Chapter Text
This multi-part meta, starting with an analysis of the “Anasazi”/“The Blessing Way”/“Paperclip” segment of the myth arc, is a look at the ways in which Jews and Jewishness is treated in TXF canon, and the ways in which we (or at least a version of us) are fundamental to the story as it is actually told in canon, and simultaneously made invisible by, frankly, bad writing and a fandom that missed a good deal of rich and difficult subtext.
The title is a reference to the book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn. The basic thesis of the book is the way in which Jews figure in discourse and are exploited for political and rhetorical ends in pop culture and arguments about many topics, without anyone caring about living, breathing Jews, and how dehumanizing that is. Basically, this quote from the Wikipedia page just about sums it up.
“Author Dara Horn recounts an inspiring event for the book was at a Nashville quiz bowl tournament in the 1990s. Horn shared a room with two Mississippians, who stayed up late watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that Rogers was speaking directly to them through their TV screens — just like they absolutely knew that Jesus loved them. They waited for Horn to concur. When she instead mumbled something about synagogue, they looked, stunned: "I thought Hitler said you all were dark." Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.”
Jews are fundamental to TXF, but really only in the pervasiveness of negative tropes about us, and that people like to kill us. No living, breathing expression of Jewishness is firmly found within the show, although as this meta series will explain, there is an ambiguous one lying in plain sight. We will get to him in time. Much of what can be said about the poor writing around Jewishness in canon can be applied to how other marginalized communities are written of by a really ignorant writing team, and I will mention some of that throughout this series of metas, but will focus on the treatment of Jews overall. I’m not the best person to speak to the other components of racist lore, but I hope this project inspires people to write and read other meta on these themes.
For the purposes of this meta “early myth arc” refers to the pre-cancer arc phase of lore. As the show went on, it became more and more about sexual violence towards Scully in particular. Of course, at this point Scully’s abduction was a major part of the lore, but the way in which it would consume her character arc and the way in which the myth arc would center on her more and more tightly was yet to be revealed. This shift in TXF was to the detriment of both the myth arc and the character of Dana Scully. The topic of the horror of the medical rape(s) and how badly it was treated in canon is the subject of countless metas and internet articles, so this meta will focus on a different aspect of the myth arc that I don’t see discussed as frequently or in as much depth as the (white) feminist angle.
Disclaimer: I have only watched the first 8 seasons and first movie of TXF. I have never heard a single good thing about the rest of the show or the second movie, so I will not watch it. This meta series only touches on events in the first 8 seasons.
Let’s get into a summary of this segment of the myth arc. If you don’t need a blow-by-blow replay, you can skip to the analysis section.
Episode Summary
This is a jam packed series of episodes. I have 1200 words worth of notes, so I’m going to summarize the plot beats briefly so this meta can focus on the problems I am setting out to describe. They use Navajo throughout the episode, but my research says that community prefers Diné, so I will try to use that throughout. If that’s incorrect, my apologies!
Let’s start with “Anasazi.” We start with breakfast with a Diné family that we can guess is a grandfather (Albert Hosteen), father (I cannot find his name anywhere which is… interesting. If y’all know it sound off in the replies) and son (Eric Hosteen). Eric is going riding. The boy returns later with an alien corpse Albert says to put back.
We see a hacker get into the state department files about UFOs. We see a bunch of what we can assume are people in The Syndicate or involved with it calling each other about the hack and something they are calling the MJ file. The Lone Gunmen show up at a sick Mulder’s house and tell him the hacker is now on the run and wants to meet him. Mulder meets with the hacker, who apparently didn’t take any precautions or think through what he was doing before doing it. A Chris Carter self-insert, I see.
Mulder shows Scully the files, which he then freaks out about because he thinks they’re gibberish.
Dude.
Scully has a brain and says she thinks it’s Diné. In the next scene, Skinner confronts Mulder about the files. Mulder denies having them and takes a swing at Skinner, who bends Mulder over his knee and spanks him, metaphorically. Scully then has to come to a disciplinary meeting about Mulder’s behavior, and the meeting basically sets up that he’s going to be fired for this. We then see Bill Mulder and CSM talking at Bill’s house. Basically, everything has gone to shit because of the hacker, but CSM is still trying to protect Mulder.
