Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: The Kids of Conspiracy Stories: The Spectacle of Victimhood from Blood Libel to the X-Files

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and I am excited to be back after taking a very brief hiatus to go get married. Thank you so much for all of your kind wishes people left on my last video! The day was perfect, my wife is perfect, and I am very happy.

            I left us off right in the middle of a discussion of the queer child shapeshifter, and … I’m going to leave us off in the middle of that discussion for just a little bit longer. In all the wedding planning, I totally forgot that I needed to complete a paper for the Mid-Atlantic Popular American Culture Association conference, so whoops! But luckily for me, I had the foresight to propose a paper that would fit right in with this channel, so I could present it to all of you, as well. So what we are going to talk about today is the spectacle of the child victim in conspiracy stories. I’ve talked a little bit about conspiracy belief on this channel before, all the way back in my Monsters 102 video, where I discussed the allure of conspiracy fictions like QAnon. The child plays the role of the perfect victim – helpless, vulnerable, and of course innocent. In the case of stories like QAnon, those who ascribe to the belief system can cast themselves as the virtuous heroes. They are the people who are smart enough to see that the conspiracy exists, brave enough to oppose it, and, should they continue steadfast in their beliefs, eventually victorious in rescuing those perfect child victims.

            Now, as far as the “monsters” in these stories go, here we’re going to be using that term more metaphorically, but I do believe it still fits. Conspiracy stories – both those meant to be recognized as fiction, like The X-Files and Orphan Black, which we’ll be discussing today, as well as those that are just as fictional but do not function as such for their adherents, like QAnon – all of them often center around the inner workings of an elite group of people pulling the strings in society. Sometimes, there can be a supernatural element to these stories, as well. For instance, the greater QAnon extended universe involves its elites worshiping Satan. Does Satan have literal power in these stories? Maybe! The Q-drops, which are the anonymous posts by the fraudsters posing as government insiders that fueled this entire fever dream – they leave the whole Satan bit deliberately vague. The important thing is that the elites are Satanists. Whether the object of their worship literally exists or not, they have committed themselves to evil beyond the limits of acceptable humanity – and thus become monsters in a cultural sense, their biological human status notwithstanding. (Unless we’re talking about like reptilians, but I can’t.) So the puller of the conspiratorial strings are socially monstrous, gleefully smashing the rules and boundaries of our collective definitions of humanity for their own gain and their own power – power over everyone, but especially, power over innocent children.

            The thing is, this type of story does not only belong to far-right reactionaries. Conspiracy stories are a shared narrative, and childhood innocence is a shared construct. Though people across the political spectrum identify the roles in these stories and the significance of these constructs differently, “save the children from the most powerful” is a rallying cry that you can hear from basically anyone. Now, I am not both sides-ing it here. I am not about to say that all conspiracy stories are created equal, or do equal amounts of damage. Indeed, I am going to be comparing what are, in a lot of ways, apples and oranges: conspiracy stories like blood libel and QAnon that have had real life adherents over the years, along with their “based on a true story” –all the quotation marks in the world – propaganda piece Sound of Freedom, and then I’m going to talk about The X-Files and Orphan Black, whose political philosophies are in many ways opposed to a lot of right-wing ideologies and also, more importantly, are intended to be understood as fully fictional. As much as my sister and I enjoyed annoying our dad by parroting X-Files plot points at him as though they were real, no one is supposed to be looking at these shows like they’re documentaries. But when we look at the treatment of the child victim in these respective narratives, we will see some striking similarities, and I think that this is important. These stories emphasize the purity and powerlessness of child victims as a way of raising the emotional stakes and increasing the heroism of the adult characters with whom the viewer or receiver of the conspiracy story is meant to identify. I argue that the spectacle of the child victim is a shared narrative touchstone that appeals to audiences across political orientations. Therefore, combating the political power of conspiratorial belief will require a wider recognition of the easily manipulable symbolic meanings of childhood in society. And that’s what this channel is all about. So join me as we dive into the murky waters of conspiracy and examine just what makes the spectacle of the child victim so captivating – and so dangerous.

BLESSED SIMON AND ST. TIMOTHY: MARTYRS AND SAVIORS

            In “Authoritarian Politics and Conspiracy Fictions: The Case of QAnon,” Helen Young and Geoff M. Boucher make an argument for treating the QAnon set of conspiratorial beliefs not as theory but as story. They have a nice succinct description for QAnon for anyone who needs a refresher: “The QAnon movement is a completely groundless conspiracy belief that has sparked a significant mass mobilization, one whose core belief is that a global elite of Satanic pedophiles, with links to the Democratic Party (USA) and some high-profile Jewish figures, secretly controls a “Deep State” in the USA, and perhaps elsewhere” (1-2). So from the very core of that theory, children are positioned as the ultimate victims, most especially of sex trafficking. But that is not all these monstrous “elites” are imagined as doing to kids: they are also purportedly harvesting the children’s blood for a substance called “adrenochrome” that can keep those who consume it youthful and healthy. If you are thinking how can anyone believe such easily disproven garbage, you are not alone. But, as Young and Boucher point out, that whole “easily disproven” thing doesn’t seem to matter to the diehard QAnoners. That’s why they believe the notion of “conspiracy theory,” where theory is an actual framework for understanding reality, is, at best, incomplete. Instead, they argue that “considering conspiracy beliefs as originating in speculative narratives makes sense, and it helps explain why QAnon beliefs are notoriously resistant to de-bunking and de-radicalization strategies that treat them as false cognition, rather than a compelling story” (2-3). In other words, QAnon functions as a narrative, with recognizable stock characters and themes that resonate with its intended audience. It casts its adherents in the roles of heroes and the figures they are already predisposed to dislike, based on their existing worldviews, as monstrous villains. This confirmation and amplification of the adherents’ belief systems renders QAnon what Young and Boucher call “a kind of consensual fiction” (3). The story doesn’t have to be the truth to feel truthful, as it “articulates normative grievances and feelings of alienation, connected with white privilege, as if these were a redemptive mission within a supernatural war between good and evil, and not a restoration of racial injustice, sexual oppression and social hierarchy” (3).

