misunderstand and belittle her. But this is not actually what he is offering. Having convinced us that he values and believes in this character, that we should too, he begins, under the guise of “character development”, her total destruction; the molestation of all she holds dear, and through this act and a hundred other micro-messages reinforcing the same thing, the rape of not just one character but in essence everything the show has purported to be.
To its fans and many of the creative forces involved, writers, directors and cast, The X-Files is a show about love and hope and possibility. It is a tale of strength and loyalty and humans. It is a show I have come to love, a show that brings us all together here, which is what makes its creator so increasingly problematic.
Chris Carter has shown, time and time again, through the stories he tells when he writes that what he actually believes in is not God or Science or the capacity of those who fight and seek truth to achieve justice, but in his right as creator to borrow tragedy and torment from anywhere and anyone, without remorse or care, to feed his egotistic vision of The X-Files. He truly believes that what his audience wants is his “genius” 40 minute take on issues that he does not understand. He is liberal only in his appropriation of trauma to feed his narrative; no race, religion or gender is safe from his careless pilfering.
I’m not saying that men like Carter shouldn’t write about these things, in many ways I wish more would, but to the service of their subject. Good writers try to look beyond their experience out of a desire to illuminate, protest and educate, to lend the privilege of their position. They create space for controversial content within their world out of a desire to be an ally and deal humanly, hopefully with the repercussions and the result. They aim to inspire change
Chris Carter just wants to cause controversy.
When asked by EW what led him to make My Struggle III’s decision about Scully’s child’s paternity, Carter replies
“ It adds to the characters in an interesting emotional way. “
This after ten seasons of character building. This after the pre-exisiting trauma of these seasons has driven Mulder and Scully apart. This, at the end of an episode, in which Scully has already had seizures, endured a car accident and had an assailant attempt to throttle her in her sickbed and watched her partner murder this man on top of her, all while missing her son, orphaned and fearing the end of the world and for her own sanity.
If you cannot, as a writer, find interest and emotional meaning in this rich body of work, then you are no writer. Except Carter is. He has written many interesting and innovative plot-lines for The X-Files, generated spin-offs, this whole world is born of his imagination… which leads us to a much more troubling truth.
He simply doesn’t care.
To him, The X-Files is a plaything and Dana Scully is an object. With every trauma unconsidered, every choice undermined and every abuse of her mind and body, Carter demonstrates that Dana Scully (the “two steps behind please” back-up who didn’t have a backstory until David Nutter wrote her one in Beyond the Sea) was never envisioned to be a feminist icon or symbol of female empowerment. To Chris Carter, she was only supposed to be a body for Mulder to bounce ideas against, a plot device for a conspiracy of men to use and exploit. Perhaps this is why Carter hates ‘shippers so much, because Scully was never intended to be Mulder’s equal, his lover, she was just supposed to be his foil. Her sexuality is supposed to be limited to inspiring male envy (Milagro), rage (Never Again) or reproduction (preferably medically induced to deny her agency even in this most traditional of female roles. Making Scully the body upon which to enact his fears, prejudices and fantasies at the cost of her own integrity is why Carter has become the show’s greatest Achilles Heel.
Ironically, this casting is perhaps most keenly summarised by a monologue Carter penned himself in yesterday’s episode. While he attempts to describe the motives of the Cigarette Smoking Man he unintentionally presents an unfortunately apt description of his own relationship to The X-Files.
“He was to be the man to lead us, but he became destructive. He took only his own counsel. […] You have no idea this man’s need to control our fate.”
- Chris Carter, My Struggle III
It’s about control, and in this case the need to maintain it when what you have created threatens to become more than you. Chris Carter was given the opportunity to be the most powerful man in a world with a long reach and the power to inspire through change. He was given 25 years of viewership and acting talent and budget to make a TV show that was revolutionary. Only he doesn’t want a revolution. He wants things to be as he sees them, his characters to be clean and platonic and known; blank canvases who spring back from torment unscathed, ready to have fresh terror and trauma rained upon them. Just to add interest. Chris Carter cannot see that the X-Files universe is one of collaboration, of unexpected circumstance sparking development, of characters becoming more than they are written. In his desire to air the biggest, most complicated conspiracy arc of all time, he is missing that many of the most beloved and iconic episodes are about small people and issues that are the more impactful for their lack of wham-bam-drama.
Why else would he, at the end of a dramatic episode that had fairly successfully fixed a tricky cliff-hanger, (an episode that I actually quite enjoyed), would he use the last three minutes to rewrite everything based on a harmful, damaging, degrading alteration of the show’s long term narrative. Mulder and Scully refer to William as ‘our son’, Scully, a medical doctor, claims William’s stem-cells will save Mulder, suggesting she knows they are genetically compatible (and we know from canon that she knows the difference between a sibling and a parental match). Given this, given the many questions that are raised in My Struggle III about a new faction of human colonisation nutters, Scully’s mental health, Skinner’s maybe-betrayal and the possibility of an apocalyptic scenario, why would we need to throw in a medical rape, ret-conning En Ami and rendering irrelevant much of the character work (Mulder and Scully as grieving parents) that he has done in the seasons since?
“Because Chris Carter” is the only reason I can come up with. It’s a self-indulgent flexing of muscles nobody asked to see and for that I will struggle to forgive him.
The calculated cruelty of his treatment of his world, characters and audience is irredeemable, and were it not for the culture of discourse in this fandom, the possibility of appreciating much of the rest of the show, its writing and performances, my struggle would be reconciling my feelings for Chris Carter and my love of The X-Files.
Fortunately, outside the writing room, the X-Files is beyond his control. The friendships it creates, the community it fosters have the power to keep the world of Mulder and Scully from descending irrevocably into a racist, misogynistic soup, even if canon’s gravity is headed that way. It crosses cultural boundaries, asks brave questions and it brings us together in our outrage. The wounds left by Carter are met by creative bandages, fanworks which take the best of the show and its people and make beautiful, powerful statements. So don’t be ashamed to love this mess of a show or allow Chris Carter’s megalomania to drive you away (though I do not judge you if it does). Get mad, get inspired and get loud in whatever way you can. Let Fox know that whatever comes next, either for The X-Files or a new show, behaviour like Chris Carter’s will not go unnoticed. Write letters, write emails, scream it on your social media, talk to your friends, make it clear to anyone who will listen, even if it is only one person, that The X-Files fandom will not support rape culture. Perhaps it feels small but all revolutions start with a whisper. Changing one mind is a huge victory.
Do it for Dana Scully, who deserved better and for all the little girls she inspired who deserve more than a world in which their idol is a man’s plaything
I intend to go see all of the movies I planned to see prior to the Harvey Weinstein debacle. Many Weinstein-distributed and produced films are among my all-time favorites and this tragic situation doesn’t change any of that. I realize that employees of The Weinstein Company and the many, many people engaged with current Weinstein projects are also innocent victims (albeit indirectly) of Harvey’s sociopathy. They don’t deserve to be punished.
I applaud the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for taking the first steps to clean up the industry and encourage them to stay the course. If they do, the industry will heal with hardly a glitch and we (they) can all get back to what we love: making and watching great films.
