NEW YORK -- Gillian Anderson, better known as Agent Dana Scully, has just stepped off the stage at the Jacob Javits Convention Center and is making her way through some 6,500 fans to the autograph table. Jessica Barrett, a 17-year-old fan from Stockholm, N.J., offers an instant analysis of Anderson's performance in the hourlong question-and-answer session with audience members that just ended.
"I love Scully, totally love Scully," Barrett says. "But, after seeing Gillian Anderson, I have to tell you I think she's an airhead, total airhead."
"Blasphemy, man!" says Edward Hernandez, a stick-thin 14-year-old from Union City, N.J., dressed in black and wearing thick, black-framed Buddy Holly glasses. "How do you even know that was Gillian and not a wicked clone of some kind or the Alien Bounty Hunter morphed out to look like her so he could get in here? Yeah, think about that for a minute. Remember, man, what they say: Trust no one. Peace."
Welcome to the world of "The X-Files," specifically the New York stop on "The X-Files Expo Tour 1998" -- a traveling roadshow of promotion, paranoia and popular culture that opens today in Washington, spiritual home of all the conspiracy theories and counter-histories of the most popular series on television.
For those not familiar with the Sunday night Fox show, it stars Anderson and David Duchovny as FBI Agents Scully and Fox Mulder. They investigate unsolved cases that defy conventional explanations -- cases classified as "X-Files" by the bureau.
Many involve assassinations and alien beings, like the Alien Bounty Hunter who can change forms. In "The X-Files," almost all roads lead back to Roswell, N.M., in 1947, and an alleged UFO crash with dead aliens left behind, or to Dallas in 1963, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Cover-ups and conspiracies that reach to the highest level of government are the order of the day.
What distinguishes the series more than anything else is its sensibility, with its weird camera angles, long shadows and scenes set in deep forests, basements and underground garages. It's a universe of whispers, tape recordings, secret files and a government that lies to its employees and "terminates" civilians who discover its dirty secrets.
What makes "The X-Files" so culturally significant is that prime-time television is supposed to be the soft, safe center of mainstream middle-class consensus -- as in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, when "Gomer Pyle, USMC" was America's most popular series.
