A Sort of Homecoming
A Sort of Homecoming
Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage
She says nobody wants to believe
You’re the same as everyone.
What makes me unique? My dark life.
… And you think you’re a guest, you’re a tourist at best
Peering into the corners of your dark life
—Elvis Costello, “My Dark Life” from Songs in the Key of X
A back alley in Vancouver. A road tunnel in Los Angeles. A gravestone in Guildford. A mock-up of the Rover’s Return pub. Graceland. The study of fan pilgrimages is sufficiently established for us readily to accept the idea that some dedicated followers of cultural texts or icons—in the above cases, The X-Files, Blade Runner, Lewis Carroll, Coronation Street, and Elvis Presley—will travel across the world to often mundane places that fandom has made sacred and special (see, respectively, Hills 2002; Brooker 2005b; Brooker 2005a; Couldry 2000; King 1993). But the idea that watching television constitutes a “symbolic pilgrimage” may still prompt a sceptical response. Such is Roger Aden’s assertion in his chapter “Transforming the Panopticon into the Funhouse: Negotiating Disorientation in The X-Files”(1999: 149).
Aden makes grand claims about fan viewing, presenting the experience of sitting down to watch The X-Files as symbolic pilgrimage—a trip without drugs, a journey and return without leaving the easy chair. Fans, according to Aden, leave their structured, everyday environment to enter Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully’s diegesis—a fictional world that echoes the panoptic control of normal working life, yet allows a playful exploration of these structures and always includes, at the end of the episode, the reassurance of an exit. The show’s panoptic environment of surveillance and control is a pleasurably threatening but safe simulation; a “funhouse” where viewers test themselves, scare themselves, and equip themselves with coping strategies for the real structures of social life. Aden has no hesitation in describing this psychological immersion and return from the show’s fictional world in the same terms as physical, geographical pilgrimage, relating it to the tripartite structure used by Victor and Edith Turner (after Arnold Van Gennep):
Each trip to the funhouse is a new yet ritualistic experience for both the agents [Mulder and Scully] and their vicarious partners, the fans. In fact, the show’s recurring form mirrors the pilgrim’s journey as described by Edith Turner: […] “(1) separation (the start of the journey), (2) the liminal stage (the journey itself, the sojourn at the shrine, and the encounter with the sacred) and (3) reaggregation (the homecoming).” (Aden 1999: 152)
My main intention in this chapter is to explore the validity of terms such as “symbolic pilgrimage” to describe the experience of viewing a TV show. I discuss metaphors of interior journey, then examine the testimonies of my own X-Files fan sample in terms of the tripartite structure Aden takes from Van Gennep through Turner, and Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow.” In the third and fourth sections, I explore two further issues raised by this case study: whether a lack of fellow travelers—a lack of physical, spiritual, or virtual connection with other people—impoverishes the pilgrimage, and what difference it makes when the symbolic pilgrimage is not a trip into the unknown but an immersion in a familiar fiction where the protagonists are old friends. Ultimately, I suggest that instead of treating symbolic pilgrimage as a separate category, we should ask whether all geographical pilgrimage in fact involves a degree of conceptual, inner, symbolic travel.
Traveling without Moving
The whole concept of TV viewers as pilgrims, entering a different state that qualifies as a journey, albeit “symbolic,” may initially sound farfetched. When we consider a Lord of the Rings fan making the trip from Britain to the New Zealand film locations, the word “pilgrim” comes more easily, but does a fan sitting in his or her own domestic environment, watching a screen—even though we readily grant the fan the status of an active viewer rather than a passive receiver—really deserve such associations of adventure?
Aden uses the metaphor repeatedly and without qualms: “just what in the series spawns the pilgrimages of X-philes is difficult to pinpoint” (1999: 151), viewers “accompany the agents on their journey” (1999: 153), “fans leave their homes to enter the invisible liminoid aura surrounding The X-Files”(1999:162).
