Document 6511870

RhondaV. Wilcox
The X-Files and Ingestion:
Or, How to Become
Vegetarian in Twelve Easy Episodes
Charles Dickens' "excremental vision," according to Michael Steig,
embodies the moral and physical filth of the surrounding Victorian world. In
the twentieth-century television series The X-Files, we eat that filth. Dickens
metaphorically represents "the psychological and physical consequences of
industrial progress" (Steig 348) as a constipation of the system which must
be purged. But in the modern world of The X-Files, filth may enter into our
bodies and become part of us at the cellular level. Throughout the series, the
perversion of ingestion is a repeated trope. FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox
Mulder investigate and sometimes are themselves implicated in the ingestion.
From the Ralph Nader Center books Sowing the t4rind (Wellford) and
The Chemical Feast (Turner) in the seventies to Robin Mather's A Garden
of Unearthly Delights in the nineties, Americans have been concerned about
the contamination of their food. While Upton Sinclair's The Jungle vividly
presented earlier adulteration of the food supply, these latter publications
focus on a peculiarly modern concern: the contamination that comes from
chemicals-in effect, from science. Thus they also focus on a contamination caused not simply by nature but by civilization, and the power structures that support rt. Sowing the Wind discusses pesticides, chemical additives, and antibiotics; by 1995 A Garden of Unearthly Delights was discussing bovine groMh hormone (recombinant bovine somatotropin/recombinant
bovine growth hormone: rBST/rBGH). The x-Files episodes which deal with
such subjects thus reflect the audience's literal concern with its physical
environment. However, the causes for that concern are embedded in a social
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moment of satisfaction-and any moment of physical satisfaction is rare in
The x-Files (wilcox). Pleasurable though the moment in the red ribs restaurant seems to be, it is soon to be undercut by information about the tainted
beef which Scully, at least, has eaten.
Viewers of the episode would also be seeing the restaurant scene in the
context of earlier vivid images. The episode opens with close-ups from above
of dirty, mottled cows entering a slaughter-house. Then we are treated to a
view of hanging slabs of beef, the physical reality of which is in no way
muted by the television camera. Finally we follow home a woman worker
from the slaughterhouse who feels she must shower, and orders apizzawith
"no pepperoni for ps"-ns meat. All this appears before Agent Scully enjoys her ribs and subsequently learns of the bovine growth hormone.
The woman worker who has tried to wash away the residue of the slaughterhouse is Beth Kane (Cain?), mother of the soon-to-be-abducted teen. She
is also unknowingly and unintentionally involved in another sort of filth: her
landlord, Gerd rhomas, has been semetly videotaping her and her children
in their bathroom: we see the voyeur watching her through the bathroom
mirror. His fondness for the children of the town, however unhealthy, has
Ied him to abduct them and mark them-not in order to harm them, but to
identify them as subjects of an experiment. He has learned that the so-called
"vitamin injections" a local doctor has been giving many of the area's youth
are in fact the same inoculant given to the cows. Though young Gary Kane
has "never been sick a day in his life," the injections are not completely
beneficial: like the old farmer, Gerd Thomas believes these injections to
have altered the young people's behavior, leading to violence. Through the
doctor's injections, they have in effect ingested evil.
But the outside evil has entered even more deeply into their natures.
Michael Steig explains that many "documents of the Mid-victorian period
corroborate the pervasiveness of shit in the smell, sight, and feel of life in
English cities" (349). But in the modern world we are aware of the possibility of contamination at the microscopic level. Through analysis of a vial of
the supposed vitamins, Scully discovers that the injections contain "antibodies derived from what mayhave been an extraterrestrial source." Mulder
says it more bluntly: "He's been injecting these kids with alien DNA,,"Purity Control," as it has been termed in an earlier episode ("The Erlenmeyer Flask"). In fact, the young people have been made impure, and are only
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instituted cannibalism in his town of Dudley with the apparent result that
town members live exceptionally long, youthful lives and are tightly bound
to each other to maintain the secret. Mary Alice Money has identified "Our
Town" as one of a series of episodes which inverts the pattern of the small
town as center of virtues; the episodes critique the stereotype, presenting
instead a sort of Anti-Mayberry. I would like to argue that this episode implies an even broader criticism of the system surrounding the capitalist work
ethic. In the episode's first scenes with Scully and Mulder at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., Mulder has mentioned Chaco Chicken in a way
that makes clear that this is a nationally known operation. In Dudley itself,
the images associated with Chaco Chicken strongly allude to one of our
cultural icons: the red-striped buckets recall the containers for Kentucky
Fried Chicken, and the advertisement line-drawing of Walter Chaco, a smiling elderly man with facial hair, recalls Colonel Sanders. Hence Chaco
Chicken is a nationwide phenomenon as well as the product of a small town.
