1997

19.3

Rhonda V. 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 Wind (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 it. Sowing the Wind discusses pesticides, chemical additives, and antibiotics; by 1995 A Garden of Unearthly Delights was discussing bovine growth 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 structure--the governmental, industrial, and cultural complex whose science supplies the various biochemical elements we ingest. When the Nader Center pointed out that "the secrecy with which USDA shrouds incidents of seizure gives the public a false sense of security" (151), their uncovering of that secrecy helped lead to the distrust of government and other power structures which is a central theme of The X-Files. Linda Badley has written about the psychosexual implications of The X-Files' various invasions of the body; the sociological ramifications are worth considering as well. Anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that materials which we excrete and which we ingest accentuate bodily boundaries. She notes in her classic Purity and Danger, "we cannot possibly interpret rituals [or in this case, art] concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body" (115). The X-Files presents ingestion in just such a fashion.

In the second season episode "Red Museum," a commune of vegetarians called the Church of the Red Museum resides in a town famous for beef production. Scully and Mulder are called in to investigate the abduction of a teenager who reappears disoriented and clad only in his underwear, with the unexplained words "He is One" written on his back, establishing him as one of a series of victims of crimes Mulder has begun to track. As the two agents investigate, they learn that the beef-eaters among the local youth have begun raping and violently fighting. An aged local farmer takes the FBI agents to witness cattle being injected with massive amounts of bovine growth hormone; he notes a coincidence in the rise of violence and the use of the injections, and laughs to hear Scully say that such hormones have been declared safe by "the government?!" The growth hormone, then, would have been ingested by the humans indirectly through their eating of the beef.

This information comes shortly after a scene in which Scully and Mulder have been comfortably ensconced in a local restaurant. They are shown close together at a small table with a red tablecloth and a red curtain behind; the camera displays a shot of ribs on a plate, Scully's sauce-reddened bib napkin, and Scully's mouth with a touch of sauce beside it. "You know, Mulder, [with] ribs like these, I'd say the Church of the Red Museum has its work cut out for it," she says. As Mulder reaches over to wipe the sauce from the lips of the bib-wearing Scully, the picture seems to represent an almost infantile 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 a pizza with "no pepperoni for me"--no 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 Thomas, has been secretly 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 led 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 may have 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 saved (from a conspiratorial agent planning to wipe out the evidence of their bodies) by requesting sanctuary at the vegetarians' religious compound. Science (in the form of the growth hormone) and the government conspire to make us ingest material that is far from "purity" but does represent their "control"--to the point of making us alien to ourselves.

It is worth noting that in The X-Files' very postlapsarian world this particular town's fall from innocence involves a family called Kane (Cain). The written form Kane is given in credits at the show's end, but the name is introduced aurally during the episode and might first be interpreted as "Cain." Furthermore, the red restaurant in which one absorbs tainted flesh is called Clay's--clay, of course, being a biblical term for the flesh. In Genesis, ribs are connected to the creation of human flesh (specifically the female). And as Joseph Campbell observes of the story of the Edenic apple, the coming of death into the world is connected with both food and sex (1.176-77), the acknowledgment of our physical natures and thus our vulnerability. The Cains (Kanes) in this story are subject to depredations of sex and food. But they also belong to elements of the community who have denied responsibility for problems; they are not their brothers' keepers. In this sense, they are aligned with the biblical Cain, the farmer who was envious of the meat sacrifices of his brother Abel the shepherd. Given the town's division between the beef-eaters and the harassed vegetarians (on whom, for example, the bovine youth throw cow's blood), it is surprising that in the end the vegetarians are willing to be the keepers of their beef-eating "brothers." But though the beef-eaters survive after a period of severe illness, the tainted beef and milk cannot be traced; it has spread out across the country. In the last scene, a voiceover from Scully says, "Further inquiry into the tainted beef has been promised by the pertinent government agencies"; but the visual shows the old farmer who laughed at the idea of government safeguards driving solemnly by the boarded-up Clay's restaurant where Scully ate her ribs. Not only Scully but any of the rest of us may have ingested primal evil.

In "Our Town," Scully narrowly misses consuming the poultry variation on the dangerous ingestion theme. In this late second season episode, an entire small town in Arkansas seems devoted to community values in the form of chicken-packing plant owner Walter Chaco, whose motto is "Good Food, Good People." Unfortunately, the good people are the good food; Chaco, who was shot down in World War II and rescued by cannibals, has 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 in this country" (Wellford 101); and the 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 Money 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 episode's locale, Seth County, alludes to the Egyptian Osiris-Isis-Set (Seth) story of destruction and rebirth (Isis 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 family named Kane (Cain), Seth, of course, is the son of Adam who followed Cain. Seth is a very long-lived man (912 years) who "Call[ed] upon the name of the Lord" (Gen. 4.26, 5.6-8), just as the long-lived patriarch of Seth County calls upon his people to keep their faith. But nowhere is a truly spiritual element to this faith suggested; the faith is based on the rewards of this life. Its solid placement in this physical world is represented by the literal cannibalism that the communicants practice.

The faithful of "Our Town" practice exocannibalism. Peter Farb and George Armelagos, in Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, explain that food interrelationships are emblematic of societal relationships. The kinds of food one eats and the people with whom one eats, to whom one gives food, from whom one takes food--all these things are strictly, if not always consciously, related in social structures. In Dudley, outsiders are fair game. But it is important to note that one may be identified as an outsider even if one is a resident; status is subjective. Poultry inspector George Kearns is identified repeatedly as one who did not fit in because he "had no values": he was a womanizer; he was a complainer; he did not work hard enough; as the plant manager says with a pun whose meaning only later becomes apparent, George "had a bone to pick with everyone." The social structure that eats up lazy complainers is here identified with wholesome capitalism. But that system soon eats up George's widow Doris, too, who is only frightened and weak, and who had been declared "one of us" (by Chaco himself). (In an effectively elliptical scene, she is shown being stunned to learn that she has participated in consuming her husband.) And finally, the town turns on Walter Chaco himself, when he criticizes their killing of Doris Kearns. They have become, as he says, "no better than the animals" in the quest to maintain their system.

