Vera Rule investigates Chris Carter, the mysterious force behind The X-Files
He’s from Bellflower, southern Los Angeles, a “burb” for guys who used to make aeroplanes; a part of what Chris Carter’s writers call the military- industrial-entertainment complex.
Teenage Chris and a classmate drove 30km to Westwood, Los Angeles. The boy looked nervously around a restaurant there, scared by its patrons’ sophisticated assurance. “Let’s go,” he said to Chris, “we don’t belong here.”
But Carter found a way out, via the beach and surfing, while his mistrustful temperament appreciated paranoid Seventies movies like The Parallax View. Watergate, which broke when he was 15 or 16, was, he says, “the Big Bang of my moral universe”.
Carter put himself through a state university journalism course by working nights and gofered for Surfing magazine.
Maybe he’d have stayed on the shore, skin leathering, but in 1982 he saw Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark six times in six days and knew he wanted to tell stories with the inexorable zest of its opening sequence.
He might not have known how to go about it, except that his girl, later his wife, Dori Pierson, was a screenwriter. She encouraged him to write, and he got a job at Disney, which was buying batches of fresh writers because it needed bulk product. Carter developed other people’s ideas – stuff not now mentioned even on the many Chris Carter web pages. But in TV he could sense control, and a direct access to a pop audience which didn’t have to be under- estimated, treated contemptuously in the mass, as it often was by the Westwoodians.
Then the new and of necessity bold 20th Century Fox, grabbed by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, offered him a contract. What, he was asked, do you want to do? “A good scary show,” answered Carter. Those were the years when the most frightening things on TV were Baywatch’s silicon implants.
He felt his way through the summer of 1992, reaching for elements: noir meets the creature-feature; the scientific detection of the Sherlock Holmes stories; the Avengers’ avoidance of sexual contact onscreen; the fantasy FBI woman in Silence of the Lambs; the real FBI man whose beat was satanic cults. Carter pitched Fox a show about two FBI agents investigating the paranormal, he a believer, she a rationalist. Sometimes he would be right, sometimes she.
Fox turned it down. But Carter had a survey done by a Harvard professor claiming 3% of Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens. Carter didn’t buy it, but he understood he had accessed a new folklore narrative, as Bram Stoker had created Dracula from a synthesis of Victorian sexual repression and Slavic legend.
He repitched. Fox bit. He cast his leads against Fox’s desires. They wanted tans and tits, he needed the ability to deliver entire paragraphs of quasi-scientific exposition. He shot the pilot in wet and cheap Vancouver, and delivered to Fox at 8am on the day they were due to premiere it for Murdoch at 8.30am.
Carter says, “This business is about failure, most shows fail.” But spontaneous applause for The X-Files happened before any executive had a chance to observe how Rupe had reacted. Thirteen episodes were ordered. By word of web, it acquired an audience. Ratings were low, but advertisers coveted its under-35, computer-literate fans, who went online afterwards to discuss it. Carter eavesdropped.
He recruited writers and directors he knew to be outsiders like himself. His 200-strong crew can turn around an episode in eight days, writing in three and dubbing post-production effects so close to the wire that one show differed according to where it was seen in North America because progressively better versions were fed to satellites for transmission just in time.
Carter is now listed in Time’s 100 shapers of the United States’ psyche, and among People magazine’s 50 most beautiful humans -silver hair, tanned, calm, with a voice suited for God. Yet he eats at his desk – “My fine china is styrofoam.”
Traditional logic insists that after the new X-Files movie Carter would morph into a triumphant cinema creator. The Westwoodian snobbery is to presume that five years’ interactive devotion from 100-million viewers in 60 countries counts for less than a few reviews and the ticket stubs on a $70- million investment Fox did not commit to until the last moment. Movies are inherently more important than TV.
Yet Carter has used the movie as a big- toy reward for the faithful and a chance to lure in new TV viewers. His original idea seems to have been that it should be an expensive finale to the series, but at least one more season is certain, so the film promotes the series. (The film starts at the end of series five. South Africans ar enow watching series four, but the film can be seen independently of the series).
Entertainment Weekly recently quoted artist and critic Manny Farber at Carter, warning the film might be “white-elephant art”, while the series is “termite art which always goes forward eating its own boundaries, leaving nothing but the signs of industrious unkempt activity”.
Carter adores Farber. Okay, he replied, the film might be white-elephant art, “but we should at least make sure the elephant steps on the right people”. Westwoodians, mostly.