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HOW TO BE AN X-PHILE WITHOUT BEING A GEEK
BY DANIEL RADOSH

The truth is out there. And over there. And look, there it is. Heck, the truth is everywhere these days. It's splattered across the Internet like so much alien goo. It's stacked up in bookstores like top-secret files in a government warehouse. It shines forth from newsstands like beams from high-powered flashlights pointed at the camera. When it comes to The X-Files, the truth is all over the gosh-darned place.

When the Fox network launched the science fiction/horror/detective hybrid in September 1993, few people — including David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who play FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully — believed it would still be around five years later. Today it is more popular than ever. New episodes draw up to 16 million viewers each week, not counting growing audiences in countries from Japan to Switzerland to Croatia. It has racked up more than 25 industry awards, including a best actress Emmy for Anderson and Golden Globes for both leads and for the series. An ambitious big-screen version is on the way. But The X-Files phenomenon is larger than the show itself. X-philes wanting to look beyond the tube can turn to books with titles like The X-Files Declassified, to Internet sites and newsgroups like alt.tv.x-files, to magazines and even CD-ROMs, and to the touring ''X-Files Expo,'' coming next weekend to the Coconut Grove Convention Center. There has never been a better time to be an X-Files fan.

But there is a better way to be an X-Files fan. Do you own more than one of those books? Do you regularly check the Web sites? Have you ever actually identified yourself as an X-phile? If so — how can one put this gently? — do you have any friends? Meaning real-world friends, not ScullyGuy@aol.com.

You see the point. Fandom can be creepy. You may be agog that the Flukeman in episode 2X02 was played by Darin Morgan, who later wrote the classic episode ''War of the Coprophages,'' but most of us, frankly, would rather kiss a coprophage than get into such a conversation. True, some people suspect that any interest in science fiction is a sign of geekdom, but that's not what this is about at all. It is entirely possible to appreciate The X-Files and still be attractive to the opposite sex.

The model to avoid, obviously, is the Trekkie — especially the one who insists on being called a Trekker. Fortunately, the stylishness of The X-Files means that no matter how into the show you are, you'll never be tempted to paste on pointy ears or a ridged nose. If you did want to dress like Fox Mulder for Halloween, you probably couldn't afford to (nor could most FBI agents). And even if you could, you still wouldn't look like Mulder so much as yourself in a nice suit.

In a way, the pervasive mysteriousness of The X-Files works as a foil for the obsessive tendencies of certain types of fans. Trekkies know that if they put their minds to it, they can figure out exactly how to adjust for power fluctuations in the transporter's annular confinement beam. X-Files fans understand that the absence of firm answers is so fundamental to the show's appeal that true appreciation requires not investigating its minutiae.
That's the ideal, anyway. Clearly, however, more than a few X-Files fans really do resemble The Lone Gunmen, Mulder's socially awkward sidekicks whose idea of fun is going on the Internet to nitpick scientific inaccuracies in TV shows. If you can name all three Lone Gunmen, you may be a candidate for membership. Weaving a tangled Web
As with any hobby, excessive contact with the Internet is to be avoided. Not only do The Lone Gunmen hang out in cyberspace, but Dean Haglund, the actor who plays Gunman Langly (with the long blond hair, as if you didn't know), is the only X-Files regular with his own Web site. Really his own, as in he does his own coding. And while he admittedly comes across as a basically affable young man, let us emphasize again: He does his own coding.

This is not to say that the Web can't occasionally be a fun way to enhance your viewing pleasure, but with 852 sites listed on Yahoo, the potential for wasted time is enormous. Sure, it could be worse — there are twice that many Star Trek sites — but if you catch yourself scrutinizing the number of times Mulder and Dana Scully have said the words "I'm fine," don't say you weren't warned.

If you absolutely must own an 8-inch statue of a despondent alien smoking a cigarette or a real dollar bill with Scully's face where George Washington's usually is, buying it through the Web may be your only option. Either that or attending an X-Files convention. On the other hand, if you feel compelled to pay $40 for a question-and-answer session with the serial killer who could squeeze through air ducts, it may time to go cold turkey (Lone Gunman alert: If you can name either the character or the actor, keep it to yourself).