Like "Red Museum," "Our Town" is full of graphic and unappetizing images of food processing. Early in the show viewers are shown the chicken plant and the mash which the chickens eat: they consume chicken offal as part of their diet. Thus the chickens are cannibals, too (a fact we are introduced to early in the episode, in preparation for our later learning of human cannibalism). In a vivid scene early in the episode, a worker at the plant becomes delirious: she has contracted Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, mad cow disease, by eating George Kearns, who suffered from it, and whom (in the episode's opening) she helped entice to his culinary demise. She imagines 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 scene: Scully is eating with Agent Colton, an acquaintance from her FBI Academy days. They discuss colleagues' career advancement or lack thereof and Colton's plans to move up "on the fast track" and perhaps help Scully along. What we are seeing is a power lunch, one more instance of feeding used to sort out one's place on the food chain.

The attacker in this episode seems on the surface to be much farther down that chain; in fact, he is a dog-catcher, though of course he is euphemistically titled an "animal control worker." He wears humble clothes and holds himself humbly, eyes usually veiled; but he occasionally lifts them to show them glowing with a lurid, jaundiced yellow light. Mulder notes that his victims fit no single profile; however, those victims the episode shows us are all middle-aged businessmen, hinting at an implicit class antagonism. But while Tooms seems to be the disadvantaged one, his attacks are frighteningly successful: he rips out livers with his bare hands and slips into locked, apparently impregnable rooms. In fact, this seeming throwback has a genetic advance, or at least an adaptation: he is able to detach his bones and elongate and squeeze his body (hence the title) into incredibly small places. This slippery lower-class character thus eludes the authorities sworn to protect solid upper-class citizens like those we have seen murdered. Near the episode's end, Mulder comments, "All these people spending good money on high-tech security systems--I look at this guy, and I think--it ain't enough." The power of Tooms' genetic adaptation is suggested by his name, Eu-gene Victor; "eu," of course, means "good," (as in "eugenics"), and he apparently expects his genes to be victorious over the standard human type.

Tooms has not, however, reckoned with Scully and Mulder, who move in and out of traditional patterns for authority figures (Kubek; Wilcox and Williams). Mulder is marked throughout the series as an outsider who is only tolerated within the system because of his great abilities. He is repeatedly mocked, and sometimes returns the mockery: When Colton asks him if he imagines the case to be the work of little green men (referring to Mulder's interest in extraterrestrial investigations), Mulder explains that it's "little gray men" called "Reticulans," and asks Colton, "Do you have any idea what liver and onions go for on Reticulam?" In contrast to the liver-eater and all those who metaphorically or literally feed off of others, Mulder is shown eating his trademark sunflower seeds, and offering them to Scully. In fact, it is only because Scully chooses to align herself with Mulder rather 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 middle-aged 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 1945--I 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 of the 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 of the episode shows old Detective Briggs reading a newspaper that contains back-to-back articles on the capture of Tooms and the violence of "ethnic cleansing."

Purity in this world is not to be had, The X-Files seems to suggest--"purity control" or not, vegetarianism or not. Those who attempt to except themselves from the normal human condition are doomed to fail. A grotesque parody of this attempt to deny our common vulnerability and interconnectedness is given in the episode "Home," which shows that avoidance of contamination cannot be achieved even by total separation. In "Home," the revolting Peacock family grow their own food and breed strictly among themselves. They are fiercely proud of the fact that, apparently because of a genetic anomaly, they literally feel no pain. But this seeming denial of physical vulnerability is counterbalanced by the barely human physiognomies of the family, which are signs for their genetic abnormalities. The deformed sons attempt to procreate with a deformed mother whom they keep under the bed (on a rolling gurney); furthermore, they pre-chew her bread in an infantile distortion of devotion. Their insanity of self-containment does not result in purity. In contrast, the vegetarians of the Red Museum are willing to sacrifice purity for the sake of saving lives. Early in the episode, the sect's leader makes clear that having meat-eaters enter their building would defile it. Yet at the end of the episode, when Mulder asks them to accept that defilement in order to hide some of the town's young meat-eaters from a killer, they accede to his request. In the penultimate scene, we see the vegetarians and the meat-eaters literally standing together --if not side by side, at least in the same place: the vegetarians' place. This acceptance of impurity even in the context of a quest for purity seems to be endorsed by the series because of both Mulder's imprimatur and the fact that the vegetarians are the only ones in town who are not physically sickened by the food additives.

The dangers of a physical contamination far deeper than any suffered by the Victorians are reflections of a moral contamination created by the social system we all, to some degree, participate in. It is comforting to identify with Scully and Mulder, who are in some degree separate from the system; but sunflower seeds or no, the vegetarians of "Red Museum" identify them both as meat-eaters; Mulder eats a bite of liverwurst in the sequel to "Squeeze" ("Tooms"), and Scully decides just in time to put down that bucket of cannibal chicken. From the global political system to the level of our 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 meat-eating 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.

Gordon College
Barnesville, Georgia 30204

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York: Viking, 1968.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

"The Erlenmeyer Flask." Writ. Chris Carter. The X-Files. FOX. 13 May 1994.

Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton, 1980.

Hinton, Alex. Telephone conversation. 30 Oct. 1996.

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