            Young and Boucher specifically claim that conspiracy stories like QAnon are modeled on the tropes and narrative structures of fantasy fiction, with its heightened and stark moral stakes and grand, sweeping scope. This is not a story of personal grievances with government bureaucracy, but an epic tale of good versus evil with the fate of the entire world hanging in the balance. And as Young and Boucher note, fantasy fiction is very referential. It recycles images and tropes from earlier stories, building a symbolic library of sorts that readers or viewers or adherents of conspiracy belief can easily recognize and comprehend. And not for nothing, a lot of this symbolic library is steeped in those other narratives that organize our collective lives: namely, white supremacy and xenophobia. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explores the ubiquity of racialized Otherness in fantasy in her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. The existential threat to the capital-G Good Guys is coded as literally physically dark, with trappings of cultural and geographic non-European-ness. So, unfortunately, there are elements of fantasy fiction that lend themselves well to being remixed into conspiracy belief.

            And of course, no conspiracism is complete without antisemitism. As you heard from Young and Boucher’s description of QAnon, the linking of Jewishness with the monstrous elites is explicit and intentional in this narrative – but it is far from original. The whole adrenochrome nonsense is just a scifi rehash of the centuries-old blood libel conspiracy story that hails from medieval Europe. In these stories, Jewish people were accused of kidnapping Christian children and draining their blood to use in dark rituals, including making matzoh, which very much begs the question of whether any of these medieval antisemitic weirdos knew what matzoh was. But again, it’s not about truth: it’s about truthfulness – or, as Stephen Colbert coined the term in the Bush-era aughts, truthiness. If it feels true, you believe it; never mind the facts. And to medieval Christendom, any antisemitism unfortunately registered as very truthy.

            But of all the wild accusations leveled against the Jewish people – and there have been plenty – why did blood libel have the staying power to make it all the way through the centuries to QAnon? Well, consider the victims. What gets people more riled up than a pure and innocent child coming to harm? And when I say pure and innocent, I mean it in a particularly intense, religious sense. Let’s take a look at Simon of Trent. Who was this figure holy enough to be beatified by the Catholic Church? A toddler from the fifteenth century whose death had violent ripple effects for all the Jews in what is now northern Italy.

            Simon was two-and-a-half when he went missing, and after three days of searching, he was discovered dead in the water beneath a local Jewish family’s house, in what I’ve seen described as a canal, a cellar fed by a canal, and even a sewer, depending on the source. What exactly this body of water was, it was fed by the local canals, and one could easily come to the conclusion that Simon wandered off, tragically drowned, and his body eventually washed into the Jewish family’s property, especially because the family’s property had already been searched and turned up nothing the day before. Unfortunately, this is not the conclusion that the townspeople, and later the court, arrived at. First, there were reports that the boy’s dead body started bleeding again in the presence of the Jews, which was interpreted as a sign of their guilt, and later a physician, Tiberino, who conducted the autopsy, declared that Simon had been exsanguinated via multiple wounds all over his body. Important note: Tiberino produced a luridly antisemitic and graphic account of the bloodletting ritual that he alleged took place. Did he believe his own account, or was he consciously making it up? Who knows? But the account was truthy enough for the local population. The Jews of Trent were accused, tortured until they gave false confessions, and either executed, forced into conversion, or both. Not only that, the trial precipitated rising anti-Jewish violence across the surrounding areas, which culminated in the nearby Vicenza forcefully expelling all of their Jews several years later.

            The death of a toddler is deeply tragic, but that’s a lot of power for a single tragedy to wield. As soon as Simon died, though, he became more than just a single child; he became a capital-C Child, the symbolic stand-in for all of the hopes and fears that childhood as a social construct contains. Whatever actually happened to him, he himself was obviously blameless, innocent insofar as he lacked guilt; but that innocence was then elevated to the realm of literal holiness. Jeanette Kohl reviews the iconography of what quickly became known as Simon’s martyrdom – as though he had died for his faith as an expression of godliness, despite that being definitely beyond the cognitive capabilities of a less-than-three-year-old. Kohl identifies three main types of Simon artwork: Simon martyr, who is surrounded by Jewish adults engaged in the act of violently killing him; Simon triumphans, in which the holy child appears in glory, often also accompanied by his instruments or symbols of his martyrdom or showing his wounds; and Simon victima, in which the boy’s corpse is laid out on a table or altar, again accompanied by the weapons that allegedly killed him. In all of these depictions, the child’s body is transformed into a grisly spectacle, highlighting its smallness, vulnerability, and brokenness. The viewer is intended to be moved to horror and pity – and a desire for justice. These are not passive images. They are calls to action, calls for the viewer to align themselves with those who would protect future would-be victims – other innocent Christian children like Simon.