Scully goes to Mulder’s apartment and wakes up a sick Mulder. She’s worried they are going to get fired, and wants reassurance that this is worth it, so Mulder puts up the X in the window to summon Mr. X. Scully goes to research about the Diné language and eventually gets put in touch with Albert Hosteen, who was a code-talker in WW2.
Mulder’s dad calls him and asks him to come. Mulder leaves his apartment, Scully shows up and someone shoots at her, ostensibly thinking she is Mulder. At Bill Mulder’s house, he says some cryptic shit to Mulder about never throwing in with other people’s politics, how he did it and regrets it. That Mulder’s going to find out terrible things about him. God, how I wish he would just tell him something useful. But this is a Chris Carter episode! Mulder’s dad goes to the bathroom and Krycek kills him. Mulder finds the body and calls Scully, who lowkey thinks he did it but tries to convince Mulder to leave the crime scene so he won’t get arrested. He comes to her apartment because she tells him she got shot at at his apartment and sleeps there.
Scully steals his gun to run ballistics on it to clear him. Mulder is pissed as hell over this. Scully’s doing her best, but I get why Mulder took it wrong. Scully figures out that the water in Mulder’s apartment is being poisoned and that’s why a woman shot her husband of thirty years earlier that day. In the parking lot of Mulder’s apartment, Krycek sneaks up on Mulder, but Mulder beats the shit out of him.
Scully shows up and shoots Mulder to keep him from killing Krycek, who gets away.
Scully takes Mulder to Albert Hosteen in New Mexico. He tells them the files are about an international conspiracy about aliens that started in the 1940s, and apparently Scully’s name is in them. Hosteen talks to Mulder about the Anasazi being abducted by aliens. (Eye roll). Eric takes Mulder to the area where he found the alien body. CSM calls Mulder and tells him Mulder’s father authorized the project, which he doesn’t explain. Mulder climbs down into a buried box car and calls Scully to tell her about the pile of gassed alien corpses he found. Scully tells him the documents are about Axis powers in the U.S. doing human experiments. Eric closes the lid suddenly as a helicopter with the CSM lands. The CSM’s underlings don’t see Mulder in the bunker. I’m pretty sure the implication is that he hid in the pile of bodies. This… is certainly a choice we will discuss later. The underlings toss a bomb in the bunker. End of episode.
On to “The Blessing Way,” and I will try to go faster this time. Hosteen has a monologue about “Indian” sayings about history and memory that we will return to later as well. After this, we learn with Scully that the government men beat the shit out of the Hosteen family for not telling them where Mulder is, as the government men did not find his remains in the boxcar after throwing the bomb. Scully goes to look for him in the boxcar, but when she leaves the area, she is intercepted by a helicopter and the files are taken from her.
Scully is being put on leave for missing a meeting with Skinner. The two argue about what is going to happen next and what Skinner is able to do about it. Scully goes to the basement office, but the digital copy Mulder hid there is gone. Cut to the CSM trying to convince the rest of The Syndicate the Mulder is dead. Cut to the Diné finding Mulder and starting a ceremony to resurrect/resuscitate him. Frohike goes to Scully’s apartment and tells her the hacker has been killed.
The Diné ceremony leads to Mulder having these terribly written visions of Deep Throat and his father. I rewatched this scene three times and I simply retained none of the atrocious dialogue. During Deep Throat’s monologue, Mulder has a vision of the aliens being gassed with *hydrogen cyanide* and clawing against the walls, eventually finding a little hole they tried to get out of. This is ostensibly how Mulder survived the bomb. This vision is very important to the point I will discuss below. Bill Mulder has a stupid ass monologue about fate and choices and this is when I rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head. So many words to say nothing at all!
Scully goes to Skinner to tell him the hacker is dead, which is somehow going to clear Mulder’s name? Skinner pretty much shuts her down and just wants the tape which she doesn’t have. Cut to Scully just now finding out about the chip in her neck??? How would she not have known??? She tells Melissa about the chip and Melissa thinks she should go to therapy to unlock her memories. She tries, but it gets very intense, the therapist startles her and she leaves. Poor Scully :(
Cut to Mulder, who is fine now due to appropriated mysticism and plot armor. Scully, randomly, sees Skinner leaving her apartment building. She goes to bed and has a vision of Mulder telling her he’s back from the dead and ready to do the work together.
