In the nexus of technology, suspicion, and history, the “conspiracy nut” characters known as The Lone Gunmen are essential to The X-Files’ ability to capture how 1990s America got to the point where The X-Files could be a hit show on network television. The Lone Gunmen explained what were once fringe parapolitical and conspiratorial understandings of US history to a prime-time audience of millions. The X-Files’ hero Fox Mulder trusts them and benefits from their work, accepting their commonly dismissed theories and explanations are accepted as at least partially true. Moreover, the show uses the Lone Gunmen to highlight the potential for counter-hegemonic communities to emerge in the new venue of the internet.
Mulder knows about governmental crime in the abstract. The Lone Gunmen know the facts of the case (often more than Mulder) and their material effects. For instance, in the season 3 episode “Paper Clip,” Mulder gives a bloodless definition of Operation Paperclip: “Our deal with the devil. The US government provided safe haven for certain Nazi war criminals in exchange for their scientific knowledge.” Two of the Lone Gunmen, Byers and Langly, provide specific names and deeds. First Byers: “Werner von Braun, designer of the V2 rockets that levelled London, may be the most notorious, but Victor Klemper certainly takes the prize for the most evil Nazi to escape the Nuremburg trials.” Langly then adds details about the name Byers only mentioned: “Experimented on the Jews. Drowned them, suffocated them, put them in pressure chambers. All in the name of science.” Langly’s explanation comes in an important shot composition: Langly in the back of the image, the shot focused on Mulder’s face in the foreground. Mulder is a stand-in for the audience, alarmed to hear this information for the first time. The shot makes it clear that the official story is incomplete and mostly untrue, and that these weirdos know more than the FBI agent. At the end of their conversation, the third Lone Gunman, Frohike, arrives bearing bad news he heard on the police scanner.
This scene offers a template for how the Lone Gunmen operate. In the Mulder-Scully relationship, Mulder is the sceptic and Scully his sceptic; Scully is the not-A to Mulder’s A. The Lone Gunmen take an additive approach — Byers A, Langly A+B, Frohike B+C. Furthermore, their research methods are multi-pronged. They draw on traditional printed sources (books, newspapers, government reports), open-source intelligence like the police scanner, and — key to the show’s 1990s historico-technological moment — the internet.
In another season 3 episode, “Wetwired,” Mulder asks the Lone Gunmen to analyse a videotape that exercised mind-control powers over Scully. They explain the technology: “Using some interpolating freeware we pulled down off the net, we were able to blank out visible frames.” Langly makes it concrete: “This device is stimulating electrical activity in the brain.” Then the Lone Gunmen describe the mind-control effects that could result from this. Byers notes that the Americans and Soviets have both investigated “heightened suggestibility and the manipulation of this response,” while Frohike adds that Madison Avenue has researched this as well. After hearing the open-source-software-enabled explanation, Mulder takes a phone call, and the Lone Gunmen continue discussing amongst themselves what Mulder’s red-green color blindness could mean for this sort of subliminal messaging. The way their discussion of hidden knowledge continues through a closeup on the show’s star, as in the “Paper Clip” scene, drives home their curiosity and how their team works; the show uses its star’s face to direct the audience towards the Lone Gunmen, telling the audience they should trust and believe these weirdo researchers. Also, this 1996 scene shows the potential for the hard-copy-zine-publishing Lone Gunmen and others on the fringe to use the expanding internet as a resource that could circumvent standard channels and controls, revealing the shocking truths that might be out there.
The X-Files is a product of the 1990s, as the end of the Cold War brought a re-appraisal of the methods used to win it. The Lone Gunmen expose the historical crimes committed in the name of freedom, and the show uses them to cultivate a productively paranoid view of power. Finally, the characters illustrate the decentralization of publishing and research that the nascent internet was ushering in: a “non-standard” research community reaching out into an increasingly receptive world, more willing than ever to hear and even embrace the Lone Gunmen’s point of view.
1978 ad for the Volkwagen Bus, the Lone Gunmen’s vehicle of choice (via eBay).