Author(s): Bethan Jones (Contribution by)

Television

The X-Files, premiering in 1993, asks us to reconsider the very essence of truth and belief, to ponder the roles of science and faith, to do what resistance movements throughout time have always done: question authority. This groundbreaking series transported the paranoia of the sixties and seventies to the technologically savvy nineties as it followed FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully on their labyrinthine pursuit of truth. In The Truth Is Still Out There, scholar Bethan Jones notes that in the thirty year since, mass paranoia has been fundamentally redefined-Watergate has been replaced by Gamergate, a grassy knoll in Dallas by a White House park, and political assassinations by a rifle assault on a DC pizza parlor falsely accused of hosting a cabal of Satanic Democratic child abusers-but remains an integral part of America's identity, making The X-Files just as relevant today-if not more so-than when it first appeared.