Alienation: X-Files, Nostalgia and Isolation

 

A few days ago I read a blog (The X-Files Has Made Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Experienced) by a self-described Gen Zedder about their impressions watching the X-Files, the hit Sci-fi show of the 90s. It's an interesting read, one part about getting into a show after it had its moment and the strangeness of a first time viewing in a culture heavily influenced by the thing in question. The other part is exploring just how much society has lost compared to the 1990s which were just 20+ years ago.    

It caused a bit of a stir on social media, with quite a few veterans of the period weighing in, often negatively.  Reading I had some "Notes" and a few sentences raised my eyebrow, but I did find myself largely in agreement with the thrust of the piece. I will be quoting sparsely from it, so I recommend taking a few minutes to read it yourself (here's the link again). 

I think what rubbed many people the wrong way was the rose-tinted view of the decade. Several statements come across as crass and hard to stomach. e.g.

 It’s far too easy to romanticise the past, wallowing in the struggles of today whilst forgetting the real and terrible struggles of times gone by, but I believe that, to a good extent, people lived better in the 90s. 

 

The 90s were awful, miserable for many, sadly that's true of all periods of time under system's of exploitation and oppression. And while at the end of the day the X-Files was TV show it is worth remembering that the show was rooted firmly in the counter culture of the 90s, which was a time when suspicions of government were growing and fantastical conspiracies rubbed shoulders with mundane leaks and investigative journalism into corporate and government corruption. And that was just the general malaise that effected everyone, if you were in one of the out groups like I was reading something like this comes across as a personal challenge especially when written by someone who by admission does not know and cannot know the period in question. The 90s for me and many others were bleak and threatening, Yanks call that period "The End of History*" but the end did not stop for the rest of us. I remember the death of my community, rampant drug addiction and homelessness and extremely, violently anti-queer society and being taught how to check cars for bombs behind the tires. Though fortunately that last one was just before the Good Friday Agreement when terrorism in Britain and Ireland was ended once for all**. 

Now I didn't write all the above to have a go, but to illustrate a flaw in the blog I'm responding to. It does go onto explain that "lived better in the 90s" refers to specific relationships in society and the absence of excesses that plague our present. But, it remains a bold and in my view incorrect thing to say that does not take into account the reality of the 90s and using an artificial substitute. It's easy to think a time and place is pretty great when you watch a version crafted and edited for a specific purpose like in TV shows and movies. But I think that lesson's been demonstrated by the negative reception. No sense piling in here. After all they are correct that it wasn't all terrible either, for every bad memory and experience I have some good ones. The rub is no place or period of time is totally good or totally terrible it's a mix of both and sometimes the balance leans too far one way for some people, and for some people I mean society's outcasts and losers. 

Sticking with the first part I sympathise with the author's experiences, last year I watched the entirety of Twin Peaks, and I am currently working through the 60s classic The Prisoner. Once these shows sink their hooks into you, it is very difficult to shake the notion that they don't make them like they used to, and that we have lost something in the passage of time. But that is the issue with nostalgia, or at least imbibing too much of it for too long, it warps your perceptions and makes it harder for you to see reality. Nostalgia for some kind of "better" pastime is a key motivating factor for many reactionary movements today after all, and it does not matter that their perfect 50s or Ancient Roman Imperium never really existed, they were attracted to an artificial substitution. 

Moving onto the second part, I don't think many would disagree with statements like this

 I am of course thankful for the technology I am privileged enough to have; there is a certain irony in moaning about modern times through the medium of internet blogs. However, I see the brain-rotting, radicalising, life-altering effects of the current state of the internet, particularly on young people, and despair. How many hours of how many lives have been used scrolling to no meaningful end? How much violence, loneliness, ignorance, and hatred has been stoked by ‘social’ media?

In broad strokes at least I'm with the author here. However, this is where the more constructive and useful part of the criticism came into the discussion. The 90s were still largely an analogue period, but they had many of the problems of today in some form or another. Much of the 90s media dealt with loneliness, a sense of isolation and that life seemed to be meaningless. Fight Club was written in the 90s and is about the 90s, the film came out in 99 and was a massive hit, and yes, some of its fans have drawn the wrong lesssons from it, but Tyler Durden's hypermasculine warrior lifestyle was a reaction to the effects of living a "normal" life in the corporate dominated 1990s. 