Scully goes to Bill Mulder’s funeral, where the Well-Manicured Man basically tells her people are after her and might send someone she knows to kill her.
Mulder goes to his mom’s house to show her pictures of The Syndicate and ask her questions, but she keeps refusing to look and saying she doesn’t remember. Scully leaves her apartment to go to Melissa’s, but Skinner intercepts her to talk and they go to Mulder’s apartment together. She pulls a gun on him because she’s convinced he’s there to kill her. Cut to Krycek shooting Melissa because he thinks she’s Scully. Boo, Krycek. Tomato tomato tomato. While Scully interrogates Skinner at gunpoint, she gets distracted for a second and he pulls a gun on her too.
On to “Paper Clip.” We are almost done. We get another monologue from Hosteen, this one is about a white buffalo that is a good omen.
Mulder burst into his apartment and instantly sides with Scully and pulls a gun on Skinner. LMAO. LMFAO even. Maggie is at the hospital with Melissa, who is gravely injured but still alive. Cut to The Lone Gunmen filling the audience in on “Operation Paperclip,” where Nazi scientists came over to the U.S. to work for the government. This was a real thing, but TXF is fictionalizing it. The guy standing next to Bill Mulder in the photo is Klemper, who is a fictional Nazi who did terrible experiments on Jews in particular. The shudder that passes through Duchovny as Langly explains this— me too, bro, me too. I am not confident that was an acting choice, as opposed to Duchovny being uncomfortable, but it’s very compelling. In this alternative history TXF is offering, the project continued into the 70s. Frohike tells Scully her sister was shot and Scully wants to go see her, but Mulder convinces her it’s too dangerous.
Mulder and Scully go to meet Klemper. Scully confronts him about some of the terrible shit he did, which was nice to see from the token conservative of the duo. Klemper tells them where the photo was taken and the mathematical equation to use to get into the files. He then calls the WMM to tell him Mulder is alive.
Cut to Hosteen at the hospital with Maggie and Melissa. Cut to Skinner trying to strike a deal about the tape. Cut to Mulder and Scully finding Scully’s file in the archive, then Samantha’s file, which used to be Mulder’s apparently. They get split up, goons show up to kill them, and eventually they sneak out the back.
Skinner, Scully and Mulder argue in a diner about what to do about the tape. Scully decides that Skinner can start negotiating, but not actually give up the tape until Mulder says. Hosteen monologue time. The calf is sick and its mother died. This is bad. Skinner goes to the hospital and follows a mysterious man who was standing outside Melissa’s room. The man and Krycek jump him and steal the tape. Krycek escapes a car as it blows up. I still don’t know why? It doesn’t matter.
The WMM, Mulder and Scully meet at Klemper’s, who is now mysteriously dead. The WMM fills them in on what Mulder thinks was the plan to create an alien human hybrid. Scully says this isn’t possible because DNA wasn’t discovered yet. (Once again, Carter’s attempt to write a smart person fails catastrophically because he is not a smart person). She thinks the WMM is feeding them a lie to prop up the Nazi agenda of human tests. That wasn’t the Nazi agenda— the Nazi agenda was a master race, but ok, Chris. Scully storms off.
The WMM tells Mulder Samantha was taken as insurance to keep Bill Mulder from revealing the truth, and now Mulder is in danger. Krycek calls the CSM to tell him he’s alive. Teena tells Mulder Bill is the one who picked who would be insurance. Skinner tells the CSM Hosteen used oral Diné tradition to teach a bunch of men the contents of the file, so destroying the tape won’t do anything. The plot hinging on the U.S. government not killing a bunch of Native Americans is… exasperating but I suppose it is science fiction. Melissa dies.
Analysis
The invocation of the history of the Nazis for a sci-fi myth arc dehistoricizes the Nazis, making them into campy fictional villains rather than real people who harmed real people. Of course, the Nazis went after many groups, but it is absolutely undeniable that antisemitism and anti-Roma racism was fundamental to the entire project of Nazism and not a quirk of history. This problem is not isolated to these episodes— the later episode titled “Herrenvolk” also invokes this history. There is a similar critique to be made of “731” and “Nisei” and dehistorization of Japanese WW2 war crimes. In TXF’s telling of events, the legacy of German fascism is some goofy alien nonsense, and not the nationalistic fascism of the modern day. Of course, we live in a different time politically now, but it still creates this alternative history where the legacy reads totally differently and is removed from the actual historical legacy that we must constantly grapple with.
