tunnels, and races and speculating that flying saucers come not from outer space but from this underground world, whence they allegedly reach us through hidden openings in the earth’s surface.
The most influential examples of this genre are a set of science-fiction stories published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories between 1945 and 1948. The stories and their surrounding circumstances came to be known as “the Shaver Mystery,” after their principal author, Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania. Shaver claimed to have been in psychic communication with a subterranean race and to have once physically visited their underground civilization. The “mystery” deals in part with the basis of Shaver’s bizarre claims, and in part with the question of authorship. Some have attributed much of the actual writing, and especially the use of the literary conventions of science fiction, to Shaver’s editor, Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer himself claimed to have written the first Shaver story, based on a ten-thousand-word letter Shaver had sent to Amazing Stories. In an account written during Shaver’s lifetime, Palmer claimed, “While it is true that a great deal of the actual writing of the stories published under Mr. Shaver’s name have been written by me [sic], it has been in an editorial and revisional [sic] capacity, and although the words are different, the facts of the Shaver Mystery are the same and remain original with him.” Shaver himself strongly disputed this account and claimed, “There is very little revision in any of my work, just cutting where it didn’t fit.”24
Regardless of who may have authored the published stories, they took on a life of their own and have come to be treated not as science fiction but as factual accounts. While some writers on the occult, such as Maclellan, regard Shaver’s work as a hoax based on earlier writings such as Bulwer-Lytton’s, an immense Shaver Mystery literature has proliferated, some of it in print but much on the Internet. It has fused with later claims about secret underground bases and tunnels, some of which are alleged to have been constructed by the government and others by alien races. As in so much of the literature from the stigmatized-knowledge domain, complex patterns of cross-referencing and cross-citation have come to be taken as proof. Thus if a claim is made that a contemporary government tunnel system exists, that is deemed to be proof that Shaver was correct, and vice versa. By most accounts Shaver himself believed with absolute conviction in the truthfulness of his stories. This, combined with their appearance in a pulp-fiction venue, served further to blur the already uncertain boundary between fact and fiction.25
STIGMATIZED KNOWLEDGE AND POPULAR CULTURE
The volume and influence of stigmatized knowledge have increased dramatically through the mediation of popular culture. Motifs, theories, and truth claims that once existed in hermetically sealed subcultures have begun to be recycled, often with great rapidity, through popular culture. Although this movement may be observed in a variety of forms, including television and mass-market fiction, the most important and visible venue has been film. Two particularly notable examples are Conspiracy Theory (1997) and The X-Files (1998).
The significance of Conspiracy Theory lies in both the construction of the protagonist and the surprising and dramatic denouement. The protagonist, played by Mel Gibson, gives every indication early in the film of being delusional to the point of paranoia. He lives in a fortresslike apartment, complete with an escape hatch and self-destructive capability. The rooms are a warren of securely locked spaces; even the refrigerator is padlocked. Surrounded as Gibson is by shadowy, imagined enemies, the viewer is surprised by the gradual realization that indeed, there is a conspiracy, one of whose aims is to destroy this lone eccentric who has stumbled across truths that have been successfully concealed from his supposedly normal fellow citizens. In the film’s final frame, the sky above the conspiracy theorist fills with emblematic and all-too-real black helicopters.
The film’s conversion of its seemingly lunatic central character into a seer illuminating the dark side of American life clearly resonated with at least one real-world conspiracy theorist. Michael A. Hoffman II, a Holocaust denier and exponent of multiple conspiracy theories, seemed to find personal vindication as well as a convincing conspiratorial message. The film was, he writes, “a new revelation . . . which restores credibility to the investigators and validates their concerns.” He acknowledges Gibson’s wild, delusional ideas but concentrates on the awareness that while “much of what he says is nonsense . . . the kernel of truth is so potentially lethal that it justifies his paranoia.”26
If Conspiracy Theory implied that militia claims about black helicopters were grounded in reality, conspiratorial preoccupations were presented in a far more detailed and literal fashion in The X-Files motion picture. The film, which grossed $150 million worldwide, joined T-shirts and a veritable library of books and magazines as part of the industry generated by the original television series. While the film contains the expected quota of references to black helicopters and alien abduction, its most striking characteristic is its demonization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Since the 1970s, FEMA has been a target of conspiracy theorists. The film’s principal conspiracy theorist, the ill-fated Dr. Kurzweil, predicts that when the conspirators are ready to strike, the president will declare a “state of emergency. . . . All federal agencies will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—FEMA—the secret government.” This belief, which has circulated widely on the radical right for decades unbeknown to the general population, suddenly was presented to an audience of millions.27
The appearance of conspiracism in major motion pictures signals a major change in the relation between stigmatized and mainstream knowledge claims. The coteries within which stigmatized knowledge was refined and nurtured were traditionally insular and marginalized—the worlds of occultism, alternative science and medicine, sectarian religion, and radical politics among them. These domains were marginalized in part because they were so closely associated with stigmatized knowledge. At the same time, the reverse was also true—some knowledge claims were stigmatized because they were identified with marginal subcultures. Now, however, the boundary between the stigmatized and the mainstream has clearly become more permeable. Themes that once might have been found only in outsider literature or on the more outré Web sites have become the stuff of network television and multimillion-dollar motion pictures.
It may be, as Jodi Dean suggests, that such easy cross-boundary movement has erased any distinction between “consensus reality” (the version promulgated by powerful mainstream institutions) and deviant, alternative realities, including those in which conspiracies figure prominently. On the other hand, as Dean herself concedes, stigmas have not been wholly erased, giving to those who traffic in the forbidden the thrill of the taboo. Thus, for example, “the very stigma makes UFOs and alien abduction seductive, transgressive.” The as-yet-unanswerable question is whether the partial absorption of these ideas by popular culture will increase or decrease their potency and appeal.28
Surely the appearance of conspiracy themes in popular culture at least partially destigmatizes those ideas, by associating them with admired stars and propagating them through the most important forms of mass entertainment. They are sometimes identified with stigmatized sources, as is the case with the strange cabdriver at the center of Conspiracy Theory, who clearly reads publications and pursues issues omost people are unaware of, making them part of his reclusive lifestyle. But at other times, as in The X-Files, the claims may appear strange, but their sources are never identified, other than through tipsters in the film such as Kurzweil. And even Kurzweil is literate, well-spoken, and far better dressed than his fugitive life would lead one to expect.
Popular culture can also reduce the potency of conspiratorial themes by depriving them of some of their allure. Once hidden, they are now revealed. Once intended only for the knowing few, they are now placed before the ignorant many. Once mysterious, they can now appear banal, the building blocks of not particularly distinguished popular entertainments. Those who frequent the domain of stigmatized knowledge do so in part because it confers feelings of chosenness: only we few know the truth.
