Le fracas silencieux de la guerre dans The X-Files (1993-2002 ; 2016)

• Main Author: Frédéric Gai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2016-12-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: X-Files (The); war; Cold War; Vietnam War; Gulf War; 9/11
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/1887

Among the plethora of topics covered by The X-Files, war has a special place. Present in both the "closed" episodes that echo the tradition of genre films, as in the mythological arc, it presents at first a fundamental distinction between the soldier, the first victim of conflicts, and the army, a structure involved in the occultation of abuses committed by the United States since 1945. Beside the veteran, the televiewer enters the unreal wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the sensitive violence imposed by successive political decisions. Pointing the responsibility of the US army in the contemporary geopolitical context, it calls into question the official speeches to better see the US imperialist position, which maintains a permanent war state to serve military and industrial interests. If "major wars" ended, United States maintains the possibility to have enemies in a mystification framework built during the Cold War. For its part, the series offers a dramatic speech on human excesses and on the end of the world, making the fictional weapon a way to alert and criticize, to better counteract the media's treatment of war and to propose a renewed criticism form throughout more than two decades of broadcast.