            A lot of critical ink has been spilled on the nature of “spectacle,” especially within Marxist theory via economic critiques of commodified representations of social life replacing the experience of the real thing. That’s much of the critical thrust of Guy Debord’s 1967 text Society of the Spectacle, which is an important touchstone for the critical theoretical treatment of this term. Now, obviously medieval northern Italy is pre-capitalist, but one thing that is very interesting is that Debord begins his book with an epigraph from Ludwig Feuerbach’s nineteenth century text, The Essence of Christianity. This quote reads: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” Certainly, a great deal of the life and death of Simon of Trent is more illusion than truth. Blood libel, we must remember, is just that: libel. Whatever actually happened to Simon, the story of the martyrdom that rendered him sacred was not it. And the representations of Simon – in this case, the artistic representations, in printed materials, paintings, and sculptures – absolutely rendered him into a spectacle, an eye-catching, sensationalized object to behold. This object came to mean much more than the real thing. He even became commodified, because holy children are big business for the church. He never made it all the way to canonization – that is, sainthood – but he was beatified, which for those of you unfamiliar with the strata of dead Catholics, is just one rung beneath. He bore the title of “Blessed,” and his body was treated as a holy relic in Trent for centuries. His corpse was processed through the streets annually, a ceremony that the Church only put a stop to in 1965. Little late! But like I said, it’s business: relics have always driven pilgrimage, which can support a whole local economy.

            Simon was not the first dead child to be forced into the role of innocent victim in the conspiracy story of blood libel, nor was he the last. But I think the iconography of his death is a great reference point for many of the child victims who came later, in conspiracy stories both truthy and overtly fictional. The innocence elevated to true holiness, the tininess and physical weakness in the face of violence, but the spiritual triumph that is available to you, as well, as long as you help the children, save the children – how could that imagery, that narrative fail to pluck at your heartstrings and move you to tears?

            Well, I was almost moved to tears when I watched the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, but not for the reason the movie wanted me to be. This film was produced by Angel Studios, a Mormon production company that creates big budget religious content, and it stars Jim Caviezel, of Passion of the Christ fame. It tells the story of Tim Ballard, who started an organization called Operation Underground Railroad – which, no, my guy. This organization had the mission of rescuing children who had been internationally trafficked. Obviously, I support the goal of ending child trafficking, but Ballard was not quite the hero we had all been waiting for on this front, despite his desperate attempts to appear as such. Indeed, in the only two years since the movie’s release, he has experienced a steep fall from grace, as multiple members of his own organization came forth with allegations of sexual assault and grooming, much of which was carried out under the pretense of “training” female agents for undercover work among traffickers. Ballard was removed from OUR, and even the LDS Church issued a condemnation of his behavior. He is, by all credible accounts, an utterly trash human being.

            But you sure wouldn’t know that from watching the film! No, Sound of Freedom is, above all, a hagiography of Tim Ballard – pretty literally. The first kid that he rescues after going rogue from his government job that doesn’t do nearly enough to actually help kids is a little boy named Miguel. Miguel and his older sister Rocío were snatched by a trafficker from their loving father under the pretense of hiring them as child models, and the two siblings were separated when they were sold to different buyers. Thank God, the film doesn’t actually show or visually imply, really, what it says has happened to the kids. But the way their vulnerability is framed on screen is highly reminiscent of Blessed Simon. Tiny bodies, big sad eyes – and instead of the instruments of martyrdom, we are given suggestions of the trappings of abuse, like makeup and overly adultified poses during the “model” photoshoot. They serve the same purpose as the pincers and needles around the body of Simon victima: to turn the stomach and rend the heart at the juxtaposition of total innocence and total corrupting evil. And of course, then we have the adult caricatures of monstrous villains. As stereotypical as the antisemitic depictions of Jewish men are in the Simon martyr images, so are the racist depictions of cartel goons as well as the laughably simplistic greasy child predators in Sound of Freedom. Sometimes we get characters who are both at the same time. Their ontological evil, as revealed by their appearances, is contrasted with the unbearable suffering of the child – but, unbearable though it may be, you must bear it. The film won’t let you escape the image of the innocent child victim.

            This, in fact, is what nearly brought me to tears as a viewer, but because it made me so angry at what I, as a person who studies this sort of thing, could only see as incredible exploitation. The kids portrayed in Sound of Freedom have been as divorced from reality as Simon of Trent, but in both cases, they are based off of real kids who have had real harm befall them. In both cases, as well, the media spectacle, the sensationalism, of their nigh-deified suffering utterly obfuscates the real measures that could be taken to help people in their position. What did Simon need? With the lack of hard facts about his actual death, it’s hard to know; maybe just safer canals around the village. What can be said for certain is that torturing and burning a bunch of Jewish people at the stake didn’t do a damn thing for the already-dead child. And real victims of trafficking aren’t actually served by tough guys going rogue and plunging into undercover work that only puts their own employees at risk, primarily from themselves. Portraying child trafficking as the work of exaggerated, obvious villains does nothing to protect the majority of child trafficking victims who “know and trust their traffickers,” according to Teresa Huizar, who is the CEO of the National Children’s Alliance. The spectacle of the child victim is just that – a spectacle, not a reality.

            Anyway, back to Miguel. The fictionalized Ballard, who I’m just going to call Jimothy from here on out due to the Caviezel of it all, tells Miguel that his name in Spanish is Timoteo – which, like, in and of itself I thought was weird, because I feel like people don’t typically translate their own names outside of middle school Spanish class. But Miguel is stunned: he has a medallion of San Timoteo – St. Timothy – that his sister gave him before they were separated. So it’s just like St. Timothy himself has been sent to save them! So this time, the child is not the only one elevated to literal holiness – the adult “hero” is, too. And remember, that’s who you are positioned to identify with here, so that could be you! If you fight for these kids, you could be exalted, as well.