Though this language of physical journey seems unusual when applied to TV viewing, the idea of traveling without moving has various precedents in religion and anthropology. Alan Morinis’s study, Sacred Journeys, opens with the reminder that it is “questionable to distinguish between terrestrial and ‘metaphorical’ pilgrimages. This distinction portrays the earthly journey as somehow more real, when, in fact, most cultures subsume physical journeys and other quests into one more inclusive category: the spiritual life is a pilgrimage” (1992: 4). Morinis includes in his discussion of “nongeographical goings-forth” (1992: 2) the “inner pilgrimage” to sacred places within the mind and body, practiced by Hindu mystics (1992: 3), and the celestial “Vrndavana of the mind,” the city inhabited by Krishna that devotees can “visit” through perfect prayer.
As already indicated, Aden’s notion that fans “travel” while engrossed in the show is tied to Victor Turner’s anthropological structure of pilgrimage—yet that structure refers, in both Turner and Van Gennep’s work, not specifically to pilgrimage but to a more general “rite of passage.” Turner describes rites de passage, after Van Gennep, as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” (Turner 1969: 94; see Van Gennep 1960: vii). Although the word “passage” of course implies journey, a change of place is only one of the possible transitions connoted by the phrase, and the shifts from one state to another that Turner describes are by no means exclusively physical. When, for instance, he writes in The Ritual Process of the ritual subject in Zambian tribal culture as a “passenger,” “passing through a cultural realm” (1969: 94), the individual may be going physically no further than to a shelter a mile from his village, though symbolically the ritual may involve a transit from boy to man, man to chief.
This notion of passage as a spiritual and symbolic state rather than a literal movement can be identified in Christianity, as well as African tribal culture. Turner notes that “traces of the passage quality of the religious life remain in such formulations as: ‘The Christian is a stranger to the world, a pilgrim, a traveller, with no place to rest his head.’ Transition has here become a permanent condition” (1969: 107). Indeed, in his later work with Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Turner describes physical travel to a sacred shrine as a second-best, layman’s substitute for the “interior salvific journeys” practiced only by “monastic contemplatives and mystics” (Turner & Turner 1978: 7).
Another promising metaphor of interior travel can be found in Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of “flow experience,” which shaped Turner’s later work and also explicitly informs Aden’s study. Flow, in this context, is the pleasurable sensation of losing oneself in an activity—work, a game, a physical or mental challenge—and becoming immersed, with everything perfectly meshing in a harmonious state where goals are set and satisfyingly met. Time contracts or stretches, and the individual merges with the activity, totally absorbed.
This sense of immersion, where the everyday is transcended and the participant enters a different state of being, a form of communion with a text, with a process, and sometimes with other participants, seems to offer a productive approach to the experience of watching television: in particular, the more intense viewing practiced by fans with their favored shows. Aden uses the term in this sense when he describes the “deep sense of involvement” reported by X-Files fans as similar to the “‘flow experiences reported by pilgrims.”
However, in applying Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” to television fandom, Aden ignores the fact that Csikszentmihalyi does not merely fail to mention TV viewing in his discussion of flow activities; he deliberately excludes it, denying it any such potential and only referring to it as a negative example, a contrast to more worthwhile practices. Reading is, to Csikszentmihalyi, “the most often mentioned flow activity around the world,” and studying a work of art can transport the viewer symbolically to “a separate reality” (2002: 118–19). Sex and eating can be transformed from biological urges into flow experience with the right kind of discipline and discrimination (2002: 101, 114). Even trench warfare and criminal activity such as vandalism or joyriding are, according to Csikszentmihalyi’s respondents, potential sources of flow (2002: 68). Yet Csikszentmihalyi refuses to discuss television viewing as anything but a passive, brainless, numbing act. “Watching TV is far from being a positive experience—people generally report feeling passive, weak, rather irritable, and sad when doing it” (2002: 169). In order to apply Csikszentmihalyi’s concept to a fan’s immersion in his or her favorite show, we have to negotiate this prejudice and find, as I later suggest, a loophole in his damning ruling against television viewing as flow experience.
