The "X-Files" effect: The truth about why fans are still obsessed

This photo provided by FOX shows, David Duchovny, left, as Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully in the “Founder’s Mutation” season premiere, part two, episode of “The X-Files”.

This Sunday, 1990s sci-fi cornerstone the “X-Files” returns to television after a 16-year absence.

Chris Carter’s bizarre, alien-endowed thriller – which made David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson stars as FBI agents Mulder and Scully – left the airwaves after nine seasons and two movies. The six-episode miniseries marks the first time Agents Mulder and Scully have shared the screen since 2002.

“I knew we had new stories to tell,” explained the creator via a column on Yahoo TV.

But while the agents search to see if “The Truth is Out There”, the return of the show speaks to some wider truths about why we become so attached to characters that we just can’t let them leave us.

To one degree, shows with serial narratives like the “X-Files”, “Lost” or “Breaking Bad” give the viewers a bit of agency, they let us play along compared to other television shows that are sculpted and wrapped up neatly without mystery, says Dr. Scott Henderson, Chair of the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University and Executive Director of the Popular Culture Association of Canada.

“We have a bit of say in it,” explains Henderson. “Things like the “X-Files”, or “Lost” particularly – open up these spaces where we can invest ourselves.”

When “X-Files” came out in 1993, the Internet was still in a lot of ways a barren place – Mosaic web browser had just poked its head up and the Windows version of AOL was just released. Internet fandom didn’t exist. That is, until ‘X-Files’ fans took to Usenet and IRC, early non-centralized computer networks, to espouse theories and debate whether or not Scully and Mulder were, ahem, “getting it on” behind the scenes.

“The show could really pull together that community,” adds Henderson.

Technology has evolved since, with shows like “Lost” capitalizing on podcasts and YouTube and all those wonderful ancillary tech tools that were coming about, broadening the ability of the creators to really capture that universe, that sprawling (and exhausting) debate and discussion.

Now, these types of shows are being remade and revisited on the backs of these fervent fan groups, disciples of the narrative that got away.

“I think it’s part of an older phenomenon but reworked given our current media climate,” says Henderson. “Historically, shows have either been revisited or remade or shown up in reruns partly timed to a certain era – now we’re seeing stuff from the early nineties.”

And the youth of the early nineties who were heavily invested in these programs are now, more than likely, parents at home watching Netflix after the kids have gone to bed.

“They’re looking for stuff that’s kind of a comfort food of television,” he says pointing to the upcoming Full House remake. “TV has always done that, played to these dual audiences by going after the new parent market… by tapping into that nostalgia – but now because we have streaming, Netflix and all sorts of other means of going back to the original, we need these updates instead.”

And we need more of it.

In 2014, Canadians spent about 8.2 hours of their day consuming media, with four hours devoted to television. It’s a 13 per cent increase from 2010.

There can be an addictive quality to our stories, an attachment that comes with trying to solve puzzles.

“At the evolutionary/psychological end, there is a lot of evidence that when people engage a story they first try to figure out what the character is up to – basically the character’s intentions and goals,” explains Dr. Michael Shapiro, a professor and theorist who teaches a course on the Psychology of Entertainment Media at Cornell University. “Obviously this connects the character to the plot.”

We get caught up in discerning motives, analyzing actions and seeing how it all fits together.

“If you follow one of these shows over multiple seasons it is incredible what you know about a character’s motivations, relationships, goals, etc., usually more than you know about your friends and family members,” explains Shapiro. “And these characters are almost certainly more interesting.”

If we strip it down further it’s deeply rooted in the fundamental ways our brains work.

“Story arcs are how humans digest the world,” says entrepreneur and consultant Gordon Hotchkiss, whose interest in the intersection between human behaviour and technology led him to co-found digital marketing company, Enquiro, one of the foremost researchers of online user behaviour. “Our psyche is driven by narratives, who we are is really an ongoing story that we create for ourselves… here’s who we are and here’s how I interact with the world around me –and that’s a self-authored narrative.”

He’s basically describing the foundation for how we survived as a species and moved onwards, an evolutionary quirk-turned-necessity that has allowed us to perceive the world, to develop that longer form thinking and planning. Simply put, we remember and learn from stories better than straight up facts.

Joel McHale, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and Chris Carter. FOX ‘The X-Files’ Winter TCA Tour.

“What often tends to get overlooked is that stories including carefully-crafted public narratives we see on television or in books are all the creation of people, they’re the creation of human societies and in a lot of ways they reflect us and our primary interests,” says Dr. Raymond Mar, an associate professor of psychology at York University whose research centers around how we relate to fictional characters. “I think what matters most to people is really, other people, we’re intensely social animals and when it comes to our environment and maybe our early environment, our survival depends on our ability to predict and get along with other people.”

That’s what fiction gives us, another way to analyze others and, more importantly, ourselves.

“It makes sense that we’d be deeply interested in fictional characters because they look like and represent our real world peers,” he says.

Mar points out that our interest in narratives begins very early on, with children showing the deepest love and attachment to stories – be it cardboard books or those brightly-coloured scenes that play out on the television or iPad screen. But that nostalgia, the kind those “X-Files” fans can’t really let go of, is also a powerful tool.

“I think in general, any show that promises a reunion of characters that we connected with is intriguing to us, it’s like reconnecting with old friends,” says Hotchkiss. “We all go through our own ages of nostalgia, this is a pattern that repeats itself over and over again, connecting with things we remember.”

But our attachment is especially powerful in the social-skill-forming teenage years where we are sourcing our own likes and dislikes as a way of flaunting our independence. Of course, we consume in a completely different way than we did when “X-Files” initially came out, says Hotchkiss.

“There’s this recurring pattern where new technology allows us to do things we weren’t able to do before and binge-watching is part of that,” he says. But the long-term social effects of intensely-focused, back-to-back show-watching in a cloud of Dorito dust while our bodies merge to become with the couch, is still up in the air.

“When we devote three days of our life to binge-watching the Making of a Murderer, you have a level of interaction with that storyline and those characters that you never used to have,” he says. “We used to watch our half-hour of our favourite sitcom or hour drama and that was all we got until the next week, whereas now we can really immerse – we really almost become detached from the real world and immersed in these make believe worlds.”

Although the world of television is certainly not exempt from addictive elements, Mar says in a lot of cases, our attachment to these characters is actually a positive thing. And when, for instance, one of them dies and we feel particularly distraught over it, refusing to come out of our rooms or take our “Sons of Anarchy” T-shirt off because it still smells like our favourite character, it kind of makes us better people.

“It gives us the ability to explore complex emotions that involve loss without any real consequence,” says the psychologist. “It allows for emotional growth.”

Just like horror and suspense, it’s practice for real-life situations, like (in the X-Files case) alien abductions and government conspiracies. Well, okay, maybe not those experiences but you get the idea.

And ultimately, our obsession with television shows and their intricate plot lines adds up to a social outlet for our social species. One that’s getting better as technology reshapes the way we interact.

“Where prehistoric fans were once limited to talking about last night’s episode around the campfire, or more recently last night’s TV show around the water cooler, now you can click on “like” and let dozens of people know what you watched last night,” says Shapiro. “You can debate a plot turn with fellow fans from New Orleans and New Delhi, hate watch with a friend from college you haven’t seen in years, or write new episodes of a show and post them on a fan website –I don’t think there is any great mystery about why these shows are engaging for their fans.”