Did the X-Files and Conspiracy Theory (1997) Help or Hurt the Conspiracy World?
I'm reading Barkun's book, "A Culture of Conspiracy," and in it he makes an interesting claim. In short, he argued that because part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer the believer an insight into "special knowledge" the pop-culture exposure of conspiracy theories (CTs hereafter) caused, among the believers, a disgruntling effect. As more and more people looked at these two artifacts of pop-culture and became exposed to the ideas the average conspiracist had to rethink their positions.
I'm not entirely sold on this idea but it does need some exploring. First off one appeal of CTs is definitely the exposure to secret knowledge. This is argued in two different papers: "I Know Things They Don't Know" (Lantian et. al, "Social Psychology" 2017) and "Too Special to Be Duped" (Imhoff and Lamberty, European Journal of Social Psychology 2017) which made this point pretty explicit. This, to be clear, is not the only reason that people are drawn to CTs but it is an important feature once a person is in. The claim of non-believers being "sheeple" is a clear indicator of this.
As an analogy, think about the appeal of the iPhone and how it's dropped amongst the general public. Now, I don't mean to claim that no one wants an iPhone, or that the OS is crap, or anything of the sort. However, a few years ago, the iPhone was THE phone to get and if the price was too high people settled for an Android. Only really strict tech junkies were clamoring for the customizability of the Android OS, but the iPhone had a mass appeal of form and function that was hard to beat. There's still, of course, Apple fans that clamor for the new version but now that everyone's aunt has an iPhone the appeal has gone downhill. I'm old enough to remember a time when Mac computers were the domain of people who needed them for audio and video engineering, and now when I look in my classes roughly half the students are writing papers/taking notes/or doing whatever on Mac Books* when they do not require the special functions of those Macs but are willing to pay for the glowing apple on the lid.
Conspiracy Theory made 136M in worldwide box office and was the 19th highest grossing movie in 1997. The X-Files Fight the Future movie garnered 189M in 1998 and was the 23rd highest movie that year. Meaning a lot of people saw these movies. At the time, I was a conspiracist, and I got all of the in-jokes and references both movies were making, from the black helicopters with 'silent mode' in Conspiracy Theory, to the FEMA claims in X-Files it had the reverse effect on me that Barkun is claiming. To me, the movie was an affirmation of the things that I was reading in books (because in my day, you had to go to the library for most of this stuff) and on the dial up internet that we had. The popular movie releases essentially told me that: you're not wrong and here's some pop-culture stuff that confirms what you believed.
Troubling though, was that the exposure to those movies actually shook my foundations but not in the way that Barkun thinks. Take for instance the silent mode on the black helicopters, why wouldn't all helicopters have this ability...or at least all military helicopters? It didn't make sense to me that it would be restricted to whatever secret group was running everything, especially since they use them in a crowded NYC street with literally hundreds of people that could claim "hey I saw a helicopter and guys repel out of them but I couldn't hear it."
Barkun wants us to claim that CTs are more like the early iPhones. That their primary appeal is this secret knowledge and I've granted that point. However, I'm not so certain that widespread exposure on the part of popular movies harms that. I think that what it does is lend an air of pretension to the conspiracist groups in that they can say they were aware of these things before everyone else knew them. Which is a more powerful appeal than just knowing something.
*In the interest of disclosure, I'm typing this post on three year old Dell. My cellphone is a Windows Phone 10, the last of its kind. I don't have a dog in the Android v. Apple fight.
Works Cited:
Barkun, Michael; A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America 2003 University of California
Lantian et. al; "I Know Things They Don't Know" Journal of Social Psychology 2017
Imhoff, Roland; Lamberty, Pia Karoline; "Too Special to Be Duped" European Journal of Social Psychology 2017
I'm not entirely sold on this idea but it does need some exploring. First off one appeal of CTs is definitely the exposure to secret knowledge. This is argued in two different papers: "I Know Things They Don't Know" (Lantian et. al, "Social Psychology" 2017) and "Too Special to Be Duped" (Imhoff and Lamberty, European Journal of Social Psychology 2017) which made this point pretty explicit. This, to be clear, is not the only reason that people are drawn to CTs but it is an important feature once a person is in. The claim of non-believers being "sheeple" is a clear indicator of this.
As an analogy, think about the appeal of the iPhone and how it's dropped amongst the general public. Now, I don't mean to claim that no one wants an iPhone, or that the OS is crap, or anything of the sort. However, a few years ago, the iPhone was THE phone to get and if the price was too high people settled for an Android. Only really strict tech junkies were clamoring for the customizability of the Android OS, but the iPhone had a mass appeal of form and function that was hard to beat. There's still, of course, Apple fans that clamor for the new version but now that everyone's aunt has an iPhone the appeal has gone downhill. I'm old enough to remember a time when Mac computers were the domain of people who needed them for audio and video engineering, and now when I look in my classes roughly half the students are writing papers/taking notes/or doing whatever on Mac Books* when they do not require the special functions of those Macs but are willing to pay for the glowing apple on the lid.
Conspiracy Theory made 136M in worldwide box office and was the 19th highest grossing movie in 1997. The X-Files Fight the Future movie garnered 189M in 1998 and was the 23rd highest movie that year. Meaning a lot of people saw these movies. At the time, I was a conspiracist, and I got all of the in-jokes and references both movies were making, from the black helicopters with 'silent mode' in Conspiracy Theory, to the FEMA claims in X-Files it had the reverse effect on me that Barkun is claiming. To me, the movie was an affirmation of the things that I was reading in books (because in my day, you had to go to the library for most of this stuff) and on the dial up internet that we had. The popular movie releases essentially told me that: you're not wrong and here's some pop-culture stuff that confirms what you believed.
Troubling though, was that the exposure to those movies actually shook my foundations but not in the way that Barkun thinks. Take for instance the silent mode on the black helicopters, why wouldn't all helicopters have this ability...or at least all military helicopters? It didn't make sense to me that it would be restricted to whatever secret group was running everything, especially since they use them in a crowded NYC street with literally hundreds of people that could claim "hey I saw a helicopter and guys repel out of them but I couldn't hear it."
Barkun wants us to claim that CTs are more like the early iPhones. That their primary appeal is this secret knowledge and I've granted that point. However, I'm not so certain that widespread exposure on the part of popular movies harms that. I think that what it does is lend an air of pretension to the conspiracist groups in that they can say they were aware of these things before everyone else knew them. Which is a more powerful appeal than just knowing something.
*In the interest of disclosure, I'm typing this post on three year old Dell. My cellphone is a Windows Phone 10, the last of its kind. I don't have a dog in the Android v. Apple fight.
Works Cited:
Barkun, Michael; A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America 2003 University of California
Lantian et. al; "I Know Things They Don't Know" Journal of Social Psychology 2017
Imhoff, Roland; Lamberty, Pia Karoline; "Too Special to Be Duped" European Journal of Social Psychology 2017
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