            Finding Rocío becomes Jimothy’s driving mission, which leads him to head an undercover sting operation to trick traffickers into thinking he’s created a luxury resort for predators. He valiantly saves a bunch of kids through that operation – but Rocío isn’t among them. So then Jimothy goes deep into the exotic jungles of South America to infiltrate a cartel hideout as a doctor, where he finally finds the branded Rocío – her body marked, again like a martyr’s. Jimothy saves her by killing the cartel boss and escaping with her through the jungle as they are pursued by goons. Talk about spectacle: this is child saving as daring action thriller. The real Ballard admitted that this part never happened, which, like, yeah, bro, we know. Jimothy returns the San Timoteo medallion to Rocío, and then reunites her with her father, as he sheds a single manly tear. Rocío singing in her room opens and closes the film, and as the movie fades out, her voice melds into a heavenly children’s choir. The implications are about as subtle as an anvil: she is pure and sacred, and in rescuing her purity and sacredness, so is Jimothy.

            So what’s this film’s connection to conspiracism? Well, the film certainly alleges that there is a well-connected network of child predators among the wealthy – but, in the age of the Epstein files, we kind of know that that’s actually pretty true. But who exactly are these predators – or more accurately, what are their politics? The real Ballard made his stance on that pretty clear when he hosted a private screening of Sound of Freedom for the likes of Steve Bannon and prominent QAnoner Jack Posobiac. Jim Caviezel has also openly supported QAnon claims, including the whole adrenochrome mess (remember, that’s the blood libel one). So while the film itself does not textually bring up any of the wilder QAnon claims, its depiction of trafficking as run entirely by organized (and racialized) crime and stranger danger serves as a not-so-subtle dog whistle for those in the conspiratorial know. Daniela Peterka-Benton, the academic director of the Global Center on Human Trafficking at Montclair State University, warns that the film should not “be used to push political agendas which neglect vast areas of human trafficking to the detriment of its many victims.” In focusing only on the spectacle of the child victim, Sound of Freedom creates a neat little hero vs. villain narrative that is truthy and persuasive to its intended audience, but is as far from the messy reality as any conspiracy story.

            So at this point, if you have similar politics to me, you may be feeling a bit vindicated – self-righteous, a little, even. And hey, no judgment: it’s hard to resist that impulse when presented with something as baldly manipulative as Sound of Freedom. But Tim Ballard is not the only one to recognize the power of the spectacular child victim. The holy child martyr exists all over storytelling, and even when we are meant to recognize these stories as fiction, I believe that the repeated motifs really do something to our collective imagination. After all, media about children or childhood both reflects and reinforces our social constructs. So let’s take a look at some less reactionary conspiracy fictions – that everyone knows are fictions – to see what parallels of Blessed Simon we find there.

SACRIFICE AND REDEMPTION IN THE X-FILES AND ORPHAN BLACK

            The X-Files is a complicated show. I was too young for its original run, but I watched it in reruns on the SciFi Channel – back when that was spelled normally – when I was in high school. I went in knowing that it wasn’t going to have much in the way of a satisfying ending, but I was really just there for the intense chemistry of Mulder and Scully, so that was fine. Recently, I’ve been rewatching the series with my wife – really enjoying saying my wife – and she’s watching it for the first time. Some of the episodes are total masterpieces, and some have aged like milk, and honestly we’re having a good time along the whole spectrum. Conveniently, we just got up to the exact episodes that I wanted to talk about in this paper: the season five two-parter “Christmas Carol” and “Emily.”

            You need a little bit of background lore to understand what happens in these episodes, and I will try to deliver that to you as clearly and succinctly as possible, unlike the show itself. So: Agent Dana Scully was abducted early in the second season by aliens and the shadow government that runs the world and does secret deals with aliens. At this time, multiple experiments were conducted on her, and her ova were removed for nefarious government-alien purposes, rendering Scully herself infertile. (Fun fact: this storyline was actually introduced because Gillian Anderson was actually pregnant and needed to go give birth.) The ova of Scully and abductees like her are used to produce alien-human hybrids, to further an alien colonization plan that the shadow government, known as the Syndicate, are working on in cahoots with the aliens themselves. To the Syndicate’s – credit? I guess? – they are planning on double-crossing the aliens, but they are willing to create a lot of human collateral damage along the way. (The Syndicate is also at the center of all other conspiracies throughout the world, including the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.) The aliens of The X-Files are frankly too complicated to get into right now, but suffice it to say that one of the hallmarks of alien hybrids is a highly toxic green goo that they have in lieu of blood. The hybrids are used in many cases as a slave race and also as subjects of further experiments.

            So all of that brings us to Christmas Carol. While visiting her brother and her heavily pregnant sister-in-law for Christmas, Scully receives what sounds like a phone call from her dead sister, Melissa, telling her, “She needs your help.” When she traces the call, she arrives at the house of a woman who has very recently died by apparent suicide, leaving a husband and a three-year-old daughter, Emily. Scully inserts herself into the investigation and discovers that not only does Emily look exactly like Melissa did as a toddler, but Emily was, in fact, adopted. Meanwhile, Scully reveals her own infertility to her mom after her mom observes Scully’s less-than-happy demeanor at her sister-in-law’s proclamations about pregnancy, such as, “I can’t help but think that life before now was somehow less. Just a prelude.” Which, like, girl, I know you don’t know that your sister-in-law had her ova removed, but still an intense thing to say to another adult who you know doesn’t have kids! But this does very much sets the scene for the near-deification of motherhood that is to follow. Scully is having symbolic dreams of her own childhood with plenty of religious imagery, which is typical for Scully-centric episodes, which often highlight her Catholic faith and its uneasy relationship with her scientific skepticism. As she is plagued by visions of her child self against the backdrop of giant glowing crosses, she learns that Emily has a rare form of anemia for which she is receiving experimental treatments.

