Media

...Would I he to you9 Come on, some of you have even learned to like "NYPD Blue " This fall, watch "The X-Files " FRANK McCONNELL 17...

...It's when— remember when you were six7—you had to, but didn't want to, peek over the edge of the blanket And that moment before you did peek: that's the moment of horror The Truth Is Out There...

...But I am by now tired of refuting the Cromwelhans they never, bless their pointy little heads, listen anyway The mass-cult imagination, as history teaches us, is a much more fertile soil for art than the hydroponic gardens of "refined" taste And the good folks at Fox—as shamelessly and exuberantly profit-driven and pandenng as Shakespeare, Mozart, or Balanchine—have, in a few short years, raised the medium to a level of vulgarity and magnificence, stupidity and perspicuity, that it never enjoyed during the long domination of the three big, over-theair networks It was the cable revolution that made the upstart Fox thinkable, because the advent of cable broke the stranglehold of ABC, CBS, and NBC on the available transmission-bands You can analogize this change to the wedding, in the early nineteenth century, of the pnnting press and the steam engine suddenly everybody could publish books in great quantities, and that popcult monster, the Victonan novel, was born Now there are Chnstian channels, occult channels, gay channels, anti-gay (morose9) channels, cooking channels, undso wetter...

...They are all simply—in the phrase of that brilliant man, Neil Gaiman— "machines for telling stones...

...The network that gave us "In Living Color" has to spend some time in Dante's Purgatory...

...By and large, Fox didn't do more "Charlie's Angels" or more variations on "Drff rent Strokes": they did counterprogramming, betting imaginatively on the imagination of the American viewer...

...Science fiction, sure, the grotesque, as in "Twilight Zone," of course...

...Formulaic'' Right, like about 90 percent of all the stories we' ve ever bothered to enjoy At one level, "X-Files" has all the subtlety of those headlines in the tabloids ("Aliens Clone Hitler's Child'") that you wish—confess, now—you could peruse in full, if only the guy ahead of you had fourteen more frozen dinners to check out At another level, though, it draws upon what Harold Bloom used to call our debased, but still authentic, yearning for the sublime, our sense that even absurdities like sentient octopi from Planet Zord or three-headed, telepathic calves are somehow, though false, more real than the mundane, infinitely recurative commonplaces of "The World According to Benjamin Franklin " For these things are of what the Middle Ages called, beautifully, faerie- not "fairyland" in the cuddly Disneyesque sense, but the truly and fearfully strange, out of which gods and demons—and humanity—are born For its first season, at least, "X-Files" proved last year to be one of the very closest approaches TV has made to the shiver of confronting/aene...

...But as that major aesthetician Mel Brooks says, "Listen...

...At each stage of complexityof-production, though, the machine demands more elaborate maintenance...

...That legend appears at the beginning of every "X-Files," and its promise-threat is just the stuff of the blanket-moment...

...TV, as its most Cromwellian cntics never tire to tell us, is debased, popular entertainment out to make the fastest possible buck by pandering to the most vulgar possible mass tastes...

...the pacing was brilliant, and the camera work, virtually without distracting special effects, was as good as—and derivative from—the best work of Spielberg (Close Encounters) or John Carpenter (Halloween) But the stunning goodness of the show was in the onginal concept of executive producer Chns Carter The ghost-hunter in "X-Files" is not the occult Dr Van Helsing-type of the Dracula myth, but the squeaky-clean Agent Mulder of the computer-dominated FBI It's impossible, for me at least, not to read Mulder's position as a parable about Religious Man in the Age of Perfect Information For all the transformation of the world into pure data, Mulder still feels the terror and allure of the world as Mystery, a visionary trapped in the infonet...

...MEDIA GO AHEAD, TAKE A PEEK FOX'S 'X-FILES' Let us now praise the Fox Network...

...and the gnarly/violent, 01 vey' But not horror...

...F.B I. Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny)— yes, dammit, the first name is a dumb pun—is obsessed with the fact that his sister, when they were both children, was abducted by a UFO To the dismay of his superiors in the Bureau, he spends most of his time running down cases of the extrater16 restnal, the paranormal, or the unnatural that the Bureau itself has junked under the presumably lunatic category of the "X" Files...

...He has been assigned an assistant, Agent Dana Sculley (Gillian Anderson), a good hard-headed skeptic, whose job is as much to ride herd on Mulder's perceived dottiness as actually help him...

...with Children" has got to send at least somebody to his Inferno (Eighth Circle, I figure—the Fraudulent and Malicious...

...The same charge of whoredom has been brought, at vanous times, against the Hollywood film, the Victonan novel, and Elizabethan drama...

...My own fantasy is a TV-Anon channel twenty-four hours of white noise 15 for viewers in withdrawal—maybe with New Age music on the soundtrack) But if the technology made Fox possible, it was only genius that could make it actual...

...Here's the setup...

...Art has nothing to do with good taste" (the man who wrote both the sublime Lear and the godawful Timon of Athens would have agreed...

...UFOs, demonic possession, gender-switching alien invaders—each week Mulder attempts to track down another eruption of the uncanny, and each week, naturally, the sensible Sculley insists to him that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the events he thinks so ominous—until, again naturally, the last ten minutes, when the uncanny is shown to be there...

...Because TV wants to show you things, and real horror, as Poe knew and Chve Barker knows, is not what you see but what you're afraid you might have to see in a minute...

...and the one that gave us "Married...

...I've said before that the novel is a wnter's medium, film a director's medium, and TV a producer's medium...

...so we think of Dickens's novels, Hitchcock's films, and Bochco's series Given the cable revolution, Fox trusted the innate kinhness of mass-cult taste, while the Big Three continued to bank on its glacial conservatism (It's happened before in 1954 RCA bought Elvis from Sun Records and changed history...

...And they won Not that this is a deification of Fox...

...And here's why...

...The dialogue was crisp and wryly literate...

...And Sculley, the careerist/rationalist, finds herself increasingly drawn into Mulder's universe By season's end, Sculley had joined Mulder in his sense that "The Truth Is Out There"—at the nsk of both their careers in the Bureau The second season, which begins later this month, will be fascinating to watch, just to see if the show can maintain its very wise balance between the mundane and the uncanny I hope it will, because this is some of the very best storytelling on the Tube these days...

...The imaginative failure is mine, not the show's And then there is—there are7—"The X-Files," and that's mainly what I wanted to talk to you about TV, let's face facts, has never done horror very well...

...Who else but the folks with guts enough to roll the dice on "Married" would also have the guts to roll them on "The Simpsons," "The Adventures of Bnscoe County, Jr.," or on buying up the nghts to HBO's wonderfully grand-guignol "Tales from the Crypt"7 And then, of course, there's "Beverly Hills 90210," or, as I think of it, "Gidget Gets an Abortion " Uptight exiled-to-California Chicagoan that I am, I just can't watch it for a whole episode But neither can I deny that it's brilliant and honest and—a word that for me carries a truckload of admiration—charitable...