THE X FILES, THE THING & SCIENCE FICTION:
REGENERATING DIFFERENCE
An essay by Vanessa Long

The concepts of genre, intertextuality and discourse reveal the myriad of meanings generated in the X Files episode 'Ice'(1996), and in Howard Hawks' 'The Thing from another world' (1951). These two texts intertextually reveal through dialogism the centrality of patriarchal, sexist and scientific discourses to the science fiction genre and to the dominant culture. A tactical feminist reading of these texts exposes through lacunae, bricolage and consequently transposition that the support of the status quo and the possibility of resistance to it are some of the new meanings that can be created from these texts.

In Howard Hawks The Thing the power of man, represented by the United States Air Force, is pitted against that of The Thing , an alien creature with violent intentions. The scientific men central to this narrative describe the alien other as 'an intellectual carrot' , much like the alien 'space flower' in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The scientific men in this film typify Feury and Mansfield's (1997) definition of the values of phallocentrism, demonstrating a belief in "unity, authority, hierarchy, meaning, presence, force and teleology". Such values are intertextually common to protagonists in the science fiction genre. The values of the alien in The Thing are unknown, but are assumed to be plural, illogical, evil and random. The air force fights against and eventually constrains and kills The Thing, referred to in the movie as a "being from another world, as different from one pole to another" .

A dominant textual reading of 'The Thing' might perceive that this science fiction film is about the antagonistic relationship between aliens and humans. Alternatively, a resistant or tactical feminist reading of the same text reveals that this film also generates meanings which reflect the relationship between hegemony and otherness within the dominant culture.

Western ontology is based upon the structuralist notion of binarisms; upon the fact that something can be defined in part by what it is not. Levi Strauss binary oppositions perceive that women are analogous with illogical behaviour, death, the unknown, dark, evil and abjection (Kristeva, 1982); while men are associated with unified knowledge, life, light and good. Jackson (1982 in ACF) argues that "The shadow on the edges of bourgeois culture is variously identified, as black, mad, primitive, criminal, socially depraved, deviant, crippled, or... female. Difficult or unpalatable social realities are distorted through many literary fantasies to emerge as melodramatic shapes: monsters... femme fatales." The maintenance of these binarisms and the patriarchal, sexist discourses which support them are crucial to the phallocentric status quo in the West, which relies upon power dichotomies.

The association made between space and aliens is an intertextual feature of the science fiction genre. In her book 'An ethics of sexual difference' (1993), Luce Irigaray explores the binary opposition which associates men with time; and women with space. She states that on the time / space continuum "Time becomes the interiority of the subject itself, and space, its exteriority... The subject, the master of time, becomes an axis of the worlds ordering, with its something beyond the moment and eternity: God. He effects the passage between time and space."

The alien in The Thing is well and truly objectified, it is all exterior. It does not reveal an interior dimension, it is the personification of exteriority. Michel Foucault (1981) noted that "relations of power are not in a position of exteriority" ; thus revealing the remoteness of women and other 'aliens' from power. The transposition of Foucault's and Irigaray's texts through bricolage upon The Thing reveals a narrative whereby time symbolically dominates space. This meaning can in turn be transposed upon the the subjugation of the feminine by the masculine in the dominant culture.

There is a further direct intertextual link between the alien in The Thingand Luce Irigaray's writing on the otherness of women. Irigaray notes that "If traditionally, and as mother, woman represents place for man, such a limit means that she becomes a thing. She finds herself delineated as a thing. Moreover, the maternal feminine also serves as an envelope, a container , the starting point from which man limits his things". (10)

When writing about women becoming men' s 'things', Irigaray is speaking of the objectification of women. The alien in The Thing is also objectified, it is only ever viewed fleetingly, often in wide shots. It is depicted as an act of nature: illogical, deadly; associated with the dark, and space without a definite place, like women (Irigaray, 1993). A snowstorm continues throughout the film The Thing , as it does through the X Files episode Ice. These snowstorms, which are wild and unpredictable, are an example of the wiles of nature, which women are also identified with, and suitably set the scene for the patriarchal discourses within which these science fiction films operate.

The transposition of Irigarays and Foucault's writing upon this text brings into question the ideological function of The Thing, which essentially supports the status quo and its dichotomous power relations. This meaning is presumably radically different from the meanings that would flow from a dominant reading of this text. It does however reveal the new freedoms enabled by post modern and poststructural discourses which have liberated readers from purely intratextual readings through lacunae. A tactical feminist reading of Howard Hawks The Thing divulges much about the centrality of patriarchal discourse to the science fiction genre and reinvigorates the meaning of Hawks\rquote , Foucault's and Irigaray's texts.