            The evidence in Emily’s mother’s death seems to indicate that her husband killed her and then staged the suicide, so he is arrested. However, he then suffers the same fate, leaving Emily an orphan. Scully is convinced that her sister had a secret child who she gave up for adoption, so she orders DNA tests. Scully has already grown very attached to Emily; as she buckled her in her car seat after her father’s arrest, the little girl reached up, oh so innocently, to the small golden cross necklace that Scully always wears. (The show gets a lot of symbolic mileage out of that piece of jewelry.) Not for nothing, this is also backed by a heavenly choir soundtrack. Scully gives Emily the necklace, marking her as literally sacred, and Emily smiles beatifically. Then, the episode ends with a revelation: Emily is not Melissa’s biological daughter – she is Scully’s.

            The second part of the two-parter has Scully and Mulder desperately trying to find Emily’s true origins while they race against Emily’s steadily worsening illness. They can’t get any answers about what her “experimental treatment” was, but when Emily develops a high fever and a nurse tries to biopsy a suspiciously green lump at the back of her neck, out comes the caustic green goo (and down goes the nurse). Emily is a hybrid, and her body is visibly marked as a symbol of her suffering at the hands of the conspiracists. Without whatever the alien scientists were doing to her in “treatment,” she deteriorates rapidly. One of the aliens (in humanoid form) manages to sneak in and give her an extra dose of green stuff, which helps somewhat, but may be too little too late. Either way, Scully determines that they cannot work with the conspiracy-backed experimenters; though she tries to treat Emily via other means, the little girl does eventually die.

            So now that we’ve got the plot squared away, let’s look at some of the imagery and dialogue around Emily. Emily is described early in the second episode as “a miracle that was never meant to be.” The miracle refers in part to being a biological daughter of Scully’s, when Scully had believed that she could never have such a thing, but it is also clearly part of the religious/spiritual coding of Emily as an innocent martyr. Her birth is miraculous, like some other precious children one could name. Emily herself has very little dialogue – which is fair, because she’s played by a very young kid – but her wide-eyed silence adds to the overall solemn purity of her general vibe. (One exception is when she tells Mulder that she is drawing “a potato,” which he responds to by doing a Mr. Potato Head impression that makes her laugh, and this is the most real kid-like and therefore the most emotionally affecting part of the episode to me.) But Emily’s suffering takes precedence and it is put on somber display multiple times throughout the episode. In one scene, she undergoes a treatment in an oxygen chamber, which goes poorly. We are treated to long panning shots of her small body in the huge machine, surrounded, like any good martyr, by the instruments of her torture. Emily endures all of this with preternatural stoicism. Even when pain registers on her face, she does not scream or cry, but she just stares at Scully with a silent plea for the suffering to end.

            Of course, the shapeshifting alien doctors do not care about Emily’s suffering, and that’s what makes them so evil. Mulder, while satisfyingly slapping one of them silly, shouts, “She’s just a lab rat to you!” Emily’s childhood, her innocence, does not matter to either the aliens – the threat from outside – or the shadow government – the threat from within. When Mulder explains his conclusions that the conspiracy is to blame for creating children like Emily, Scully asks, “Children being created for who?” “For who, for what, I don’t know,” Mulder answers. That is some mild plot amnesia on their part, because they have fully encountered alien-human hybrids before, but whatever. The point is that the more mysterious and shadowy and unspeakable the conspiracy, the more undeserving and innocent their child victims. Emily was “born to serve an agenda.” She was intended to be used up and cast aside.

            Scully is the one to put a stop to all of that, by virtue of being one of our heroes, but also by virtue of being Emily’s biological mother. The fact that these episodes take place around Christmas could not be less of a coincidence. Like the Virgin Mary, who also did not control the context through which her child was conceived and born, Scully can only provide pure, holy love for this offspring that was born to die. And in fact, Scully actually kind of hastens Emily’s death by refusing the alien-provided treatments. Scully says to Mulder, “You were right. This child was not meant to be.” In some ways, that’s true. The egg shouldn’t have been stolen from Scully. It shouldn’t have fertilized with alien DNA, and the resulting child shouldn’t have been subjected to medical experimentation. But Scully also determines that it is better for Emily to die than to live the life of nefarious usefulness that her creators had in mind for her. Emily can retain her childhood innocence – her humanity, despite her hybridity – as long as she is freed from the clutches of the conspirators, even if that means certain death. Scully lies down with the dying child, and the image transitions into a stained glass window of the Virgin and Child, because, say it with me, subtlety is for chumps. Remember, spectacle is all about representation and recognition: easily interpreted references and cultural shorthand. It is meant to grab and keep our attention and highlight the emotional significance of the object – here, the child – on display.

At the funeral, Mulder places white flowers on Emily’s pure white casket. He tells Scully, “You found her, and you had a chance to love her. Maybe she was meant for that, too.” He determines that Scully “saved” Emily, but since we are at her funeral, we are clearly using a spiritual definition of “saved” here. Her soul, her innocence, her childhood were removed from the clutches of the conspirators; she was able to remain pure and human and loved. But even this triumph is tempered with defeat, as Emily’s body, and the evidence of evil conspiracy actions that it entails, has been stolen from her casket, leaving only sandbags and Scully’s cross. An oddly sentimental touch for an evil conspirator to leave this, but we needed one last Christianity-infused gut punch to close out the episode.

            I’m being a little cynical there, but I remember being incredibly moved and saddened when I first watched these episodes as a teenager. Who wouldn’t be? But that’s kind of my point: due to our collective associations of childhood with innocence, vulnerability, deservingness of happiness and safety, just about the easiest way to move an audience is with a child in peril. But move an audience to what?