Sorting trivia from trash
Fortunately, The X-Files is mainstream enough that the healthily curious viewers out there can avoid the fringes entirely and simply hit the local bookstore. Unfortunately, most X-Files books are pretty coprophagic.

One popular genre is the episode guide — show-by-show listings with plot summaries, behind-the-scene info, inside jokes and so on. These come in both official and unauthorized varieties, but either way, they are bound to be incomplete as long as new episodes are being made.

If you really want one, your best bet may be The Nitpickers Guide for X-Philes by Phil Farrand. It's insanely obsessive, but with a certain panache. Farrand tells you, for example, the number of times Mulder eats sunflower seeds or gets guck on his fingers, or the number of times Scully drives, but curiously never does he count how many times Scully has smiled. Also, it has an ingenious index for determining which episode is which, since the titles are never given onscreen. (Lone Gunman alert: Try not to refer to episodes by their titles. It's annoying to hear ''Jose Chung's From Outer Space'' when most normal people know it as ''the one where the alien smokes a cigarette.'')

Beyond starstruck biographies, most other X-Files books fall into the category designated by the Dewey Decimal System as 629.71: Useless Nonsense. The X-Files Lexicon is a dictionary of pretty much every word ever spoken in the series, with such entries as ''Japanese — Language Mulder wishes he had studied, instead of French.'' Really.

These books, along with oddities like the map pinpointing where each episode takes place, play to fans for whom the most interesting questions raised by the show are things like ''What was the first X-File?'' What smarter fans find engaging is the scientific and paranormal premises that underlie each episode. Remember, this is the series that spun a plot out of a rare, gruesome illness called Creutzfeldt-Jakob months before the rest of the world read about it in the papers as mad cow disease.

X-Files creator Chris Carter has said that most story lines are suggested not by devotees of the paranormal (or the paranoid), but by mainstream media: science journals and newspaper articles. The X-Files Book of the Unexplained, a two-volume set by Jane Goldman, explores the real-life phenomena from which the show builds its stories, though Goldman is almost Mulder-like in her willingness to give credence to all kinds of supernatural hokum.

It's also possible that all these books will be rendered obsolete by the new X-Files: Unrestricted Access CD-ROM, which aims to be the ultimate multimedia omnipedia. The slick package allows users to rifle through Mulder and Scully's case files, examine evidence and crime scenes using QuickTime VR and to redesign their own computer desktops with the signature X-Files fonts and images — a feature that is as enticing as it is useless.

Taking a novel approach
At this point, you might be saying, ''Who cares about all that? I just like the stories.'' And if you can't bear that long wait between Sundays, go ahead and curl up with one of the original novelizations of X-Files episodes. These novelizations are divided into young adult and junior editions, and the adorable junior rendition of ''War of the Coprophages'' has been retitled ''Die, Bug, Die!'' Go figure.

If the whole novel thing is too challenging for you, there are always the comic books. (Lone Gunman alert: Don't store your comic books in plastic sleeves. Use Mylar, or they'll never be worth anything.) There's also a narrative CD-ROM, a live-action adventure game featuring appearances by Mulder and Scully themselves.

Finally, there is a danger of being too high-minded about all of this. While manic attention to trivia is the most common ailment of over-eager fans, there are others who get a little too heavy meta. Deny All Knowledge: Reading 'The X-Files' is a collection of 11 academic treatises that illustrates this tendency perfectly — and that in fact says far more about the sad state of academia than it does about the TV show. Here's a taste: ''Grounded, like Sartre and Todorov in Western psychology and neurobiology, The X-Files sustains a Todorovian hesitation between the physical and the metaphysical that takes on an openly dialogic form.''
 
As Fox Mulder might say, the verity is dispossessed.

This article originally appeared in Verge, 1998