Sexist discourses are prevalent in the science fiction genre to varying degrees in everything from The Thing (1951) to the X Files episode 'Ice' (1996). This sexism is overt in films such as Invaders from Mars (1953) , with its subjugated, domestic females and dominant males; and overt in The Thing where women are primarily secretaries and girlfriends, whose only entry into the scientific, authoritative world of men is through gifts of food and subtle flirting.

The sexist discourse which operates in the X Files series is both more implicit and tangential to that found in films such as The Thing or Invaders from Mars. Indeed, Irigaray noted that the delineation of women as things unfixed within space enables some possibility of change from one historical period to another (1993: 10). The X Filesseries reveals through central character Agent Scully the contemporary shift in traditional gender roles which has enabled more women to become scientific experts. What could be considered sexist about the X Files series is the fact that once women move into the arena of science, as Agent Scully has, and men, such as protagonist Agent Mulder, start believing in the power of intuition, traditionally a feminised area of thought, suddenly the authority of science, a principal discourse since Enlightenment, is brought into question, as intuition becomes paramount. It is in this shifting gender discourse that sexism can be viewed in the X Files series once viewed through a feminist analysis.

Sexist discourses operate both textually and technically in the X Files episode Ice , where an unknown, deadly, feminised parasitic alien from 'space' is investigated by a team led by Agent Mulder. Many extended shots in this episode feature close ups of Agent Scully, the scientist, listening to the intuitive analysis of Agent Mulder. These scenes serve to invite the objectification of Agent Scully through the continued direction of the viewer's scopophilic gaze towards her body, whilst our intellect is directed towards Mulder' s reasoning processes. The centrality of patriarchal and scientific discourses to the science fiction genre is demonstrated in the 'X Files' episode 'Ice' through a tactical feminist discursive analysis, which transposes new meanings upon its intratextual coherency and lacunae.

The X Files episode Ice is a matrix of intertextual allusions. Its narrative is launched by the fact that there are aliens in the ice which are uncovered by scientists, as in The Thing . One of the first and most crucial lines of dialogue in this X Files episode states "We are not who we are. It stops right here, right now". This line of dialogue is an allusion to a portion of dialogue in the 1956 and 1978 versions of the science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) in which the protagonist states, when speaking of her alien effected boyfriend, that "Geoffrey is not Geoffrey... there's something missing... he's just not the same person". Intertextually, within the X Files episode Ice, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars (1953), changes in characters behaviour signify alien contact and threat to other characters. The X Files episode Ice and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as other science fiction films such as Invaders from Mars, Aliens (1979) and Dark City(1998) make intertextual allusions to a belief in unitary subjectivity, static selves and the threat of aphanasis (Feury and Mansfield, 1997) which alien others present.

All of these films follow the generic science fiction narrative structure. This involves the investigation of an event, conflict, coming to understand that alien others are killing humans and are a threat to human existence, coming up with a plan often through scientific and / or intuitive means through which to destroy the alien, and then doing so, with varying degrees of effectiveness, resulting in denouement. Often the conclusion of these plots entails the resolution of sexual tension, through the pairing off of a lead male and a female character. Although all of these films ascribe to the science fiction generic convention, their narratives are also multigeneric (Cranny Francis, 1987) and through dialogism simultaneously display aspects of the horror, romance and film noir genres. The Thing and X Files Ice as science fiction texts support the status quo through their generic narrative structures and through the patriarchal, sexist and scientific discourses within which they operate. Discursive dialogism is evident in the fact that the chief characters in these popular culture texts are usually white, middle class, male and Christian. Thus bourgeois, Eurocentric, individualistic, progressive, sexist and Christian discourses also operate within these texts in an implicit fashion.

What has shifted within the science fiction genre is the way in which aliens are materially depicted. While both the alien in The Thing and the X Files Ice are parasitic, their physical representations have changed. The alien in The Thing(1951) had a body curiously like that of a human, while the alien in X Files Ice (1996) is minuscule, almost undetectable. This shift in the representation of difference represents a historical shift in the social relationship between cultural hegemony and otherness. It suggests a social process whereby difference is viewed as a more insidious and imperceptible threat than before. Both The Thing and the X Files Ice were created in a time of sociocultural uncertainty; and emphasise the need for vigilance if the status quo is to be maintained. This request for vigilance is explicit in the Thing where a character warns 'Watch the skies', and is also explicit in the X Files Ice and Invasion of the Body Snatchers , where a character ominously warns ' it gets you when you sleep' .

Crucial to the creation of meaning from Howard Hawks The Thing or The X Files episode 'Ice' is an understanding of the historical periods in which they were made and the fact that "generic considerations can uncover the historical process of social meaning" and "reveal the cultural conditions and contexts in which texts are used and the effects of their use" (Thwaites, et al. 1994)

The Thing is a post world war two film which symbolises post war confusion over traditional gender roles which arose owing to the movement of significant numbers of women into the paid work force. Additionally, The Thing, and other science fiction films from its time such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Marsexpress Cold War concerns over the threat that communism posed to capitalist ontology.