In “Alien Assassinations: The X-Files and the Paranoid Structure of History,” Robert Markley describes the politics of The X-Files as equal parts paranoid and cynical. The paranoia, of course, reflects a post-Watergate world in which the government cannot be trusted, and the cynicism is the belief that there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Markley quotes Chris Carter, the series’ creator, as saying that the show has a religious quality to the questions it asks: “it’s about beliefs – and meaning and truth and why we are here and why are they here and who’s lying to us” (80-81). Markley finds it very telling that “who’s lying to us” is one of Carter’s central religious questions: “Our faith becomes the conviction that we always and already have been lied to, and, as the interpellated producers and products of this faith, we want to believe both the Lone Gunmen [the ur-conspiracy theorists in the show] and Scully [the skeptic]” (81). Markley drives this point home by drawing attention to the show’s two paradoxical taglines: The Truth Is Out There – and Trust No One. Markley identifies this worldview as a largely libertarian one, in which the government is “a projective fantasy of monolithic power in which nameless, faceless bureaucrats act out their own fantasies of control with the same abandon that we are schooled to desire as the utmost expression of our liberty” (81). There is an obvious built-in tension here, which makes for a great suspense thriller of a show, but also for a highly anxious worldview. While it may seem like the main fear would be the fear of manipulation, Markley actually believes that it is “the fear that none of us matters; that it’s not worth the trouble for Them to notice, let alone persecute, us; and the desire that we matter to Them in some profound way” (82). But Mulder and Scully clearly matter to Them, and the audience can live vicariously through our heroes to an extent. Most of us, however, don’t get a chance to break into top secret government facilities or demand answers from mysterious cigarette smoking men. So what can we do? Well, we can protect the children.

I think Markley’s arguments about the cynicism and resulting complacency – almost nihilism – of a lot of conspiracy fictions are very compelling. They confirm the feeling that we just exist in a morass of lies, and they make us go, well, what are you gonna do about it? But I would posit that depictions of children – specifically, the spectacle of the sacred child victim – can cut through this cynicism. We may have a hard time imagining ourselves mattering to the grand machinations of the Syndicate – or whatever we imagine is their real-life counterpart – but we can matter to children, and since we build up that capital-C Child to be the most holy, the most important, then we get to be holy and important by association if we are on their side. Now, the “Emily” two-parter still has a very pessimistic approach to what it means to be on the child’s side, because, again, Emily does die. Control of the child’s life cannot actually be wrested back from the hands of the conspirators. Only her sanctity can be, by refusing to let the conspirators use her anymore.

When I watched these episodes with my wife, she commented that she was reminded of The Black Stork, which was the 1917 eugenicist propaganda piece that I discussed in my first video on childhood, monstrosity, and disability. In this piece of absolute filmic garbage, a disabled child is “euthanized” at birth so that he does not grow up to be a monster. In death, he retains his holy innocence, as the specter of Jesus literally receives his soul to take him to heaven. Now, The X-Files, of course, is not ideologically anywhere near The Black Stork. Reproductive control and coercion are the greatest evils in the show, as shown by the conspirators’ theft of Scully’s ova. Eugenicist projects are part of the horrible conspiracy that the good guys must oppose. But I think my wife was really onto something here with the similarities in the pure, holy deaths. If the child cannot escape their proximity to evil – in The Black Stork, the evil of disability, and in The X-Files, the evil of conspiracy – then it is better for them to die and remain innocent than become corrupted. And, not for nothing, as in The Black Stork, that evil is still embodied within Emily, as an alien hybrid. If she dies now, she remains one of us, but if she with her tainted biology grows up, she may irrevocably become one of them.

For a somewhat more optimistic take on the would-be child victim of a conspiracy, we can turn to Orphan Black. Now, Orphan Black is one of my straight-up favorite shows of all time, so know that I am critiquing from a place of appreciation here. (I mean, I also love The X-Files, despite and sometimes because of its many flaws.) But once again, we find a lot of similar tropes of the holy child at the center of the evil conspiracy, the spectacle of her suffering, and the heroism of the adults who save her.

For those of you unfamiliar, Orphan Black tells the story of a group of cloned women, most of whom, until recently, did not know that they were part of a murky secret biological project. There are actually two groups of clones – though both from the same chimeric source – Project Castor, the male clones, and Project Leda, the female clones. Project Castor is controlled by the military; all the boys are raised self-aware of their clone status and are trained to be loyal soldiers and living bioweapons. Project Leda is controlled by the Dyad Institute, a corporate entity that is not technically a part of any government, but has its lobbying tentacles in many regimes and administrations across the world. Dyad is run by mad scientist types who ascribe to the philosophy of “Neolution,” human-controlled genetic advancement towards perfection. That is to say, high-tech eugenics. That’s not me extrapolating; Aldous Leakey, one of the big bads of the early seasons, compliments his protégé Delphine by saying that to her, “eugenics is not a dirty word.” One of the main things that Orphan Black is about is the fight for women’s and even children’s bodily autonomy against the threat of male-dominated corporate interests, so pretty far away from a right-wing worldview.

It turns out that this vast web of money and power can all be traced back to one insufferable rich dude and his desire to live forever, because ain’t that just the way. The clones were genetically engineered to carry a mutation that their creators hoped would accelerate their healing and lead to extended life – even perhaps one day immortality. The idea was that their creators could then extract and use the clones’ genetic material for treatments for themselves and of course treatments that they could sell. However, this did not work, possibly because of further genetic meddling that was done to render all the clones infertile – because letting them reproduce would simply be scientifically irresponsible – and also to tag the clones with genetic patents encoded right into their DNA. So not only do the Leda clones not have accelerated healing, they have genetic time bombs associated with their engineered infertility that start attacking their reproductive organs and lungs around their late 20s. (To be 100% fair, their creators didn’t know it was gonna do that. But to be fair again, they don’t enormously care.) But two Leda clones escaped this fate: protagonist Sarah Manning and her naturally occurring twin Helena, my beloved, who mutated in such a way that their creators’ plans for their infertility were switched off. Helena spends a great deal of the series’ run pregnant with twins of her own, and Sarah starts the series as the mother of a little girl, Kira.

