The X-Files 20th Anniversary Blogging: "Arcadia" (March 5, 1999)

One of the qualities that I admire most about The X-Files (1993 – 2002) is its willingness -- even eagerness at times -- to offer full-throated critiques of the culture from which the series arose.  Case in point is “Arcadia,” an episode in which Scully and Mulder encounter the monstrous terrors of…an upscale planned community in California. 

In that community -- the Falls at Arcadia -- the agents run smack up against forced conformity, public shaming, intolerance, and the kind of despotism or tyranny usually reserved for fictional third world countries in Mission Impossible episodes of the 1970s.

Yet, importantly this view of life inside a planned community in “Arcadia” never seems over-the-top, or unrealistic in the slightest.  Indeed, if you’ve been a homeowner in such a community for any length of time, you’ll probably recognize many key aspects of the episode’s narrative.  The episode is caustic, absolutely, but appropriately caustic in my experience.

Specifically, “Arcadia” concerns a monster that enforces the rules of the planned community in question, but the episode works brilliantly on two separate and distinct humorous fronts outside the horror veneer. 

On the first front, we get the critique of modern life in affluent America, where we willingly trade our freedom to live in a neighborhood alongside the “right” people.

On the second front, we see Mulder and Scully go “undercover” behind the very institution of marriage, and the episode -- by Daniel Aarkin -- is just as sharp and wicked about its observations of that institution. 

While undercover on a case, Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) pose as a newlywed couple, Rob and Laura Petrie so as to gain access to the Falls at Arcadia, a restrictive planned community in California.

There, residents who have disobeyed the rigid community covenants, contracts, and restrictions have a bad habit of disappearing without a trace   As Mulder and Scully soon learn, the Falls is policed by a strange and draconian sentry, a Tibetan “thought” creature bought to life from homeowner president Gogolok’s (Peter White) mind.  The creature is composed of mud and other detritus of modern life, because the planned community is erected over an old landfill.

When Mulder determinedly flaunts the community’s rules and digs up his front yard for a “reflecting pool,” the creature re-appears, with the misbehaving agent as his latest target.

In some ways, “Arcadia” is the rightful heir to the famous The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964) episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” That segment of the classic Rod Serling anthology diagrammed how easily fear could take hold of suburbia and transform neighbors and friends into monsters, into a mob. 

Made thirty-something years later, “Arcadia” picks up that conceit and reveals how some modern neighborhoods are constructed not upon friendship or fellowship, but much darker human instincts: on the need of some affluent families to be viewed as the “best” or as “exclusive,” and on the need of the wealthy to control their peers, and determine for the community some bogus set of “standards.”  

Yet, that image of being good or beautiful is a superficial one, as “Arcadia” cannily suggests.  It’s a charade, or even a delusion.  The people at Arcadia are (mostly) monstrous individuals, not paragons of beauty and virtue.  This idea is reflected in the landscape of the real estate development.  Beautiful homes are literally built upon…garbage.

“Arcadia” also does a terrific job of mocking the ubiquitous “keeping up with the Jones”-syndrome by extending it to bizarre and extreme lengths. 

That idea takes powerful voice here in the form of neighbors that think they can be the best of the best only by informing on those who live around them. If they inform on their neighbors about every infraction -- if they have Gogolok’s ear -- they will become the princes and princesses of Arcadia.  What their informing really represents, however, is murder. Those who are known to have disobeyed a rule -- or even suffer a broken bulb on a street lamp -- are murdered by the dark sentry. 

So, would you kill your neighbor to get your neighbor’s seat on the homeowner’s committee?

A more pertinent question perhaps is this one: is it worth it to live in the “right” neighborhood with the “right” people, even if you have no freedom to express your individuality, even if your very life is in danger? 

The satire comes to the forefront in this episode right from the title “Arcadia.”  In Ancient Greece, Arcadia was a place renowned for a simple, pastoral “innocence” and its highly-contented individuals.  And “The Falls in Arcadia” in no way fits that definition. This Arcadia is about corruption and surfaces, about the avaricious and social climbers.

Of course, the irony in all this is that to be a homeowner in such places you must also willingly pay dues to the very organization that is hassling you to live in a certain way.  So you pay for the privilege -- in places like “The Falls” -- to be bullied and to conform to some outside, arbitrary aesthetic of beauty.

This episode of The X-Files absolutely nails this very un-American aspect of American life. “Arcadia” captures the idea that your home isn’t really your castle, and that your personal freedom is applicable only so far as the CC&Rs are concerned.  Who knew that picking a certain piece of real estate would mean abdicating so much liberty?

“Arcadia” is widely-loved by X-Files fans not for the really sharp commentary on planned communities, but for the scenes of Scully and Mulder “playing house” together.  These scenes are indeed delightful, and quite funny.   Mulder and Scully may be kindred spirits in that they are both smart, but in terms of living together, they are absolute opposites. Mulder is a slob drinking orange juice out of a carton and leaving the toilet seat up.  And Scully gives a (randy…) Mulder the surprise of his life by emerging from the bathroom for the night wearing bright green lotion over her skin.  Yikes!

There’s the romance of marriage in a nutshell, “Arcadia” seems to suggest.

The image of a perfect married life, -- of “Rob and Laura Petrie” (from The Dick Van Dyke Show) -- is just that, an image.  It is a façade every bit much as the Falls at Arcadia is a façade, a “beautiful” community that is actually built on garbage.  I’ve been happily married for nearly twenty years at this point, and I don’t view this episode as a critique of marriage so much as it is a critique of the way marriage is presented in our popular culture, or at least the way it was presented for decades.

People just don’t live perfect lives in perfect homes, and everything isn’t beautiful and perfect all the time.  Life gets in, and makes a mess.  I love that The X-Files is able to express that idea here.  It goes a step further critiquing Martha Stewart’s America in a season seven entry, titled “Chimera.”  The difference in episodes is that “Arcadia” makes the case largely through comedy, whereas “Chimera” is more straight-forward.

Next Tuesday (Christmas Eve): “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.”