I Want to Believe
Aden’s study is based primarily on a textual analysis of ten episodes from X-Files seasons 1 and 4, and interviews carried out in person and by email with fans. The viewer feedback, however, is not extensively used, and fan voices only emerge occasionally through the discussion of theory, narrative, and character. I want to address that here by giving more space to viewer response. My own data are drawn from a survey (thirty questions, inviting lengthy qualitative replies) submitted to thirteen X-Files fans, recruited from the Xfiles community of Livejournal.com. While the sample is small-scale, the responses were rich, sometimes running to several pages for each question. These data can, of course, only be suggestive of possible trends, but the fan voices are intriguing nonetheless.
First, we can return to Van Gennep’s tripartite structure of a rite of passage. In Aden’s application of the theory, this involves a separation from the habitus, the “panopticon-like culture” of postindustrial culture with its “constant surveillance,” employment and financial insecurities, and controlling social structures (1999: 160). The second stage of pilgrimage involves an in-between, liminal transit, away from home but not yet at the “promised land,” the sacred site that marks the pilgrim’s goal:
Once we are immersed in the liminoid flow of watching The X-Files, fans such as myself can begin the rhetorical process of constructing a symbolic community that offers an outpost for transcending the habitus. In this case our construction efforts build a community that exists in between the real and unreal, with faith generating the bonds of connection. (1999: 165)
Aden’s two references to the blurred boundaries between real and fictional worlds repeat the theme of ambiguity and liminality, while the viewer’s involvement in the fictional world is characterized as “immersion” in “flow.” This latter term is, of course, a reference to Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of “optimal experience,” the state of being pleasurably lost in an activity to the extent that the outside world drops away, and the individual meshes perfectly with his or her goals (1999: 164). It also implies a state of ambiguity and being between, as flow experience, like liminality, seems to contract and expand time, and combines the paradoxes of structure and freedom, work and effortlessness, individual achievement and a sense of community.
Aden’s respondents are briefly cited to support his argument that the X-Files viewing experience is immersive, which in turn helps indirectly to justify his use of terms like “journey,” “trip,” and “traveling.” Aden’s interview subject Sandy emails, “While I’m watching, I’m only involved with the show and don’t do anything else” (1999: 164). Other fans tell Aden that they “control their material environments to make the move to the symbolic even easier”—that is, they turn off the lights, “enhancing the distinction between being materially positioned in a living room to being symbolically ensconced in a liminoid flow” (1999: 164). Finally, Aden’s subjects shut out interruptions, telling their mothers not to call during the show or ignoring telephones and doorbells so as not to disturb the “flow experience” (1999: 164).
Our initial response to this passage may well be skeptical; a single quotation from Sandy, who doesn’t do anything else when the show is on, seems quite a stretch away from providing convincing evidence that watching The X-Files qualifies as immersion in liminality. The other half of Sandy’s testimony, in fact, suggests that a more half-hearted, absent-minded involvement with the show is equally likely: “I watch The X-Files by myself, while my husband works on the computer and listens to it.”
However, my own respondents went some way towards justifying Aden’s characterization of the viewing experience as absorption in flow, and even as a metaphorical “trip.” Eleven of the thirteen fans I asked reported that they felt “anticipation” or “excitement” just prior to an unfamiliar episode, comparable perhaps to the enjoyable nerves a traveler might feel before setting off on a journey. Twenty-three-year-old Schally’s response was typical:
When the show was airing on television I would often get a little nervous before the second or third part of a multipart episode because those had invariably ended at an unpleasant cliffhanger the week before and I was usually worried about the characters. The season four finale “Gethsemane” absolutely killed me. I was very worried about Mulder and extremely anxious about the upcoming season premier. I used to also get very excited about episodes that had had particularly funny or suspenseful teasers the week before.
