The Truth Is Out There. Somewhere. Maybe. : ‘The X-Files’ Eats the Brains of About 10 Million Americans Every Friday Night. Why? It Isn’t Even Normal TV. Maybe the Truth Is in Us, After All.

“The hardest thing is, the truth is out there--but you don’t know what it is and you have no control whatsoever.”

That’s what 26-year-old Stacy O’Grady told a reporter during the six days that she and her family waited for news of her brother, Capt. Scott O’Grady, after his plane was shot down over Bosnia last June. Neither Stacy O’Grady nor the reporter stopped to discuss the likely source of her sentence. But for about 10 million Americans what she said was familiar, something that’s become as close as we get nowadays to a proverb. These 10 million spend their Friday nights watching or taping “The X-Files.” Over spooky stills and spookier music, one tantalizing sentence flashes on the screen in white capital letters: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.

The rest of the sentence is O’Grady’s elaboration, but it accurately expresses the state of many characters on “The X-Files”--and of many of us who watch it. Which may be the secret of the show’s success.

It needs a secret, because the hourlong “X-Files” goes against classic mass-entertainment formula. Its lead characters, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), have laughed once , and that was in the pilot. They were standing in the rain in a graveyard and were laughing at Mulder’s gruesome theory about the deaths of several young people. (The young fare badly on this show. They are always being murdered, or possessed, or abducted and/or experimented upon by aliens and/or our own government.) It might be more accurate to say that only Scully laughed in that scene. Mulder chortled. Since then, they’ve smiled and smirked some, but there’s been precious little chortling and no more laughter. With good reason. Agents Mulder and Scully never win.

In two seasons, not one show has given us anything that a Hollywood executive would call a Happy Ending. Mulder and Scully manage to stay alive, and that’s about as happy as it gets. The Bad Guys--sinister, super-secret government cabals--almost always get away. The facts are almost always inconclusive, and the evidence is almost always destroyed or stolen. When someone who knows anything is about to talk, he is instantly doomed. Brutal betrayals take place as a matter of course; for instance, our government (or a cabal, within a cabal, within our government) assassinates Mulder’s father. The perpetrators--whether earthly, ghostly, or alien--are rarely caught; sometimes they’re not even seen. They depart after doing as much harm as interests them. At best, they’re neutralized only after they’ve done a great deal of damage. And since the nature of how they come and go is vague, there’s never any assurance that the Bad Guys won’t be back to do still more damage, whenever they feel like it.

In an episode called “The Calusari,” a boy is dispossessed of his evil stillborn twin’s spirit, but only after he’s witnessed the grotesque deaths of his father, younger brother and grandmother and has been cleansed in a ritual in which rooster blood is splashed upon him by some very chilling old men. We can only imagine what sort of shape this boy and his mother are going to be in for the rest of their lives. (Families in general have a hellish time on “The X-Files,” always threatened and often devastated by inner and outer forces beyond their control.) In a voice-over at the end of this episode, Mulder tells us that “neither innocence nor vigilance may be protection against the howling heart of evil.”

Needless to say, if neither innocence nor vigilance are going to do us any good, we don’t have a chance. Even if the truth is out there.

Compare these goings-on to “NYPD Blue,” “ER,” “Homicide,” “Law & Order,” the various “Star Treks,” or any halfway-serious, successful show, past or present. In those stories, the authorities are sincere and can usually be depended upon, and the forces of good hold their own, though with difficulty, against the forces of not-so-good. Even in “Twin Peaks” the authorities were the Good Guys, and the government could be trusted not to assassinate your father. In contrast, Mulder and Scully are in constant danger from elements in their own outfit. An oft-repeated “X-Files” axiom is “Trust No One.” (“Trust No. 1” is Mulder’s computer access code.)

*

What could be the appeal of a program in which every attempt to bring order out of chaos seems doomed to produce only further chaos--and in which life seems to be defined, at best, as a tentatively normal arrangement over which the abnormal reigns? Is that what many of us are really feeling? (You don’t have to answer that.)

Perhaps so, since the show--which is having its season premier Sept. 22--won this year’s Golden Globe as TV’s best dramatic series and has been nominated for seven Emmys, including Best Drama and Best Writing in a Drama Series. The show’s ratings have been climbing steadily, and its growth from the first season to the second in the key 18-to-49 category was, according to Fox, the greatest of any returning network show. Its fans are devoted to the point of fanaticism, generating umpteen fanzines and computer bulletin boards in which every detail of every show--and I mean every detail, such as the significance of the number on Mulder’s apartment door--is contemplated and discussed endlessly.

