Truth Is Out There in Elsinore: Mulder and Scully as Hamlet and Horatio, The

Hamlet has become a special favorite in the ten years closing the twentieth century. Within a few years of each other, popular film stars Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Mel Gibson ( 1990) opted to perform in major film productions of the play, and in 2000 Ethan Hawke took a turn in an especially noirish version. Eric Mallin and Linda Charnes note that the 1990s have also brought us film "paratexts" of Hamlet-"stories that transform or fundamentally reconceive Shakespearean concerns" (Mallin 128). Mallin looks at Last Action Hem (1993), and Charnes at LA. Story (1991; 11-16), as two significant examples of such paratexts adapting the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet to late twentiethcentury concerns. Although not citing any specific examples other than Last Action Hero, Mallin also points out, "there are many paratextual Hamlets in Hollywood" (128). One important paratext that should be included is Chris Carter's The X-Files.

The relationship between Hamlet and The X-Files only struck me within the past few years. I was inwardly grumbling one Sunday evening that I was much too brain-weary to be reading Hamlet to prepare for a Tuesday evening class, when I could be relaxing by watching The X-Files. I unexpectedly found myself thinking that much of what I considered pleasurably challenging about The X-Files could be found in Hamlet: mysterious, dark, confusing settings; characters and circumstances begging for illumination; irruptions of the supernatural and preoccupation with madness, disease, and infection; a brooding, sardonic hero driven to find order and truth in a confusingly chaotic, dangerous world; mordant humor; and a bulwark against despair in the humor, loyalty, and integrity of friends. I was particularly struck by how two of the catch phrases connected with the program clearly connected with the play I was reading: "the truth is out there" and "trust no one."

My students seized on comparisons between the play and the television series in class discussions. One pointed out that another catch phrase, "all lies lead to the truth," snapped into her mind when she considered that the final conspiracy to kill Hamlet ultimately not only went astray to kill the perpetrators, as well as an unintended victim (Gertrude), but in doing so also exposed the plot itself, Claudius's earlier crimes, and most likely Hamlet's sins. These class discussions piqued my interest to study more deeply how the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet informs The X-Files, as well as how and why The X-Files reworks that myth.

Simon Irvine and Natasha Beattie see The X-Files as resulting from social and philosophical conditions "peculiar to the present historical moment":

"I want to believe," "The truth is out there," and "Trust no one." These statements are catch cries that concisely capture the Zeitgeist. The end of this century is privy to the hyper-acceleration, deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and (he political, which is a state of play bound to television. ("Conspiracy Theory")

This description may very well describe the spirit of the last decade of the twentieth century, but it also recalls the Zeitgeist of the era in which Hamlet was created and revenge tragedy flourished. Severe competition between Anglicans and Puritans for the imprimatur of divine truth; anxiety over finding a stabilizing replacement for Elizabeth; consequent fears about Jesuit conspiracies; terror of either becoming the prey of witchcraft or of being accused of practicing witchcraft; shifts in power and money to merchant classes; and awareness of the popular media's (plays, pamphlets, sermons) power to shape perceptions of truth as well as morality also suggest a "Zeitgeist" of "deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and the political."1 Thus, describing The X-Files as just embodying a Zeitgeist "peculiar" to the time period in which it was created is much too limiting. More accurately, the television series draws on a mythos of Western culture also shaped by anxieties about loss of faith in benevolent higher powers (spiritual and political), in human relations, and in one's own integrity-traits bespeaking a stable, beneficent reality.

Linda Charnes's "Dismemeber Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture" provides an important insight into The X-Files' descent from Hamlet. Charnes asserts that noir film and literature descend from the ethos of revenge tragedy. Both genres "[offer] a paranoiac ethos, in which the fact of a particular crime is insufficient to explain what's really gone wrong and draws attention to a more pervasive social problem precisely by virtue of its lack of criminological 'critical mass'" (3). Thus, because Hamlet has "in terms of its popular mass-cultural reception . . . long been regarded as the classic Renaissance revenge play" (4), Charnes concludes:

Hamlet-and not Hammet-offers the first fully noir text in Western literature, and Prince Hamlet the first noir detective. Or, rather, the first noir revenger. Situating a plot-driven classical revenge tragedy within the recursive circularity and ethical indeterminacy that characterize noir, Shakespeare's Hamlet is modernity's inaugural paranoid text ["paranoia in the literal Greek sense of Overknowing'. . . that leads... not to discovery but undecidability"]. (4-5)