The fact that most episodes now are familiar to X-philes, and the difference this makes to their viewing experience, will be discussed below; as will be evident, the respondents often made a distinction between watching for the first time and reacquainting themselves with a favorite installment.
“Trip,” of course, has a double meaning of drug-induced-trance, and a number of responses suggested that this dual connotation may be appropriate. Only one respondent, 41-year-old Steve, stated explicitly that his preparation for watching The X-Files involved getting “hammered (ie. indulge in alcohol and drugs),” but Schally spoke of her “cravings” for the show, and Seoirse, a 29-year-old woman, described it as “like an addiction for me. If I catch an episode on TV […] it starts this cycle of needing to watch at least 6 episodes before I’m satisfied.” Maddy Martin, aged twenty-one, talked about becoming “annoyed and fidgety” if she was called away from an episode to work; Katherine, aged seventeen, exclaimed, “I always feel like watching another—they are addictive!”; and Bellefleur, aged twenty-nine, confessed a “withdrawal feeling” during the week while waiting for the next installment. Thirty-year-old Jamie’s observation that if the flow of the episode is interrupted, “I tend to lose interest […] it feels as though the ‘magic’ is lost” also carries overtones of a ritualized trance state.
Some form of preparation ritual is not uncommon among media fans, and this often seems to approach an act of communion, a symbolic activity that removes the participant from the everyday and brings him or her closer to the fiction. To draw two examples from my own research, listening to the soundtrack CD and wearing an authentically “distressed” Capeside t-shirt before an episode of Dawson’s Creek (Brooker 2004: 572), or dressing up for a Star Wars home screening in Queen Amidala lipstick with Leia hair-buns while feasting on “Wookiee Cookies” and “Yoda Soda” (Brooker 2002: 35) are both forms of bonding with the text, taking the fan a little way out of normal structures and arguably into a liminal border zone between the real world and the diegesis, where the viewer eats the same snacks or wears the same outfits as the characters on screen. The Twin Peaks cultists who gathered religiously for a new episode with cherry pie and coffee, and the “Dinner & Dynasty” meetings of the 1980s (Fiske 1987: 71) provide a further example of this ritualized viewing; most recently, fans of the BBC time-travel cop show Life on Mars (2006) celebrated its season 1 finale by eating 1970s-style Viscount biscuits and spaghetti hoops.
Aden’s X-philes described turning out the lights, unplugging the phones, and creating an appropriate environment for undisturbed passage into “flow”; each of my respondents independently testified to a similar routine. Seoirse made this ceremonial aspect explicit: “Before, when there were still new episodes, I would unplug the phone, switch of all the lights and make myself a pot of tea—it’s a ritual!” The common practice among these respondents was notable, with six of the thirteen mentioning that they turn off or unplug telephones, and seven preferring to watch The X-Files in the dark.
I usually watch the show right before I go to sleep, Lights off, door shut, so on. (Schally)
A lot of the people I watch episodes with prefer to watch it in the dark: all lights out and curtains drawn. When the show used to be on TV, I had to ignore my phone, ignore my parents, and I was unable to draw my gaze from the TV screen. (Maddy Martin)
When it was on the BBC it was a case of turning out the lights […] getting away for the fifty or so minutes of the programme. (Jamie)
In part, this may be an attempt to transform the domestic viewing environment into a kind of home cinema, with the screen as main focus. The preference for dimmed lights or total darkness could also be related to the horror and suspense aspects of The X-Files; this creation of a setting particularly conducive to “flow” may be shaped by the genre and the need for an appropriately spooky setting.
Already we can see that the fans’ language suggests immersion and journey. Maddy’s gaze is fixed on the screen for almost an hour, as if hypnotized, while Jamie speaks of “getting away,” clearly conveying the idea of a “trip” and departure from the everyday world. This terminology is particularly appropriate to a show that, in addition to the geographical journeys and emotional quests of its protagonists, frequently returns to the motif of alien abduction.
