Fox Mulder, the FBI agent whose unswerving quest for evidence of alien life on earth is at the heart of The X-Files , is the perfect embodiment of the paranoid style. His understanding of the world creates order out of chaos, replaces ambiguity with utter clarity, and sees malevolent purpose where other people see only mistakes or flukes. For Mulder everything in the world makes sense. If he had the X-Files he would know. Or, rather, since he already knows, if he had the X-Files he would be able to convince everybody else.
History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.
The X-Files eerily illuminates the peculiar exhilaration of paranoia, of recognizing that contingency can be replaced with certainty. The dilemma the show presents, in the end, is that paranoia does not seem entirely inappropriate at a time when the reins of power increasingly seem to be slipping from the hands of ordinary citizens. Certainly the attempt to think about global capitalism as a system rather than merely as a haphazard collection of different local solutions is a valuable one. And in that sense The X-Files probably pushes us in the right direction, away from utter contingency and from apathy. But the show also pushes us in the wrong direction by making Mulder essentially a lone wolf, a man who works with no one but his partner, Scully.