Chaco is also connected to the dominant historical social structure through
his large, white-columned southern home and the African-American serving woman he employs. Sowing the Wind quotes Alabama contract farmer
Crawford Smith as saying, "Us folks in the chicken business are the only
slaves left inthis country" (Wellford 101); andthe country at large was recently reminded of the working conditions at chicken plants after a tragic
North Carolina fire. Furthermore, Dudley is presented as a company town,
as dominated by the main local industry as any textile town or coal-mining
village. "Our Town" is part of a large American pattern.
But that large system purports to carry out its work best through small
town values. The very title of the episode, with its allusion to Thornton
Wilder's play, announces this theme. And Walter Chaco is unquestionably a
patriarch in the religion of hard work and community values. The whole
town reports its doings to him, and takes its "faith" from his worldly success
in elevating Dudley from "a patch of dirt" to a thriving town. As Professor
iVlone,v has pointed out, when the town members gather around a bonfire to
share bowls of a stew made from the latest victim,they are participating in a
ritual communion. Money also argues that the dpisode's locale, Seth County,
alludes to the Egyptian Osiris-Isis-Set (Seth) story of destruction and rebirth
(lsis reassembles Osiris's bones after Seth destroys him). But a biblical allusion may also be identified. For while the beef-eating episode centered on a
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seeing George's head on the spike that normally holds a headless chicken
body; she attacks the plant manager and is shot by the local sheriff. In a very
suggestive image, she lands face down in the chicken mash and slowly sinks.
It is soon revealed that she is the grand-daughter of Walter Chaco, a part of
the tightly connected system. In the last moments of the episode, while
Scully's voiceover intones that "As of this date, [Walter Chaco's] remains
have yet to be found," the visual shows a worker finding and discarding a
clump of gray human hair in the chicken mash. As a result of Scully and
Mulder's investigation, the plant is being closed; but who knows how many
times this scene may have been repeated in the past? Those who participate
in the patriarchal capitalistic faith may believe that they can distinguish between people who are virtuous and people who are outsiders; but how easy
is it to move from one category to another? Just as the chicken feed is enriched by dead chicken parts, it is also enriched by human offal-so all
those who eat Chaco Chicken participate in the horrid consumption. In the
interdependent web of the harsh modern world, we may be eating each other
unawares.
And it is difficult to know our point on the food chain. In the episode
titled "Squeeze," the horror that humanity can become is represented by a
mutated human who maintains an extraordinarily long life span by eating
human livers. While Walter Chaco, who ate the communicants' stew, looked
sixty at age ninety-three, the mutant Eugene Victor Tooms looks thirty although he is over one hundred. (Sowing the Wind notes food additives' "potential impact on the incidence of birth defects . . . and mutations" (188).)
The liver, of course, does the work of cleansing the body, but itself collects
impurity. The liver-eater is perhaps the most unclean beast in the X-Files
collection, the extreme version of the beef-eater or the chicken-eater.
Once again, however, the episode sets the eating pattern in a larger
social context. The episode opens with a shot of a middle-aged businessman
emerging from a restaurant called "1066." For him, indeed, the restaurant
was a battlefield: he has had a dinner business meeting, and he goes to his
office and calls his wife to tell her that it has not gone well. Things are about
to go much worse, however: the businessman is attacked by the liver-eater,
who-in a scene revealed only indirectly, through reflections in the shiny
possessions on the man's desk-spatters his blood on his business papers.