Furthermore, the imagery invoked in the gassing of the aliens, desperately clawing at the concrete wall to get out of the small room they are trapped in is a conscious invocation of gas chambers. The decision to use hydrogen cyanide is deliberate. I only wonder why they didn’t go even further and label the canister Zyklon B, but we must be thankful for small mercies.
The writers might not have always known the tropes they were playing with, but in my opinion, this is too extended a sequence to be a coincidence. Surely even CC isn’t this ignorant. (He might be though. I do not believe he is a smart man.) To then add to that imagery by having Mulder (who we will get to in the final installment of The X Files Loves Dead Jews) hide in the pile of gassed corpses from the government who is trying to kill him is to reinforce Mulder’s association with these tropes. To what end is Mulder constantly martyred in ways that invoke historical Jewish suffering? We will get there.
There is another element to this arc that I’m not sure they totally thought through and that’s the division of the concepts of memory and history.
Hosteen: There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.
There is something frustrating about things like “ancient Indian saying” rather than attribution to whichever actual community this idea comes from, assuming it comes from one at all and not CC’s brain. As I stated in the front matter, the problems in the portrayal of Jewishness are not isolated to Jewishness; they frequently apply to other marginalized groups, women, and general, deeper issues with CC’s writing in particular. Nevertheless, the concept of peoples who trust memory against peoples who trust history and seek to eradicate memory is quite poetic to me, and it’s actually a division that also exists in the Jewish world. There is a quote from the Chabad website by Mendel Kalmenson that encapsulates quite well the dynamic I am speaking of.
“Put differently: History is made up of objective facts, and memory of subjective experience. As you might have guessed, Judaism is less interested in dry facts than in breathing experiences. It is for this reason that much of Jewish tradition and ritual draws on reenactment. We don’t just commemorate, we remember. We don’t just recount someone else’s story, we relive our own.”
The idea isn’t that history isn’t true or important, rather that memory captures something history does not. Accordingly, in Hosteen’s monologue and this Chabad quote, we see that some treat history as something that is past and fixed, and some, in their valorization of memory, treat history as something living and dynamic.
I don’t necessarily think CC is educated enough about Judaism to be invoking a discussion of memory standing in opposition to history and being given a moral value above it, but he nevertheless wrote it. Native Americans (CC’s versions at least) and Jews, (and Mulder judging by how the camera pans over where we just saw him during Hosteen’s monologue— we will get there) are two examples of peoples of memory. The U.S. government, Nazis, and other related historical forces are peoples of history. These malevolent sources use history to eliminate the truth and will eliminate peoples of memory to do so. At the end of the episode, it is memory that ultimately saves the day when Hosteen and company memorize the files.
Paired with the intentional invocation of the Holocaust, we see this way in which marginalization is woven into the story of the U.S. governments involvement in what we learned in “Colony” and “End Game” is the impending alien colonization of the planet. Taking real life historical traumas of colonization and genocide and making it the sprinkles on your Bad Sci-fi Sundae is really dismissive of the actual human beings this shit happened to. I’ve only ever seen this talked about extremely briefly on the podcast “The MSR Files,” but hopefully more fans can understand soon how this is a major issue. One of the ways that it’s a major issue, as discussed with the above summary of People Love Dead Jews, is that it doesn’t include anything about these dead marginalized communities and what they were/are like while alive. That’s the crux of the problem. Not only is suffering reduced to a background ornament on the overall story, the real people this happened to are erased.
This is the point of my argument and this meta. Dead Jews, along with other dead and suffering marginalized people, are something TXF loves to waive around without any of the dignity and respect necessary for those conversations. The fandom tends to not understand this very well, reproducing the same dynamic in fics. As the myth arc evolved to focus on sexual/reproductive violence, many criticisms of the myth arc tend to focus on the violence against mostly white women, starting and ending with our girl Dana Scully. These criticisms are really important, but they tend to overlook the way in which the myth arc, especially early on, is a racialized eugenicist project, which is just as important to remember as the white feminist criticisms of the arc. Of course, the villains doing racist things, as well as sexually violent things, could have been a good story despite being morally reprehensible, as depiction is not endorsement, but the lack of dignity given to real world victims really makes it plain that this is not about telling a meaningful story. This is about shock value.