I discovered the show last fall while channel-surfing on an otherwise featureless Friday night. I came in well after the beginning, and what held me, of all things, was the lighting. In contrast to the brutally bright living-room of sitcoms, and the rich primary colors of most TV and wide-screen dramas, on this “X-Files” (and most I’ve seen since) the screen was dark--often almost black, but for a few gleams in which faces and furniture were barely visible. Even exterior daylight shots were mostly gray. Yet the texture of this darkness was rich, with subtle variations that were always in movement. This movement, in turn, was rarely predictable. The camera setups were unusual, and the editing more intricate than TV schedules allow for. Someone was paying considerable attention to getting the show’s point across visually, using color to get the black-and-white effects of classic “film noir.”

Then there were the faces. On big and small screens, what we see these days are smooth and pretty visages devoid of the marks of experience--billboard faces mouthing the copycat vocabulary of behavior that telegraphs the intent of each scene with numbing regularity. Not on “The X-Files.” Its casting proves that there are still faces out there--young and old, rich in psychological depth, capable of tones of voice, flickers of expression and quirks of delivery--that add the kind of resonance to dialogue that used to be a matter of course in old movies. Virtually every actor, in every part, projects an air of intelligence. Of course, one doesn’t find such widespread smarts in “real life,” but this carefully designed show wasn’t pretending to be real life. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, these filmmakers were clearly interested in magnifying one spectrum of life and then viewing the world through that magnification. This used to be called style .

The leads, Duchovny and Anderson, are minimalist actors with attractive but distinctive looks, who usually speak softly and can make small variations in expression count for a great deal. They give the impression that they’re thinking much more than they’re saying--a touch that the old Hollywood stars knew how to make the most of, transforming many a silly script into a minor classic. The effect of the visuals and the acting that night was like listening to music where the words function as part of the sound and aren’t all that important in themselves.

I was, in short, hooked. Over the weeks, the craftsmanship that had first attracted me held up. The casting was nothing short of inspired. Whether the roles called for social workers of serial killers, abductees or vampires, necrophiliacs or small-town sheriffs, the actors looked right without looking like what you’d expect, and they played skillfully within the show’s necessarily ambiguous style. As “The X-Files” explored its menacing territory--that nether-world between “The Truth Is Out There” and “Trust No One”--I came to have increasing respect for its interplay between actors and writers. Sooner or later, all the continuing characters are given speeches that reveals their hearts; yet you don’t necessarily have to have seen any particular speech or know their backgrounds, because the acting contains subtleties that imply the content of the speeches.

But the pitfall of episodic TV is that, no matter what dangers are in the script, everyone knows that the stars will survive. “The X-Files” handles this unavoidable evasion cleverly, by making the danger to the stars psychological more than physical. The wear and tear shows over time. Duchovny’s Mulder, who believes in extranormal possibilities, has become increasingly frayed and desperate; Anderson’s Scully, a forensic doctor, becomes more and more at odds with her own certainties. Show by show, it seems that they are going slowly out of their minds--which, considering what they have to deal with every week, may be inevitable.

Their slowly changing characters help make up for the show’s inevitable ticks. (It is television, after all.) For instance, if the FBI’s X-Files--records of unexplained and unexplainable cases--are so dangerous to various all-powerful inter-government cabals, why not just destroy the files? Why leave them around for the likes of Mulder and Scully to investigate? Why would the government bury a boxcar of dead aliens in the New Mexico desert? Why not just burn them, if civilization as we know it would be transformed by the discovery? Why did it take 50 episodes for the cabals to realize that they’re going to have to kill Mulder, especially when they don’t mind killing anyone else? The flimsy excuse was that Mulder had friends in Congress. Can you imagine a congressperson standing in front of C-SPAN’s cameras and telling America that an FBI agent was killed because he had proof of extraterrestrials? (OK, maybe Newt would do it.) The gloves finally came off in the second season’s finale, when the cabal murders Mulder’s father and tries to kill Mulder himself.

If the FBI is such an untrustworthy organization, why do Mulder and Scully trust the security of their office computers? Since their homes, their offices and even their pens have been bugged, they should know that nothing is more easy to tap than a computer--unless it’s a cellular phone, and Mulder and Scully are constantly talking secrets on cellular phones. That kind of thing.

Why must Mulder and Scully enter a pitch-black room with flashlights and guns drawn in virtually every episode? (It’s such a signature gesture that it’s even in the title sequence.) And don’t Mulder and Scully ever get horny? If not for each other, then for someone. I mean, for a human being--because Mulder did have a brief (and unconsummated) crush on a vampire who ended up immolating herself, while Scully (in one of Anderson’s finest performances) was once possessed with the desire for an alien. True, we’ve all sometimes felt that our lovers are vampires or aliens. But, to put it in X-Files fashion, Sex Is Out There, along with the truth, and the reason these characters are getting so desperate may be that they’ve been forced to repress their drives for two years.

