Daniel C. Remein on “X Files, S.4 E.21”
This piece is the result of attempting to write in an ekphrastic mode about film and/or television while watching in real-time. In part to double down on the necessarily elliptical, rather than exhaustive nature of a description enforced by the temporal linearity of an experience of a film, I began to take two "passes" at each film, and to revise the two passes into a dialogic, and occasionally dialectical relation to each other. This gives us the graphemic form of the poem as you see it, which can be read from top to bottom as two separate columns, across, or simultaneously (in your head or with two voices). I'd been developing this practice at first with slower mid-century "art cinema" (e.g. Antonioni's L'Avventura), but have recently been experimenting with it as an oblique approach to a horror poetics, not so much with slasher films as with instances in which popular forms of science-fiction overlap with or adapt the generic parameters of horror—as in mid-century b-movies and in the many episodes of television shows, such as the X-Files (or even Star Trek), that adapt basic horror plots and aesthetics, however attenuated for mainstream consumption.