Fox Mulder, whose favorite slogan is "I want to believe," isn’t the first seeker for a hidden world beyond our own. In fact, he might feel more at home among the poets and fictional characters of the Romantic Movement than the 20th century.
In fact,
The X-Files may be one of the main bastions of Romanticism in pop culture today. Like Mulder and Scully, the Romantics were searchers for truth, fascinated with the mysterious and the occult
Romanticism was born out of the turmoil of the late 18th century and left an indelible mark on Western civilization. Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats created many of our modern views of nature and the inner workings of the mind.
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"Spooky" Shelley
The Romantic poets were celebrities, whose flamboyant lives sometimes overshadowed their poetry. Some of their eccentricities even sound like premises for X-Files episodes.
William Blake claimed to be inspired by "messengers from heaven." Lord Byron drank claret from a drinking bowl fashioned from a human skull, and parlor-room gossip used to speculate if he was a vampire.
Mary Shelley had a haunting dream that led to the classic horror story Frankenstein. Her husband tried to conjure up a ghost.
Beyond the Romantics' surface eccentricities, they saw the world much as The X-Files does -- not least because both the poets and the show present a healthy disrespect for authority.
There is a shared distrust of institutions, whether they are aristocracy of Wordsworth's day or the shadow government represented by the Cigarette Smoking Man. There is also paranoia about technology -- Blake called the mills of the nascent Industrial Revolution "satanic," while Mulder and Scully have had regular unpleasant encounters with killer computers, cloning and biological experimentation.
But the
yearning to believe in something beyond the everyday world may be the most important connection between Romantics and alien hunters. The motif of a silent, fleeting "hidden power" -- often depicted as flying and bathed in light -- permeates much of Shelley’s work, and Mulder would certainly agree with Wordsworth’s words about how we are "moving about in worlds not yet realized."
The crusade against the known
Conflict with accepted beliefs is another driving force for both the Romantics and the X-Files. The Romantics were famous because they rebelled against the 18th-century Age of Reason, and The X-Files is no exception.
The X-Files has always presented uneasy dichotomies. Trust is defined by betrayal, the paranormal is measured by the scientific, and belief is precariously balanced against doubt.
If Mulder is a 20th-century Romantic, than his partner Dana Scully is a figure out of the scientific age of the Enlightenment. She would agree with Rousseau that "Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves."
Despite Scully’s presence, The X-Files prefers the Romantic viewpoint.
Mulder is the archetypal Byronic hero: a radical non-conformist, a moody dreamer, a tortured outsider born of a turbulent family with a mysterious past. Like Byron himself, David Duchovny even seems to be irresistible to the opposite sex.
The great god Pan
Romanticism brought with it a longing not only for other worlds, but for otherworldly creatures.
The 19th century brought an explosion of "first-hand accounts" of mythical creatures scurrying about the European countryside. There was a fascination with "the little folk," beings on the fringe of the human consciousness -- a fascination that lives on in today’s world as Mulder’s obsession with "little green men."
Finding proof of extraterrestrials would be Fox Mulder's equivalent of the Holy Grail, but another aspect of his quest is even more Romantic: his search for his vanished sister Samantha.
Quests like this fill Romantic literature. Coleridge's "Christabel" and Keats' "Lamia" poems feature ethereal maidens at their center, and Samantha is representative of such a figure.
The truth in here
"Quest" conjures up images of exploration, but for the Romantics quests were often about turning inward. Blake spoke of the "mental traveler," presenting the quest landscape as emanations from the seeker's own mind.
For all the mantras about the truth being "out there," The X-Files is also an internalized quest. The unconscious mind of Agent Mulder has provided a fertile ground for developing the series.
Wordsworth believed in the redemptive power of memory, calling the most vivid memories "spots of time." Mulder relies on memories of his
sister’s abduction for clues, and has used hypnosis – a technique that fascinated the Romantics – to access images hidden in his unconscious.
Coleridge and Mary Shelley relied on dreams for inspiration, and The X-Files has drawn extensively on dream states in its stories. Mulder even spent an entire episode in his own dreams, seeing his younger self on the seashore mouthing the words "the child is father to the man" in an almost direct quote of Wordsworth’s "Immortality" ode.
But why?
The connection to the Romantics is intentional – X-Files creator Chris Carter once called The X-Files "a quest, a Romantic quest, in the literary sense." So why does Carter lean on Fox Mulder's Romantic side?
Maybe the key lies in rebellion. At heart they were reactionaries, uncomfortable with the concepts of progress and order that drove the Enlightenment.
Mulder shares this. His obsession with aliens grows from a wish to return to his idealized childhood, the lost world where he was united with lost Samantha and -- more strongly as the series goes on -- his
"real" parents, the mother and father of heart's desire.
In the end, the Romantics failed to roll their world back to the pastoral state of grace that gave birth to Blake's "Songs of Innocence". But they tempered Enlightenment rationalism with feeling and gave people a way of understanding the changing world of the 19th century.
Mulder can’t put his family back together either. But if he can understand that loss, he may provide a viewpoint on the chaos of the modern world.
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