These experiences of partial to total absorption were typical of the responses I received. “On good episodes,” Schally became “completely engrossed in the show.” Jamie stated that “the show makes you forget the real world in its opening moments,” while Seoirse and Katherine Woodruff were both “completely involved.” Kevin, aged fifty-one, entered the story-world through a main character: “I identify with Mulder in particular and so feel totally immersed […] often very moved by it, always thrilled by it.”
Those fans who qualified their replies nevertheless felt enough connection with the fiction for it to prompt a dramatic emotional response. Steve reported, “I lose myself, but not to the extent of forgetting the real world,” yet added, “I’ve felt the whole range of emotions, ranging from extreme joy to anger”; and Ceruleanjen, aged twenty-two, stressed that she was always aware of her “real” surroundings as she watched the show, but continued, “if something sad happens I might cry […] nothing out of the ordinary.”
Ten respondents echoed Jamie’s comment that external distractions broke the spell of the X-Files; disruption often riled them to hostility. “I really don’t like it” (Schally), “I was never happy about interruption” (Bellefleur), “It has happened—and I’m not pleased when it does!” (Kevin), “It would greatly annoy me” (Chantal), “I hated being interrupted […] I responded with anger” (Steve). Again, these reports tally with Aden’s theory of viewers becoming “enmeshed in flow experiences while consuming popular stories.”
We should also note the echoes of Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” experience. The sensations described by his research subjects, from mountaineers through chess and basketball players to dancers—“that’s all that matters” (2002: 58), “it becomes your total world” (58), “your concentration is very complete” (52), “the concentration is like breathing—you never think of it” (53), “your comrades are there, but you all feel the same way anyway, you’re all in it together” (40)—tally closely with the reports from these fans at the moment of closest engagement with their favored show. It seems even more perverse in this context that Csikszentmihalyi takes such an outdated view of television, excluding its potential for active involvement; although he does unwittingly provide a gap where his theory can be levered open to include certain forms of viewing.
Csikszentmihalyi dismissively compares television with a “drug” (2002: 169) that “keeps the mind from having to face depressing thoughts,” but then allows that drugs can only produce optimal experience, or flow, when used “in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies.” Unsurprisingly, he declines to consider the possibility that television viewing could bear any similarities to the ceremonial trances of shamans and priests, but this chink in his condemnation offers some space for a reevaluation of ritualistic fan viewing as a source of flow experience.
You’re the Same As Everyone—What Makes Me Unique?
So far, the testimonies of my respondents tend to support Aden’s characterization of immersive viewing as a transition to a world “between the real and unreal” (1999: 165), “a sacred place where ‘real’ time and space are excluded” (1999: 164). Another integral aspect of this journey away from the immediate, material surroundings into a liminal state is “connection with a spiritual community of others […] as vicarious participants in the stories” (1999: 166–67). Just as the fans’ journey, in Aden’s account, does not involve physical movement from the sofa, so the community is also symbolic, and can take place even if the individual is sitting alone. “Despite watching the show by themselves, they feel attached to the community of nonpresent viewers” (1999: 168).
This congregation, an invisible network uniting fellow fans—dependent in part on traditional schedule-based broadcasting, so the viewer can imagine millions of others doing the same thing at the same time—unites individual viewers, according to Aden, in a kind of intellectual elite. My respondents, as members of Livejournal’s Xfiles community, were part of a virtual, invisible network that enabled them to communicate with other fans instantaneously, across geographical distance. However, few of them mentioned community as a major aspect of their pleasure in the show. Several stated that they kept their X-Files enthusiasm mainly to themselves and felt no close connection with like-minded viewers, whether physically (in real life), virtually (through the internet), or, in Aden’s sense of communion with nonpresent fellow travelers, spiritually. Some expressed regret that the most vibrant and rewarding period in the show’s fandom was now lost in nostalgic memory:
I think it would have been cool to have been one of the ardent online fans back in the show’s early broadcast days in the US. I’ve never really met anyone who has more than a casual interest in the show, which is a shame. (Nina)
The fact that the show is now complete and finished, having reached its final closure—it ran over nine seasons, from September 1993 to May 2002—may make all the difference; when fans watch their DVDs or videos now, they have the convenience of deciding how long their “journey” is and when it starts and finishes, but have lost the sense that they are undertaking it at the same time as a nationwide community, undergoing the same or similar experiences during the same time scale. Katherine, like Nina, mourned this loss: “I would love to talk about it with other people—I’m desperate for fellow Philes!”