Then there’s the occasional unintentional hoot, my favorite being when Mulder corners the nameless but most powerful cabal operative, referred to as “Cancer Man” (because he always smokes). Cancer Man tells Mulder, “If people were to know what I know of the things I know, it would fall apart.”

Hasn’t anybody on the show noticed that it is all falling apart? That a show as fundamentally negative as “The X-Files” probably wouldn’t have an audience unless it spoke to the suspicions of many that society is at least a little shaky?

You can see that I was, and remain, hooked. But the hoot was finally on me when a friend told me that his exceptionally smart 13-year-old daughter, and all her dearest friends, were just as obsessive about “The X-Files” as I. When a reclusive, middle-aged, more-or-less intellectual gent like myself is sharing a Hollywood-manufactured fix with plugged-in 13-years-olds--well, that was it, I had to meet these people, both the creator and the kids.

*

Actor Doug Hutchison, who starred in the popular “Tooms” episode, refers to creator and executive producer Chris Carter simply as “God”--a fairly accurate description of how executive producers function on television. At 38, Carter is not quite middle-aged, even with his longish prematurely gray hair. He wears faded blue jeans, he’s charming, he smiles a lot, but just beneath that affability lurks the single-mindedness of a man at the height of his powers, a man who cares about nothing but his work and whose time has come. Such a time comes once if it comes at all, and Carter radiates that excitement, albeit under tight control.

In a bungalow at Twentieth Century Fox’s studio in Los Angeles, Carter and some of his crew were gathered around an editing console, fine-tuning “The Calusari” episode. “The way it works here,” he said, “the writers are also producers. So they do the editing.” Writers having a say in how a scene plays on the screen? In most Hollywood shoots, once a script is approved (much less shot), writers are kept at a distance, and it can even be hard to get a phone call returned by anyone in production. So the show’s greatest mystery, its consistent level of craftsmanship, was partly revealed: The people who cared most about the story were in on its depiction from beginning to end. Carter added: “Were all filmmakers. That’s what it ends up being.”

In the room with Carter were the episode’s writer, Sara Charno, editor Heather MacDougall, and two, sometimes three others. An orange-and-white cat had the run of the place as well. Carter’s crew were of his general mold, casual on the surface but tense underneath, intelligent, and looking just a little out of place in this bastion of Hollywood--as though they were still a bit surprised that the guards had let them through the studio gates.

But none of them, Carter especially, looked in the least bit tortured. You’d think that people whose job description is immersion in paranoid horror, constant dwelling on what Carter calls “extreme possibility,” and preoccupation with fear and betrayal, you’d think they’d at least be a little gaunt. Instead they were pleasant, affluent, healthy types, with no distinguishing ticks, who happened to be working up quite a bad dream: a woman realizing that one of her sons may have indeed killed the other as well as her husband and mother. “To show you how fast we work,” Carter said, “this show airs a week from Friday.” The editing wasn’t yet finished, and technical matters such as voice-overs and color conversion hadn’t even begun.

There was a lot of discussion about the exact moment that the mother has her realization. Was it in this frame, or was it several frames later, and when should they cut? People spoke freely, disagreed and agreed easily. They seemed to share an unspoken understanding of the program’s intent, and they spoke within that framework. Carter cautioned: “What you leave to the imagination is more frightening than what you show. Usually what’s most frightening is what you don’t see.”

Filmmaking is the art of dealing with crisis as much as operating a camera, and you never have to wait long for a crisis to emerge. Word came down that Linda Shima-Tsuno of Standards and Practices was on her way, and she had a strong objection to one scene.

“Standards and Practices” is the innocuous title given to the studio’s censors, the people whose job it is to keep filmmakers from going over the vague line of what may be too violent and sexy in this violence- and sex-driven medium. In “The Calusari,” a devil-manipulated accident results in a father being hung by his own necktie in front of his son. The son’s horror and the father’s agony are shocking--as they should be, if the scene is to be in there at all. There isn’t really a “light” way to do patricide.

Shima-Tsuno understood that, of course, but she thought the shock was still too much. The mood of the editing room became one of polite tension. Nobody wanted to fight. Everybody wanted to win.

“How short can you make that?” she asked pleasantly. “Can you make it shorter than that?”

“But it takes the drama out of it,” Carter replied, equally pleasantly. “It would be a bad cut, honestly.”

