Cancer Man spotted on the grassy knoll!
In prime-time sci-fi land, the truth about the JFK assassination isn't just out there — it's way out there.
who killed JFK? Finally, 33 years later, we have the answer. Well, actually, we have two answers, depending on which heavily promoted prime-time network sci-fi series you want to believe.
In one corner, NBC's fledgling series "Dark Skies" suggests that President Kennedy's assassination was engineered by a rogue military/intelligence group after he discovered their super-secret project: to cover up the invasion of Earth by hostile squid-like space aliens who have taken over the brains of unsuspecting humans.
Stopping just short — too short — of camp, "Dark Skies" maintains that aliens and their Earthling puppets are responsible for every major event that happened in recent world history. In one episode, for instance, the alien leaders tried to use the Beatles to send secret messages during their debut appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," which is pure hokum — everybody knows the Beatles didn't start sending secret messages until "Strawberry Fields Forever."
And in the other corner, we have the heavyweight conspiracy theory champion of TV, Fox's "The X-Files." On November 15, the series aired a pivotal episode centering on the background of the mysterious Cigarette-Smoking Man (aka Cancer Man), the trench-coated operative who watches Mulder and Scully from the shadows and who may or may not be Mulder's real father (but that's another story). In the episode, Cancer Man is shown in flashback as a young Army captain called in to a secret meeting with a mysterious group made up of military brass, an anti-Castro Cuban exile and a mobster (that covers all the usual JFK suspects, doesn't it?). He gets a plum assignment: overseeing the assassination of a "white male, age 46, former PT-boat commander, married, father of two."
On November 22, 1963, at the precise moment JFK's motorcade was passing the Texas Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald was at the soda machine trying to decide between root beer and grape, while Cancer Man was in a drainage ditch by the grassy knoll with a high-powered rifle. As the episode continued, we learned, among other things, that Cancer Man personally killed Martin Luther King Jr., had the Rodney King trial moved to Simi Valley and swore that the Buffalo Bills would never win the Super Bowl in his lifetime. You can't say those "X-Files" writers don't have a sense of humor.
Indeed, there's a question of whether this was all meant to be taken seriously. The Cancer Man episode was an all-too obvious answer to the JFK obsession of "Dark Skies" — when a colleague asked who would take the fall for one of Cancer Man's escapades, Cancer Man sneered that they should blame it on aliens. Writer Glen Morgan and producer Chris Carter also seemed to be setting up an escape hatch in this episode, revealing that Cancer Man bangs out Tom Clancy-type espionage potboilers in his spare time; the entire series could well turn out to be, in the end, a figment of his imagination.
But even if Carter and Company are only yanking our chains, the fact remains that "The X-Files" has brought conspiracy theories and free-floating paranoia into the mainstream. And, now, the show is in the position of having to defend its alien-centric version of post-World War II history (the UFO crash at Roswell really happened, American scientists are working to create a super-army of human/alien hybrids capable of withstanding a nuclear blast) from the competing versions of "X-Files" rip-offs like "Dark Skies."
How has it come to this? How has crackpot lore gotten so deeply embedded in the culture that conspiracy theories are now offered by TV dramas as reasonable interpretations of history?
"The X-Files" and "Dark Skies" didn't create the current atmosphere of national paranoia and spiritual neediness, but they drew upon it — upon the UFO buffs and Vincent Foster-was-murdered fanatics who've found each other on the Internet — and brought it up into the light. Toss in the popularity of celebrated right-wing paranoiacs like Rush Limbaugh and left-wing paranoiacs like Oliver Stone, as well as the cumulative bad vibes of all our national betrayals from Watergate to crack-for-the-Contras-gate, and it's no wonder that viewers are so ready to accept the world according to "The X-Files," "Dark Skies" and other conspiracy-heavy dramas like "Nowhere Man" and "The Burning Zone."
We're living in a culture of distrust: Anyone in authority is suspect; any theory, no matter how farfetched, seems "possible." Skepticism is healthy, but this is getting ridiculous. We want to disbelieve so badly, we've lost the ability to reason. In the '90s, speculative fiction from TV has gained the stature of the gospel from on high.
Bookmark: http://www.salon1999.com/media/mediacircus.html