Structuralism is of particular interest to me because of the way it emphasises the way specific works add to the bigger picture and minimize the individual instance. This makes it an perfect fit for interpreting television shows in general, but i'm going to be looking at The X Files in particular. To begin with some background information, the show first aired in 1993 to 2002, and was just picked up again recently in 2016. While for the most part the show is described as a procedural, this line is heavily blurred throughout the course of the show. The X Files uses it’s format, or more specifically the expectations that it’s format creates, to make a world in which it appears actions do have tangible consequences.
The concepts of langue (the order and structure of language) and parole (the utterances and instances of a language) are concepts that help illustrate how The X Files achieves this. The langue of the show are all the unwritten rules that we know it will follow (if you have seen the show before). For example, we are aware that there is no way that Mulder or Scully die in the middle of an episode in the middle of a season, especially if we are aware of the sheer number of seasons likely after that. In the same way, we understand that it is unlikely that whatever mystery the protagonists are trying to solve will be wrapped up in the first 15 minutes of the show. This is because we have knowledge about the langue of the show. Each individual episode is the parole through which we would gain this understanding.
The X Files uses the audience’s conceived langue and plays with it, building episodes and stories with it in mind. Usually in a procedural tv show like this one, everything would be wrapped up at the end of the episode and reset for the next. The X Files often adheres to this formula, and has many “monster of the week” structured episodes, in which everything is wrapped up in the end and often never mentioned again. However there are outliers. Certain episodes will follow the “monster of the week” structure and wrap everything up nicely, only to have the events of that episode come back to haunt the protagonists again later on. For example, Eugene Victor Tooms who is listed on the X Files wiki as “genetic mutant serial killer who was capable of squeezing his body through narrow gaps” shows up in the third episode of the series and his story is seemingly wrapped up by the end of the show, only to reappear later in the twenty first episode to have his story finally brought to a close.
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| http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/Eugene_Victor_Tooms |
These episodes co-exist along with even larger story arcs in which it is quite clear that the story will continue on throughout even a season or two. “The Cigarette Smoking Man” and the events and circumstances surrounding him are a great example of this. He is so integral to the overarching story of the show that despite having only four audible words in the first season of the show, he has his own wikipedia page full to the brim with information.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_Smoking_Man |
Each of these distinct types of episodes (Monster of the week, continued story, or plot arch) even has outliers within their type. In his article "Structuralism in Cultural and Literary Studies" Robert Parker asserts that these odd examples only add to the richness and help further define the system, and that when we find them we may choose to “enlarge the circumference of the system to include the anomalous case, or draw a boundary to define the system by determining what conventions fit into it and what conventions do not fit into it”(Parker 52). The X Files allows you to consistently enlarge the circumference of its system because of the way it handles it’s episode structure. Actions that you may have thought to have no consequence may be integral to a future plot. This is not even to mention the movies which contain integral plot points for the category of episodes that deal with these things, which means they are a seemingly concrete part of the system. The ways in which the show constantly mixes and changes its parole lead to an interesting and dynamic langue.
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