“Would you go for a blink of a shot?”

“I think it is a blink of a shot.’

“Do we have to see the father twist ?”

Shima-Tsuno was not out “to get” anyone. She behaved like a co-worker instead of the voice of authority. Still smiling, Carter held his ground. Shima-Tsuno suggested darkening the shot a little to mute its effect. Carter allowed that might be a solution.

“Oh, you know what, Chris? How about this? If we get complaints, then for rerun purposes we’ll cut it.” Carter agreed. Shima-Tsuno turned to Sara Charno and smiled. “He’s so charming, you know.”

Carter returned the compliment, “She’s very reasonable.”

Nobody had fought. Somebody had won.

The next business of the day was a story-conference about the season finale. A good story-conference is never dramatic. There’s a lot of silence, a lot of staring at walls and feet, because everyone’s there to think, and thinking looks dull. What they’re building up to in the next season is that our government and the extraterrestrials have been engaged in joint genetic experiments on both the innocent and not-so-innocent. Carter is playing with the paranoid notion that, in 1948, all who’ve received a smallpox vaccination have information encoded into the scar, and thus have been programmed. That, presumably is the reason (or metaphor, if you like) for the great social disruptions of the last several decades. But the point, Carter says, is to make the fear not so much physical as mental. “I’m not so much of a science-fiction fan myself,” he says. “I’m more interested in the psychological element.”

What was most interesting during the conference was Carter’s insistence on keeping a balance between clarity and ambiguity. “Plot is so important,” he emphasizes, “but it shouldn’t be so literal that it’s laid out completely.” In most feature films and television, the plots are so obvious, especially by the end, that there’s no room for a viewer’s imagination. Carter’s flirtation with the intentionally vague is what sets “The X-Files” apart. This explains its audience’s obsessive involvement with the program. Viewers fill in the vagueness with their own imaginations and thus becomes sort of co-writers of the show.

Craft is not an accident. It allows no shortcuts and tolerates little insincerity. These people had found techniques to bypass many of television’s most severe constrictions, but have they painted themselves into a corner? Like agents Mulder and Scully, will they be overpowered by the logic of their quest, ultimately forced to reveal so much that the clarity itself becomes boring? Questions are usually juicier than answers in this realm. Their work can only become harder.

*

Carter’s attention to detail is matched, perhaps even surpassed, by many of his viewers--especially by the three 13-year-olds with whom I spent an afternoon eating pizza and having our own “X-Files” festival. They knew, for instance, that when Scully’s digital clock reads 11:21, as it does on more than one show, it’s a tribute to Carter’s wife: her birthday is Nov. 21. They knew literally dozens of things like that, plucked from computer bulletin boards. Yet they didn’t have the air of obsessed creatures. They were having fun, and for them, “fun” included the play of their minds. Period.

It’s worth adding that these young people did not fit the stereotypes you see and read about kids--especially the film “Kids.” They were polite, funny, smart, cheeky, and decidedly unravaged. I have no doubt that, being human, they are as troubled and mysterious as the rest of us, but they did sports, got decent marks in school, and had good vocabularies. I suspect that there are lots of them out there; they just don’t make for titillating news. But they do watch “The X-Files.”

“ ‘The X-Files’ makes you think,” one said.

“There’s lots of elements that make it appealing. The characters, the paranormal, the darkness of it, the non-concluding--that gets you to think,” another added. “If you watch ‘90210,’ you don’t have to think about anything.”

“They aren’t happy characters--they’re flawed.”

“When everybody’s happy,” still another chimed in, “you know something’s wrong.”

“And like in real life, people change. Mulder’s changed.”

“He’s become a lot more serious. He’s been hurt.”

Did they believe what the program is saying about the world?

“They’re the extreme,” one said. “We’re more in the middle.”

“I don’t think the government’s covering up every little thing.”

“Yeah, you know that in real life it doesn’t go that far.”

“But the war isn’t between countries anymore, it is between who controls the information. That’s what the show’s about.”

Oh.

This dark, brooding, paranoid program, a show with lots of gore but no sex, often scary and unrelievedly bleak--for me, it tends to reflect my state of mind (at least, my state of mind on solitary Friday nights), but for these fans, it seems to appeal to something far more positive in their makeup. They enjoy the psychological reality of the characters. They like not being lied to about happy endings. They don’t believe that it describes their world, but they relate to how to deal with one of our basic conflicts, the issue of “who controls the information.” They dig its intelligence, both viscerally and philosophically. They like both the gossip and the intellectual play of the computer bulletin boards. For them it is not passive entertainment at all but rather a fairly high level of fun. So the fundamental mystery of “The X-Files” may be that, as dark as it is, it’s often received with light. Now that’s fun.

