The X-Files 20th Anniversary Blogging: "Folie a Deux" (May 10, 1998)

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 21^st 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”