Buffy,Thex-Files and the Clinton Presidency
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chapter 21 Postmodern Gothic: Buffy, The X-Files and the Clinton Presidency* Mary Shelley’s 1817 novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is now widely regarded as one of the founding texts of the science fiction and hor- ror genres. The modern myth it established has been enormously influential across a whole range of media and forms. Here, I want to examine how its story was retold in two of the most successful American television series of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first: The X-Files, which ran from 1993 until 2002; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran from 1997 until 2003. I will focus on particular episodes from each series: ‘The Post- modern Prometheus’, which first went to air in November 1997, as part of the fifth season of The X-Files; and the ‘Adam’ sequence from Buffy’s fourth season, a set of four linked episodes, comprising ‘The I in Team’, ‘Goodbye Iowa’, ‘The Yoko Factor’ and ‘Primeval’, first broadcast during 2000, on 8 and 15 February, 9 and 16 May respectively. First, however, I want to say something about the more general characteristics of the two series. 1 A Tale of Two Television Series The X-Files was produced by Chris Carter for the American Fox Network, a sub- sidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; Buffy by Joss Whedon’s own production company, Mutant Enemy, and broadcast on the Warner and Para- mount networks, though its wider distribution was also handled by Fox. By televisual standards, both were subject to and acknowledge unusually strong claims to authorship. The credits for The X-Files described it as ‘created’ by Carter, he was its executive producer, he wrote the scripts for the first two epis- odes (and for 9 out of 24 in the first season, two as co-author) and directed many of the key episodes. Whedon was listed as ‘creator’ and ‘executive producer’ for Buffy and, during the first five seasons, directed 16 episodes and wrote 22. Both * This chapter has been published previously in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Stud- ies, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 103–16, 2005, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 1030431052000336324 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004314153_023 404 chapter 21 series were immensely successful. In February 1995, during its second season, the X-Files episode entitled ‘Fresh Bones’ reached some 10.8 million American homes.1 This success was repeated elsewhere, in Britain for example, both on the BBC and News Corporation’s Sky TV, and in Australia on Channel 10 and Murdoch’s Foxtel. Buffy had a similar impact, again not only in the US, but also in Britain, again on the BBC, and in Australia, on Channel 7 and again on Foxtel. Both generated a considerable secondary spin-off industry of ‘collectible’ toys, comics and books (often published by News’s HarperCollins), for The X-Files a film, and for Buffy the Angel television series. The ‘X-Files’ provided Carter’s programme with its title and central organ- ising motif: each individual episode was supposed to be a file from the Amer- ican Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiries into the paranormal. For most of the series, the investigators were Agent Fox Mulder, played by David Duch- ovny, and Agent Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson. In the penultimate series Duchovny was for the main part replaced by Robert Patrick, in the role of Agent John Doggett. The episode that concerns us is taken from the main body, however, featuring Duchovny and Anderson. As the title made clear, it was a self-consciously postmodern retelling of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Carter had never been entirely happy with the notion that The X-Files was science fiction: in a 1995 online interview, he insisted he ‘never was a science fiction fan’.2 But for the main part, The X-Files meets even Darko Suvin’s fairly restrict- ive definition of the genre as one distinguished by ‘the narrative dominance or hegemonyof afictional“novum”…validatedbycognitivelogic’.3 Its long-run story arc was provided by a threatened alien invasion and collaboration by sections of the American elite, both entirely compatible with ‘cognitive logic’. And, even where the paranormal became less obviously rational in content, Scully would seek to explain it through the cognitive logic of medical science. We should qualify these observations, by adding that this was a distinctly ‘postmodern’ sci- ence fiction, nonetheless, not only in the obvious sense that both Jameson and Baudrillard see science fiction and television as characteristically postmodern cultural phenomena, but also because the programme displayed postmodern characteristics of its own, which we will explore below.4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer was not science fiction as Suvin understood it, but rather Gothic horror fantasy, descended from Shelley by way of a rather differ- ent genealogy. The Southern Californian town of Sunnydale, where the series 1 Lowry 1995, p. 247. 2 Badley 1996, p. 150n. 3 Suvin 1979, p. 63. 4 Jameson 1991, pp. 38, 76; Baudrillard 1994, pp. 121–7..