Kira is of extreme interest to the Dyad Institute. She was not supposed to exist, but now that she does, they want to know what’s going on with her biologically. It turns out that what is going on is exactly what they were hoping for in the first place: she has the accelerated healing. A lot of the plot of the show’s five seasons is dedicated to the fight for control over Kira’s body. But perhaps even more important is Kira’s symbolic meaning to everyone around her. She is The Future to the conspirators – and she is The Greatest Good to the clones.

So we have arrived at our spectacular child victim of this story. Let’s go down the list. How is Kira’s body and her physical suffering portrayed? Well, in the first season, we see her get hit by a car. Her smallness is emphasized both in the street and in the hospital as she is surrounded by doctors and her weeping family. But then: she’s basically fine. The doctors are dumbfounded, as is Sarah; at this point, we don’t know about her biologically enhanced healing, so her recovery is declared a miracle. We see her body in the spectacle of suffering, and we also get the miraculous, nigh-supernatural, healing of that body, in accordance with her extreme importance.

Later in the show’s run, Kira donates bone marrow to help produce a treatment against the clones’ disease, specifically for Cosima, whom she now considers her aunt. Kira is afraid but resolute, and everyone marvels at how brave she is to be willing to suffer a giant needle to the hip for the sake of another. Again, she is tiny on the operating table, surrounded by medical instruments, as a sacrifice of her flesh is freely given. Taking our cues from another holy child, perhaps?

Kira eventually decides that she wants to allow the Dyad Institute to have access to her body, because she wants to understand her own biology. Her mother Sarah, understandably, struggles with this decision, but it is actually honored for a time. This certainly constitutes more bodily autonomy for a child than we’ve seen in the other stories that we’ve discussed today, and I think this is significant. In our own mundane reality, kids have so few legal rights when it comes to their own bodies. They don’t have decision-making power – or even the right to knowledge – about medical decisions that impact them and them alone. All of that is left up to adults. So for real, kudos to Orphan Black for treating children’s medical rights as important. That is still a genuinely countercultural stance. But of course, the conspirators do not have Kira’s wellbeing in mind, and they quickly devise a plan to harvest her eggs for the next clone line so they can continue chasing that sweet, sweet immortality. Again, we are treated to heartstring-yanking images of Kira’s lonely small body in a sterile, extractive medical setting.

But that’s all about Kira’s body. What about Kira’s soul? Well, Kira is unquestionably the paragon of goodness in this series. To be fair, she is allowed moments of anger or disappointment or even just unpleasantness regarding the adults around her, particularly Sarah, in later seasons. By the fifth and last season, Kira is understandably sick of being punted around like a football among all the various factions of her complicated life. She can be short or pouty, and I appreciate the show for allowing her to be so. But she is always good – to a potentially actually supernatural level, despite this not being a supernatural show. Orphan Black is steadfastly sci-fi; the speculative science is generally fairly grounded, according to people who know these things – so, like, not me. But Kira has access to an intuitive sense beyond scientific reason. She can see through the clones’ disguises instantly when they are impersonating each other, before she even knows that her mom has clones. In fact, this revelation makes total sense to her, because she has a sort of empathic connection with all of her mother’s clones. She can’t communicate with them psychically or anything like that, but she can feel them. Somehow. Exactly what that entails – for over 200 clones, no less – is never fully elucidated, but it obviously has nothing to do with a mutated gene. Kira’s connection to and instinctive love for the clones mark her as the exact opposite of the unfeeling forces that created them.

Kira is also the catalyst for the redemption of Helena, her mother’s twin. Helena’s early childhood was spent in a neglectful orphanage before she was scooped up by religious fanatics who raised her to assassinate other clones, whom they deem as insults to God’s creation. Helena feels an instinctive pull towards Sarah, so she spares her life, and when she meets Kira, her whole anti-clone worldview falls apart. She calls Kira “little angel,” and Kira treats her with pure trust and kindness. Kira can intuit that Helena has been terribly hurt, and she knows that she is not bad at heart. It is through Kira’s intervention – divine intervention? – that Helena gathers the strength to rebel against her upbringing and join forces with her fellow clones. Kira is, quite literally, the angelic figure that the tormented Helena, who has carved angel wings into her own back, has been searching for her entire life. After decades of false religion, Kira brings true holiness to her aunt.

Kira also redeems Rachel, the most villainous Leda clone in the series, and also one of my favorites. This is the monsters channel, what did you expect? By the time the decision is made to harvest Kira’s eggs, Kira appears to be well and truly trapped. But Rachel, who was raised as a self-aware clone and a corporate ward of Dyad, is quickly losing her faith in the entities that brought her up. The betrayals have started to rack up; even her ultimate creator, Mr. Immortality-Seeker himself, who at first presented as a father figure, is actually only using Rachel and literally spying on her through her bionic eye. Meanwhile, the rest of the Leda clones hate Rachel – for pretty good reasons – the scientists she called her parents have abandoned her in like every way that one could abandon a person, and she is in an abusive relationship with a deranged hitman. The only person who has ever truly shown Rachel kindness is Kira. Guided by her preternatural empathy, Kira asks Rachel, “Who hurt you?” Bitterly, Rachel responds, “All of them.” But hurting Kira is a bridge too far even for Rachel, and when she is supposed to deliver Kira’s helpless body to the same scientists who controlled her own biology, she instead returns Kira to her family. None of the clones can resist the redemptive power of their flesh and blood – since Kira is biologically all of their daughter, if you think about it. She is the symbol of both their suffering and their freedom that they are fighting for. She is all things good and human that can survive in the face of dehumanization.