*

“I hope you’ll all join me in a warm ‘X-Files’ welcome.”

A what?

The First Official “X-Files” Convention was held in San Diego last June and featured a vampirologist (to whom we were asked to give that warm “X-Files” welcome), a psychic, a couple of actors (Brad Dourif and Doug Hutchison), the publisher of UFO Magazine, a representative of Delphi Information Systems (an on-line service), “X-Files” writer Frank Spotnitz, and Chris Carter himself. There was a display of props and costumes actually used on the program. In addition, posters, caps, T-shirts, novelizations, cups and hot-dogs were sold--lots of them. It’s things like this that make you want to shoot your television.

On the other hand, such a convention is one of the few venues where people can meet television’s perpetrators, and where the perps can look into the eyes that look into the TV. Most of the fans were between 12 and 25, but there were some representatives of every age group, even a few retirees. These fans went against all cliches both about the passivity of television and the passivity of fans. They were boisterous, they were funny, they held no one in reverence (from Carter on down), and they let it be known that they think that “The X-Files” is their show, not the studio’s, not even Carter’s.

Contrary to what Hollywood thinks about what audiences want, this audience had no use for sex, at least when it comes to “The X-Files.” On no subject were they more vocal. When a fan asked Frank Spotnitz when Mulder and Scully would fall in love, a pack of teen-age boys behind me shouted, “Boo! Boo! No way! Don’t ruin our show, man!” Later Chris Carter was asked the same question and the whole crowd moaned, “Noooooooooooo.” Carter calmed them down with his opinion that “the most interesting relationships between men and women, anyway, are intellectual, cerebral and platonic.” (A fascinating thing to say when your wife is in the audience.) To sit in the midst of a crowd that doesn’t want its favorite fictional people to have a sexual life, is to wonder whether, to put it in “X-Files” style, Something Is Changing Out There.

Carter gave his by-now stock answer about his stance toward the show. “I’ve described myself as a non-religious person looking for a religious experience. I’m desperate for the experience.” He had told me at the studio that this was Mulder’s preoccupation, too. But the demand he puts on his work has to do primarily with fear. He told this crowd: “The show has to be scary first and foremost. In my mind, if the show isn’t scary it isn’t successful.”

Well, Carter is certainly not the first to associate religious feeling with fear. Some religions consider the fear of God a central element of faith, and in the Bible, when an angel appears, the first response is often to run for cover. Nor is Carter the first to associate UFOs with religious longing; that was psychologist Carl Jung’s explanation of UFO sightings. And stirring religious longing and fear into a paranoid brew would go far in explaining the aversion to sex of the show’s characters as well as its audience. Carter told the crowd, “Mulder is a monk,” and they cheered.

“Why do you want to scare people?” I asked Carter later.

“It’s better than making em’ cry,” was all he’d answer.

When I asked Dori Pierson, his wife, she smiled and said: “Latent hostility?”

*

Frankly, it was good to get all this investigating over with, so I could get back to my program on Friday nights--my own personal “X-Files,” to my own relationship in my own imagination with the finely crafted artifact that shows up on my own TV. The two reruns I watched cleansed me of the bla-bla and hoopla one inevitably encounters when writing about anything for the media.

The first was the particularly chilling “Irresistible,” about a serial death-fetishist who kills women so that he can collect their hair and nails. He captures Scully, and in the moments when he’s getting ready to kill her, we see him from her point of view. His face changes from alien to Manson-like to animal--many faces and shapes that flashed far quicker than it takes to tell. The moment is never explained, but, viscerally, one sees briefly into the heart of evil: that awful place in the psyche where all fear swirls. It was a good reminder that nothing is explainable, not really, not when you stare straight into a face.

The second was a show called “One Breath,” and in it Mitch Pileggi, who plays Mulder and Scully’s FBI boss, got to say the one speech that expresses why “The X-Files” is so welcomed by some of us. For we live in a country obsessed with safety, a country that seems to have forgotten that there’s never enough police, never enough money, never enough armaments and never enough insurance, to make the flux of life predictable and secure. He says simply: “Every life . . . every day . . . is in danger. That’s just life.”

That’s our real fear, and why shouldn’t it be? But scary as it is, it was refreshing, even exhilarating, to have that truth said plainly and forthrightly in a medium that usually lives on lies. . . .then one morning I’m crossing the street, and I see a billboard on a bus. It’s Scully and Mulder. “Working for the government is cool,” it announces. “Cool like us.” Nothing like a bracing dose of hypocrisy to start the day.