The episode's second scene, after the opening credits, is another restaurant
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than Colton that Eugene victor Tooms is caught. Tooms takes trophies of
his victims, and as Scully and Mulder investigate his residence, Tooms, unobserved by the detectives, manages to lift a necklace from Scully. This
necklace has been called to viewers' attention in an earlier scene when Mulder
fingers it after Scully suggests that he has been acting "territorial" in regard
to her willingness to work with Colton. The underlying anthropological patterns are rarely far to seek in The X-Files, and Mulder admits to the territoriality. But he rises above it-above animality-to tell Scully he won't hold
it against her if she decides to work with Colton's team; and it is at this point
that Scully decides to stay with Mulder. Later, when Mulder revisits Tooms'
s home after learning that Colton has called off surveillance, Mulder spots
the necklace which had been highlighted in the territoriality scene and rushes
to Scully's place just in time to help her subdue the liver-eater, who has
actually bared Scully's belly to feed off her. Mulder attaches handcuffs to
Tooms's wrist, and Scully attaches the other side of the handcuffs to the
bathtub. Thus these two agents who are willing to stand apart from the food
chain of power lunches and dog-eat-dog business are the ones who finally
subdue the beast.
In fact, the bestial Eugene Victor Tooms is the ultimate metamorphosis
of the sort of person represented by Agent Colton, Chaco, and all the middleaged businessman victims, the person willing to disregard others in the quest
for food, that is, the quest for power. When Scully and Mulder pursue the
investigation by consulting a retired detective who saw Tooms after the
Powhatan Mill killings of his younger days, the old man clarifies and enlarges the connection: "When I first heard about the death camps in 1945I remembered Powhatan Mill. When I see the Kurds and the Bosnians-that
room is there. It's like all the horrible acts that humans are capable of somehow gave birth to some kind of human monster." In earlier centuries, the
liver, rather than the heart, was considered the seat of the passions. And in
Cambodia today, anthropologist Alex Hinton reports, members ofthe Khmer
Rouge still eat the livers of their conquered enemies in order to show their
dominance. Eugene Victor graphically represents that type of human power.
In a profile of the killer she constructs early in the episode, Scully argues
that since the "liver cleanses the blood, the taking of this trophy [also] is the
transferring act for the killer to cleanse himself of his own impurities", and
the closing section ofthe episode shows old Detective Briggs reading a news-
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21
DNA, the dangers and evils of not eating well-not living rightly-pervade
our lives. Tooms, the most extreme example of the pattern of ingestion/
consumption, is of course named for death; and that is the result threatened
when we allow the unclean world into our bodies. But our inevitable animal
nature means that we will eat, we will die. The X-Files confronts our concerns with both literal and moral contamination. The series gives us meateating and cannibalism as metaphors for our social interaction. The patriarchal system, the business, science, and religion that gird it, surround us;
participation means corruption, but for most of us, it is our daily food. To
join in the struggle for dominance is to eat filth, to eat death. Even the vegetarians have blood thrown on them by the beef-eaters; in this world, no one
can escape the struggle. Whether the point is original Sin, warnings against
government power structures, or direct reminders of the physical dangers of
food, we are all implicated. Perhaps our only safety comes in seeing the
danger-in seeing that none of us is pure.
Rhonda V. Wilcox
Gordon College
Barnesville, Georgia 30204
Works Cited
Badley, Linda. "The Rebirth of the clinic: The Body as Alien in The X-Files.', In Lavery,
Hague, and Cartwright. 148-67.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God.4 vols. New york: Viking, 196g.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London; Routtedge, 1966.
"The Erlenmeyer Flask." writ. chris carter. The X-Files. Fox. l3 May 1994.
Farb. Peter, and George Armelagos. consuming passions: The Anthropology of Eating.
Boston: Houghton, 1980.
Hinton. Alex. Telephone conversation.30 Oct. 1996.
''Home." writ. GIen Morgan and James wong. The
X-Files. F'ox. I I oct. 1996.
Kubek. Elizabeth. "'You only Expose your Father': The Imaginary, Voyeurism, and Symbolic Order in The X-Files." In Lavery, Hague, and Cartwright. l6g_204.
Laven'. David. Angela Hague, and Marla cartwright, eds. 'Deny Alt Knowledge,: Reading
the X-Files. Syracuse: Syracuse Up, 1996.
Mather. Robin. A Garden of Unearthly Delights: Bioengineering and the Future of Food.
Nerv York: Dutton. 1995.
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