And like – that’s really ideologically messy, because the pro-bodily-autonomy, anti-corporate-violence-against-women storytelling of this show obviously really resonates with me, but we’re still trading on The Child, TM, in really similar ways that conspiracy storytelling far across the political aisle does, as well. This symbolic register of childhood is very much a shared language, both visually and narratively. So where does that leave us? What do we do with all of these spectacular child victims?

CONCLUSION

            I don’t think that conspiracy stories or imperiled child characters are going anywhere any time soon. The built-in emotional stakes are just too enticing. And conspiracy stories are fun. Even the ones people really believe in, that they would swear up and down are dead serious and terrible and not a good time at all – I think we have to be willing to admit that they give adherents a real thrill. They may not classify that as enjoyment, but it’s a not too distant cousin, at least. Conspiracy stories are mysteries at their core, and our little monkey brains love to find patterns and get to the bottom of something, and pretty much everyone loves to feel smart. The allure of being part of an in-group that is more clever than everyone who has been fooled is pretty hard to resist. The healthiest way to get that feeling is fiction – recognized as fiction – because then you get to say “yeah, called it!” whenever you get to the next twist, and you don’t then use that feeling to, you know, foster cultural environments of antisemitism or xenophobia or white supremacy. Ideally. But, while I, again, am absolutely not by any means saying that enjoyers of shows like The X-Files and Orphan Black are no different from QAnoners, I am saying that we should be aware of the symbols that we have in common, and the power of narratives that can spin out of control. We need to be able to differentiate between spectacle and reality.

            Fighting for the wider-spread recognition of these narratives as trope-filled spectacles and not representations of the Real Truth of Childhood Innocence is an uphill battle. They are so ingrained in our collective storytelling; I mean, we can look at how many tropes from Simon’s day are still going strong. That is why I really believe that the critical study of childhood needs to be so much more widespread than it is. It should be as much a part of a humanities and social science based education as critical learnings on gender and race – and then we also really need to help those subjects continue to exist, because all of that is under attack right now. But they’re clearly all connected. The only children of color I discussed here, Miguel and Rocío, require a white savior to rescue them, because it is their own national and cultural surroundings that are depicted as full of caricatured predators. Meanwhile, Kira is not the only child of the clones – Alison has two adopted kids of color – but those two aren’t the ones redeeming lost souls left and right. As for gender, we’ve got girl children paired with tales of sacred motherhood under attack. Childhood does not exist as a category in isolation, and neither do other identity categories exist in isolation of age. To understand any of it, we have to learn about all of it. Hence: public scholarship YouTube channel.

            Another way that we can begin to counter the cultural power of spectacular visions of child suffering is to be aware of and resistant to the inherent objectification of spectacle itself. This, again, is super not easy. Tropes and reproductions and representations are inescapable; they are the language of mass media, and, as our own lives grow more isolated from our communities, they often become the matrix through which we interact with the world, just as Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle. But suffering is a real thing, an embodied phenomenon, not merely spectacle to be consumed. In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt differentiates between compassion and pity: “For compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related” (85). Arendt argues that pity functions by aggregating suffering into a faceless mass, objectifying and de-individualizing suffering people. Though I have discussed specific examples of fictional or fictionalized children, I have also shown the ways in which depictions of their suffering overlap into a cumulative portrait of the capital-C Child: childhood as a mass of symbols, as opposed to real people. However, according to Arendt, true compassion “cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering” (85). Compassion requires rehumanization in order to render suffering into something not just to be beheld, but to be felt. Compassion engenders understanding, meeting someone where they actually are, much more than pity for the spectacle does. So the way we educate about childhood and its tropes and its symbolic power needs to be driven by a desire to replace pity with compassion, because even as we discuss stories about childhood, we must recognize the impacts of these stories on actual kids. And that means that we need to be willing to tear down and examine our most sacred symbols, even in the stories we like. We can’t rest on our laurels as non-QAnoners or whatever the conspiracy du jour is. We need to recognize all the myriad facets of society that reproduce and reflect the shared ideologies of childhood that can so easily turn toxic.

            It’s easy to feel like the hero when you take the child victim’s side against the vast shadowy conspiracy. But hero is as much an abstraction, a mediated representation, as victim or monster. Let’s resist the desire to live within the spectacle and start treating both ourselves and kids as real people.

            I would love to hear your thoughts about this discussion in the comments – what are your observations about childhood and conspiracy stories? How can you spread critical understanding of childhood in your own life? Please let me know! I have to go and turn this script into something roughly a third of its current length to present at the conference, and then I will be back in another two weeks with the now rather long-awaited continuation of the queer child shapeshifter discussion. In the meantime, please give this video a like and subscribe to the channel if you want to join us for future conversations. Also, take a look at my extremely cool new logo, as designed by Chelsea Pro. Link to her in the description, as well. I now have a Patreon, with perks like voting for future monster stories to be included in discussions and exclusive reaction videos; any support I get over there will also go towards the creation of book club mentorship programs for young people. Patrons will also get a chance to join future book clubs, as well! So if any of that interests you, please head on over there – also link in description. If Patreon is not in the cards for you right now, sharing the video is the absolute most helpful thing you can do to help this channel and community continue to grow. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

  • Sound of Freedom, dir. Alejandro Gomez Monteverde (2023)
  • The X-Files, created by Chris Carter (“Christmas Carol” and “Emily,” 1997)
  • Orphan Black, created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett (2013-2017)

References:

kathleenmkellett

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