The X Filesepisode Ice also explores the concerns of the culture within which it was made. This episode of the X Files overtly reflects the fear in the dominant culture of biological warfare, which the alien parasite in this film and in i Body Snatchers: The Invasion Continues (1993), represents to some extent. More implicitly, uncertain gender relations and confusion over appropriate occupations for men and women have typified the post 1970' s feminist, postmodern culture within which the X Files episode Ice\ was created. As the dominance of science over other cultural values has been questioned, so too has the dominance of men over women. The fracturing of feminism into a diffuse movement of tangential causes is possibly partially to blame for the new gender based power dichotomies expressed in the X files. Although the series involves a revived division of labour between the sexes, it continues to epistemologically uphold phallocratism despite the utopian possibilities of the science fiction genre (Richards, 1997).

Science fiction texts, with their fear of an invasive other, express the social concerns of the culture within which they were made, and support Marshall McLuhan's belief that films are the dreamwork of the social. Tony Thwaites (1994) notes that "Texts and readings are used to impose cultural dominance and to offer resistance... interactions between texts and genres are always a form of social action". As this tactical reading of the science fiction genre has revealed, feminist discourse criticises and rejects the binarisms that are central to the 'dominant phallogocentric paradigm' (Feury, Mansfield, 1997). Adrienne Rich (1976) contended that "The rejection of the dualism, of the positive-negative polarities between which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an undercurrent of feminist thought. And, rejecting them, we reaffirm the existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively defined: not only women, but the 'untouchables', the 'unmanly', the 'non white', the 'illiterate'; the invisible. Which forces us to confront the problem of the essential dichotomy: power / powerlessness". Rich's contention is that binarisms render powerless not only women but all ethnic groups, classes and forms of knowledge that are not privileged by the status quo.

Michel Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality (1981) that power relations are always in a state of flux and are replete with sites of resistance. He states that "relations of power knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are matrices of transformation". The fact that aliens representing the feminine other are perceived as a great threat to the existing order imbues them with a significant measure of subversive power. The association that Rich makes between disparate, formerly oppressed groups creates the possibility of a sizeable power block of resistant forces. The transposition of intertextual references including Irigaray's feminist analysis and Rich's and Foucault's theories on power upon the science fiction genre, which conventionally relies upon patriarchal, scientific and sexist discourses, reveals the subversive power available to the oppressed within these texts and the status quo which they symbolically depict.

In conclusion, it can be argued that the concepts of genre, intertextuality and discourse generate a matrix of meanings within Howard Hawk's The Thing and the X Files episode Ice. A tactical feminist intertextual reading of these texts reveals the centrality of patriarchal, scientific and sexist discourses to the science fiction genre, which ideologically supports the status quo. The transposition of Irigaray's, Rich's, Thwaite\rquote s and Foucault's theories on feminism and power reveal sites of possible resistance to the dominant discourses which operate within and support the dominant phallogocentric assumptions central to The Thing , X Files Ice and the cultural hegemony.

(c) Vanessa Long, 1999

REFERENCES

The Thing From Another World, 1951

Invaders from Mars, 1953.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956.

Alien, 1979

Body Snatchers: The Invasion Continues, 1993.

X Files episode 'Ice', 1996.

Dark City, 1998.

Barthes, R. (1997) 'The death of the author' in Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London.

Cook, A. (1980) ' Myth and Language', Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Cranny-Francis, A. (1987) 'The Moving Image: Film and Television' in Communication and Culture: An Introduction, ed Kress, G. NSW University Press, Sydney.

Feury, P.; Mansfield, N. (1997) 'Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies', Oxford University Press, London.

Foucault, M. (1981) 'The History of Sexuality: Volume 1', Penguin, Harmonsworth.

Kristeva, J. (1982) 'Approaching Abjection' in Powers of Horror, trans. Roudiez, L. Columbia University Press, New York.

Irigaray,L. (1993) 'An Ethics of Sexual Difference', trans. Burke, C.; Gill, G., Cornell University Press, New York.

Jackson, R. (1982) in Cranny-Francis, A. (1987) 'The Moving Image: Film and Television' in Communication and Culture:

An Introduction', ed. Kress, G., NSW University Press, Sydney.

Rich, A. (1976) 'Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution', WW Norton, New York

Richards, T. (1997) Star Trek: In Myth and Legend, Orion Books, London.

Russ, J. (1983) 'How to Suppress Women's Writing', Women's Press, London.

Thwaites, T., Davis, L., Mules, W. (1994) 'Tools for Cultural Studies: An Introduction', MacMillan Australia, Melbourne.

Wheeler, A. (1991) 'Bulldozing the Subject', JHU Press, California. Downloaded from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture

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