I
often explicitly compare The X-Files (1993 – 2002) to Star
Trek (1966 – 1969) and note that, culturally-speaking, Chris Carter’s TV
series is to the 1990s what Gene Roddenberry’s series was to the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
Part
of that equation involves the story
underneath the story. Both series
actually serve as vehicles for social commentary, and tell stories about the
culture which made them.
Vince
Gilligan’s “Folie a Deux” is a brilliant example of The X-Files’ propensity
to depict tales that are wholly satisfying as a pure entertainment and -- on
another level entirely -- react to and discuss some issue or idea roiling the
culture.
Specifically,
“Folie a Deux” concerns workplace violence and, for lack of a better term, “the cubicle culture” of the nineties.
There,
in the same world treated comically by Office Space (1999), workers are mere
anonymous cogs in a machine, meant to mindlessly sell, sell, sell,
nine-to-five, and to do so cheerily,
despite the underwhelming nature of the product, or the sheer de-humanizing
nature of the work. For some people,
this crushing routine is too much to bear, hence the outbreaks of workplace
violence.
In
the tradition of many a fine horror tale then, The X-Files imagines that
this real-life working nightmare boasts a dark, monstrous, supernatural secret….a creature that hides in plain view, and that
only a few can detect or see.
Mulder
(David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are sent to handle a potential
workplace violence incident and deliver a “threat assessment” at a
telemarketing center for Vinyl Right in Oak Brook, Illinois.
In
particular, one employee, Gary Lambert (Brian Markinson) believes that his
boss, Mr. Pincus (John Apicella) is a monster who “hides in the light,” and is
somehow transforming his fellow telemarketers into mindless zombies.
Lambert
takes over the telemarketing center and holds his fellow employees hostage,
until the F.B.I -- over Mulder and Scully’s objections -- takes violent
action. After Lambert is killed, Mulder
begins to see Mr. Pincus as he really is: a horrible, insect-like creature that
can skitter across the ceiling, climb walls, and turn the living into the
compliant dead.
When
Mulder breaks into the home of a Vinyl Right employee to rescue her from
Pincus, the agent is called on the carpet by Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) and
hospitalized for exhaustion.
But
the monster tracks Mulder there, leaving only Scully to determine if her
partner is telling the truth, or dangerously delusional...
“Folie
a Deux” makes a very clear point. Too much time spent working in a
tele-marketing cubicle and the worker becomes a drone who mindlessly and
lifelessly obeys the mind-numbing establishment.
Or,
contrarily, that worker goes crazy…
The
episode suggests these facts of life in two ways. First, it does so by charting
the endless, indistinguishable geography of the call center.
And
secondly, “Folie a Deux” makes it case about dehumanizing jobs through the
overt act of a “boss” who literally turns workers into zombies.
In
the first case, director Kim Manners’ camera probes restlessly through the
Illinois telemarketing center, sometimes from an extreme high-angle. These shots accent the maze-like, anonymous,
sealed-off world of telemarketing, and the point-of-view suggests entrapment
and doom. Each cubicle is a mini-world
just like the one next to it, and just like the one on the other side. These boxes might as well be jail cells as
work spaces.
Thematically,
the episode supports this interpretation of the telemarketing world. Telemarketers read a script about an unromantic product (vinyl siding) again and again, without real feeling, but with the simulation of real feeling. The impression given is of a most peculiar
brand of Hell; one where the seller is just as miserable to be placing the call
– and making the hard sell -- as the
customer is to be receiving the call.
“Folie
a Deux” is so clever, too, because of its fresh interpretation of zombie lore.
Before
George Romero revolutionized the concept of zombies for Night of the Living Dead
(1968), the monster had mythological roots in Africa and Haiti. A zombie was,
in that milieu, a corpse raised from the dead by a sorcerer or puppet master. Controlled by the master, a zombie was a creature
without any will of his or her own. The
zombie master, the sorcerer, or bokor
was thus a critical part of the equation.
The zombie could not do monstrous things unless directed to do so. Early films such as White Zombie (1932)
adhere to this concept of zombie and zombie master.
Vince
Gilligan’s “Folie a Deux” revives and re-interprets this original version of the
zombie myth, and transforms the sorcerer or bokor into a middle-manager or company
bureaucrat. Mr. Pincus transforms his
employees into zombies who do his bidding.
Pretty
clearly, “Folie a Deux” suggests a more-or-less direct line between the sorcerers
of zombie folk lore and 1990s bosses at call-centers. Both -- in the words of “Folie a Deux” -- “want to take away who we are.” Individuality is replaced with servitude,
with an adherence to an agenda not of the zombie’s/worker’s making. In obeying their masters, both types of
zombies might also be said to have had “the
humanity sucked out of them.”
Anyone
who has worked a mindless job like the one at Vinyl Right -- as I did during my
stint as a temp in the 1990s -- knows how it feels to be a drone for eight
hours. So The X-Files is caustic,
funny and even a little brutal in its description of such workers as mindless
zombies, and at one point the teleplay even notes “these people were dead before they were gunned down.” Indeed, sometimes it felt that way.
“Folie
a Deux” also proposes the idea that workplace shootings are, perhaps, a natural
response to the monster overlords, and to the zombie-making process itself.
The
term “workplace violence” actually came into being after several post-office
shootings in the late 1980s. In the
1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice declared that the work place was the “most dangerous” location in America, and
so this X-Files episode is clearly timely in presentation.
In
the 1990s, writes Dr. James Madero in Workplace
Violence in the 21st Century, Emerging Trends, “several well-known companies and
organizations experienced incidence of workplace violence involving many
homicides” and he listed Ford Motor Company among them. Again, that 1990s context is critical to an
understanding of “Folie a Deux.” The episode
gazes at a real-life problem and then spins an imaginative, horror-themed web
around it, one that takes into account the nature of the contemporary work
place.
In
terms of Mulder and Scully, “Folie a Deux” is an important episode in the canon,
because Mulder takes a step toward regaining his “belief” in the paranormal,
albeit an unwitting one.
Similarly,
Scully demonstrates here her total support of and loyalty for Mulder. She may write off the Pincus monster as a “folie
a deux” -- a “delusion shared by two”--
but she acts in a way that validates Mulder’s belief system, and that also happens
to save his life.
In two weeks: “Drive”
All that, plus it's actually scary in a way that few episodes are. Partly because of the way that it exposes Mulder's vulnerability in having one foot in each of the the material & daimonic worlds. Partly because the foe and it's ways are legitimately terrifying.
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