America never happened
Yet another Monsterless monster-of-the-week episode. And I for one am not in the least bit bothered. Yes, we love the X Files for its dark heart and easy dispatch of hapless victims but we also love it for the way it bends and plays with the rules of a TV serial. There’s a valid argument that Season Six laid on the extracurricular a little too heavy but, when you’ve got a team like this, making episodes like ‘The Rain King’, who cares? Grouches and Grinches to the left of me, Noromos to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle of you.
The X Files has often played with the idea of small town America, usually with the revelation that they’re a never-having-existed nostalgia for a time that never was. The twist of ‘The Rain King’ is that, just maybe, they might still.
Surely the small town still exists and it must be just about possible that at least a few of them don’t have a mythology-employed doctor experimenting of the town’s children, who are videoed by a paedophile, or a chicken plant that isn’t run by cannibals?
Small town America may be an anachronism holding out against the urban imperative yet it may hold the values the urban monstrosity needs if it is itself to survive.
Look at any trilogy of films prior to the Twenty-first Century: the first is a massive hit, the second a huge monstrosity, the third a return to what made the first successful. The ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy being a perfect example. Hollywood seems to have learned its lesson, now producing whole universes of movies that maintain a standard.
Daryl Mootz is a charlatan and he may have been drinking when he had his accident in which he lost a leg, but the weather conditions were Holman’s doing and the town decides that justice has been served. Daryl has suffered enough. Just imagine how different America would be if whole towns could reach Kroner’s kind of social contract. Instead of the need to apportion blame, forgiveness rules!
It’s as soppy an idea as ‘The Rain King’ is an episode, but no less delightful for all that.
There is no inherent reason why human beings have to be nasty to one another. We have shown time after time that we can rise above our evolutionary heritage to be better than nature made us. If America truly wants to be the greatest nation on earth it has to do more to prove itself worthy of its small town ideal.
The American small town is equivalent to Greek myth. The only difference is that the Greeks actually believed their myths for a time. What we actually mean when we speak of ‘Greece’ is Athens, for it was that relatively small city state in which democracy and philosophy flourished. Sparta may have eventually won the Peloponnesian War but, by then, fortunately, the idea of democracy had transcended its borders.
America has always bought into the wrong myth.
Athens was but a city state. Rome wasn’t much more. Genghis Khan started by uniting small tribes. Britain built its empire from a single city - London.
Coincidentally, I actually lived, for a time, in the very place from where Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagal, eventually to bring back the evidence that would lead him to his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Strangely, it was also the place where the first McDonald’s opened in Britain.
If the small town never existed, America needs to invent it and quickly. If it’s nostalgia, then find a way to make a longing for the past a way to live in the present. America is destroying itself while the world watches on TV. Or there will come a time when a future Jean Baudrillard will declare ‘the United States never happened”.
The X Files has often played with the idea of small town America, usually with the revelation that they’re a never-having-existed nostalgia for a time that never was. The twist of ‘The Rain King’ is that, just maybe, they might still.
Surely the small town still exists and it must be just about possible that at least a few of them don’t have a mythology-employed doctor experimenting of the town’s children, who are videoed by a paedophile, or a chicken plant that isn’t run by cannibals?
Small town America may be an anachronism holding out against the urban imperative yet it may hold the values the urban monstrosity needs if it is itself to survive.
Look at any trilogy of films prior to the Twenty-first Century: the first is a massive hit, the second a huge monstrosity, the third a return to what made the first successful. The ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy being a perfect example. Hollywood seems to have learned its lesson, now producing whole universes of movies that maintain a standard.
Daryl Mootz is a charlatan and he may have been drinking when he had his accident in which he lost a leg, but the weather conditions were Holman’s doing and the town decides that justice has been served. Daryl has suffered enough. Just imagine how different America would be if whole towns could reach Kroner’s kind of social contract. Instead of the need to apportion blame, forgiveness rules!
It’s as soppy an idea as ‘The Rain King’ is an episode, but no less delightful for all that.
There is no inherent reason why human beings have to be nasty to one another. We have shown time after time that we can rise above our evolutionary heritage to be better than nature made us. If America truly wants to be the greatest nation on earth it has to do more to prove itself worthy of its small town ideal.
The American small town is equivalent to Greek myth. The only difference is that the Greeks actually believed their myths for a time. What we actually mean when we speak of ‘Greece’ is Athens, for it was that relatively small city state in which democracy and philosophy flourished. Sparta may have eventually won the Peloponnesian War but, by then, fortunately, the idea of democracy had transcended its borders.
America has always bought into the wrong myth.
Athens was but a city state. Rome wasn’t much more. Genghis Khan started by uniting small tribes. Britain built its empire from a single city - London.
Coincidentally, I actually lived, for a time, in the very place from where Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagal, eventually to bring back the evidence that would lead him to his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Strangely, it was also the place where the first McDonald’s opened in Britain.
E. F. Schumacher, back in 1973, tried to teach us that ‘Small is Beautiful’. The book may not have been an actual call for all things small, but it was an economic text that had people’s worth at its heart – ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’. Can we say that people matter in the modern world of economics? Of course not. It’s all about the numbers. So Donald Trump can go to Puerto Rico and tell the people that they don’t have a real disaster because their numbers don’t match New Orleans after Katrina. No understanding of the human cost, the human misery, just simply the human. When you live your life with numbers, and money is just another way of counting, the value of a human life is meaningless.
But it isn’t just Trump, however much we might like to deride his insensitivity. Dan Hodges’ Tweet says it all.If the small town never existed, America needs to invent it and quickly. If it’s nostalgia, then find a way to make a longing for the past a way to live in the present. America is destroying itself while the world watches on TV. Or there will come a time when a future Jean Baudrillard will declare ‘the United States never happened”.
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