By Matt Allair
Out of all the recurring characters from The X-Files, the characters that had the greatest arc, other than Dana Scully, were the Lone Gunmen, John Fitzgerald Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Richard Langley. There’s are characters who began in season one, as paranoid, passive characters and through Fox Mulder’s example, evolved into very proactive, calculating heroes, and in some respects they embody the point behind the mythological Hero archetype espoused by Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung, by the end of season nine, and through their brief spin off series. In the end, they knew they were taking more risks by stepping out and doing the right thing, but they did so for a greater good.
The Lone Gunmen spin off seemed so prescient in hindsight, between uncanny predictions of a World Trade Center attack, parentage scandals of a politician, and false accusations of a media figure being a foreign agent only to have the real culprit behind the scenes, the drive of the Gunmen was to right wrongs, which they did during in the spin off and all the years they appeared on The X-Files. Yet back in 1993, this wasn’t so readily apparent when writers James Wong and Glen Morgan described them as the ‘paranoids’, yet heroes take on many forms that aren’t evident at first glance.
The fans grew to love them, that love saved one of them from almost being killed at the ending of “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”, much of that love was the fact they were underdogs, average looking outsiders who could represent everyone. It was a smart move to not just cast square jawed handsome actors for the roles, which a less canny show creator might have done, it helped to ground The X-Files into something believable.
The point of The Lone Gunmen seems more relevant than ever considering the socially compromised situation we find ourselves in. Since 2016, Chris Carter and Darin Morgan has described our plight as the ‘post truth era’. If Truth is subjective, then a fact based culture has become subjective as well, and that is a real problem as far as getting one’s bearings into what or whom to trust, and this problem tends to lead one into not being able to see the forest through the trees. The very existence, and aims behind ‘conspiracy culture’ has been co-opted and trademarked by figures they use it as a ‘justifying the means to an end’, rather than a means to bring about justice and equilibrium. You have some political parties that have used conspiracy culture as a blunt tool, and worse, foreign agencies that have used it as assets to muddy the waters using proponents who do so for their own self-interest.
Watching events unfold in the last decade, I am reminded of the Jude Law character from 2011’s Contagion, the conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede, who railed against the news of novel pandemic, and offered a herbal remedy prior to the advent of a vaccine for this virus, and man with a messianic streak, that for all of his public advocacy under the guise of protecting the public, while in his has mat suite, would not offer aid to a sick female college who was pregnant. There is a difference between intent and Byers, Frohike and Langley in contrast represented an ideal, to not completely give up on the government, to aim for a more just system that isn’t nihilistic in tone or intent. They believed the fight was about to make our federal systems, or corporations more accountable and fair, and to not victimize the innocent.
Now I realize what people are going to say, Contagion was a propaganda film for the CDC. Centers for Disease Control, that it is a form of information gate keeping, to evade responsibility by government or business agencies that ignore warnings leading up to a catastrophic event, fair point. But there’s a lot of random events that no government or business leader can be clever enough to control, and again, what is the aim of such advocacy against the tyranny of governments and business, if not to protect the innocent from harm? At this writing, are conspiracies something that hide out in the open, where one only has to follow the media and connect the dots, or still part of some nebulous agenda that is being withheld? It is hard to tell in this age where transparency has made it more difficult to keep agenda’s secret unlike at the height of the Cold War.
While conspiracies may exist and there're records and proof of past criminal conspiracies, are self-proclaimed ‘free thinkers’ really being their own masters? Or are they just the pawns of masters that can evade in plain sight? It may seem hokey to some eyes, but Byers alone set up an example of a dream of an America, of a time that give people a fair shake, that didn’t promise anything, but offered the resources to become what they wanted to be. However much the Gunmen were skeptical of the government, corporations or institutions, their aim was to make the world a better place. I would rather use Byers as someone to emulate rather than someone like Mr. Krumwiede.
The struggle to reach VERITAS is on going, to listen to the silence, to have the clarity to see what is legitimate and real and be brave enough to see the difference. Heroes come of age every day in our daily lives, we just have to realize that it is within each of us to become that hero.
Like three men who ran a newsletter managed to become heroes.