Younger folk may find this hard to believe, but early Simpsons was popular not just because it was funny but because it was subversive and rebellious

 

 We couldn't scroll for hours on are phones getting angry at twitter and facebook but we could spend hours playing Snake. To link back up to point one for a moment, why It's so strange for 90s kids to see someone gush about how great life was back then is because the decade was saturated by angst. It was everywhere including the X-Files. The show was about how the establishment of society were corrupt and a danger to us all, and in a perverse twist the part of the premise where there is in fact a shadowy cabal working behind the scenes to enact a sinister plan was the part of the show that was supposed to be comforting, otherwise we'd have to face the reality that the society we live in is corrupt and hostile and it arose organically. That's why "I want to believe" was so important to the show and one of the parts of the X-Files fandom that spread far and wide. "We wanted to believe there were key identifiable bad guys (Cigarette smoking man) and that champions of truth and justice (Mulder and Scully) would triumph over them. 

 The problems of today were problems in the 90s, what's changed is their form and scope. A book worth reading on this topic is Robert D Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Which is a collection of 90s essays tackling the growth of loneliness, isolation and alienation in the United States. 

I will end on the author's conclusion

 Please, have a phone call with a friend instead of texting, leave your phone in your pocket at the party, drop by a friend’s place, chat to a stranger, uncover a government conspiracy relating to alien-human hybrids… well, maybe not that last one - but live in a way that almost resembles the human condition! Our brains are made for living in a village, not isolating ourselves behind glowing blue squares. We can pretend that pixels on a screen are equivalent to sharing an impromptu coffee with a friend, but we are kidding ourselves.

I think this is very good advice, and I can speak from experience that I have lived an isolated and lonely life. But I've also taken steps to change that and most of those steps are like the ones above. These relations were under growing threat for some time and are harder now than they were in the 90s, but it is still possible. I live in a block of flats, so I see my neighbours all the time but do not often interact beyond a polite hello. That changed during COVID when neighbours on the ground floor took tables and chairs outside, these have become meeting points for some of us and when the weather's nice we chat, share drinks and barbecues. 

 I've joined several hobby clubs including Chess, Creative Writing and Board games. We regularly meet in person and other time friendly acquaintances have grown into friendships. My advice is to keep looking, you'll be surprised how many groups like this are around in your area, maybe in a community hall or café off the main roads, and to join something you have an interest in, as your shared passions will give you some common ground for talking, a "foot in the door" so to speak. There's also no harm in trying something if you're curious and leaving if it's not for you. 

 

Appendix: The limits of socialising through social media

This is a separate idea I had when reading the reactions to the blog about the X-Files. Many of the people reacting negatively to the piece seemed to agree with the main argument that life has declined in some areas for reasons involving the rampant saturation of digital interactions. 

 I think one of the issues this raised for me is just how limited and strained are becoming thanks to turning to these modes of communication. Platforms like twitter and Bluesky are microblogs, where character limits hammer the ability to be nuanced. To be blunt its difficult to critique or disagree with others in a way that shows genuine engagment and not just naked rejection of the whole standpoint. Its easy to "@" someone saying the 90s were good (in someways) with "Apartheid was still a thing in 1994, checkmate!" and much harder to communicate that you get what they're saying but there are still some serious issues with the framing with a strict character limit. Even the ability to chain replies (thread creation) only marginally helps, the limit is still there you're just moving it down the line, and this method requires that you can keep your views coherently structured while constantly editing because you're three characters over, and for the person you're "at-ing" to be able and willing to read through each response when their are dozens jockeying for attention.

It's not a great way to communicate to a person. It's a great way to signal to a mass of people though. The analogue equivalent of this is someone attending an open meeting reading out a statement that strikes some as controversial, those people erupt all at once in counterarguments of varying type while the original speaker tries to pick out individual voices in a sea of murmuring. 

I think one of the great lessons from comparing the 90s to today is that we can see that in a sense nothing has changed regarding the issues we're all struggling with. But in another sense everything has changed because many of these problems are now more pervasive than ever and it's harder to take the steps necessary to alter them. 

 In essence the Matrix was correct, humanity peaked in the 90s, and we really need to come to terms with that and deal with if we're to survive.

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*The author is Scottish and not from the USA, however they're basing their impressions of the 90s on US pop-culture.  

** Yes, I am being sarcastic.