Communitas is discussed by Turner as a significant aspect of the transition from everyday frameworks into liminality, and back again with an enhanced status or understanding. “In rites de passage, men are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalised by their experience of communitas” (1969: 129). His quotation from Martin Buber—“community is the being no longer side by side […] but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere […] a flowing from I to Thou” (Buber 1961: 51, cited in Turner 1969:127)—reminds us of Csikszentmihalyi’s respondents describing the single purpose of a group in “flow”: “your comrades are there, but you all feel the same way anyway, you’re all in it together” (2002: 40).
However, while the lack of perceived connection with fellow fans, even on a virtual or spiritual level, may impoverish the sense of communion to some extent—Nina expresses regret for the loss of an intense sharing, and Katherine is desperate for a bond with others—a pleasurable immersion in liminality, outside normal space and time, does not seem dependent on the company of others. Csikszentmihalyi’s testimonies of flow experience include competitive activities like chess, public debate, hurdling, and tennis, where the player is usually pitted against an opponent rather than moving as one with a team, and solitary pursuits like rock climbing, solo ocean cruising, music composing, and orchard tending (2002: 53–59). Community is clearly not a requirement of the total immersion and connection Csikszentmihalyi describes.
In my own work on geographical pilgrimages to the Blade Runner locations of Los Angeles, my respondents reflected on the lack of potential for community bonding with fellow fans, partly because of the key sites’ multiple coding as everyday utilities (the Second Street road tunnel, Union Station) or architectural landmarks (the Bradbury Building, the Ennis-Brown house) and the lack of any organized Blade Runner pilgrimage culture. One fan reported that “the group I toured [the Ennis-Brown house] with were all fans of its architect, Frank Lloyd-Wright”; another complained that “I actually tried to shoot a short film at Union Station, but the Grand Concourse was booked solid with weddings and stuff”(Brooker 2005b: 24).
However, these obstacles failed to prevent even these cynical fans from expressing some sense of wonder and immersion: “If a movie is like a dream, then standing in an actual location is like stepping into the dream. There’s a weird kind of energy to it” (Brooker 2005b: 25). The feeling of connection is not with other fans, but with the fiction; with Rick Deckard and Los Angeles 2019. It is a need for connection with the text, not with fellow travelers, that motivated my respondents to take photographs and shoot digital video from the precise angles Ridley Scott used, in an attempt to capture the fictional space of the film. This is the same impulse we see in the photographs of Star Wars pilgrims who painstakingly seek out the exact dune framed for a shot of Tatooine, and place themselves into the fictional world by striking the pose Mark Hamill adopted in the 1977 movie. This, too, is the impulse behind websites that place precisely composed images of contemporary San Francisco streets alongside screen-grabs from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), pinpointing the location and direction of Hitchcock’s camera, and pilgrims’ photographs of Vancouver that echo The X-Files’s shots of a hotel, a bridge, a Skytrain overpass. As Sandvoss writes of pilgrims to Graceland and the Coronation Street set, “the emotional significance of visiting fan places lies in the ability of fans to put themselves physically into the otherwise textual universe” (2005a: 61).
These pilgrims are not necessarily bonding with others like them; they are bonding with Luke Skywalker, Scottie and Madeleine, Mulder and Scully. Remember in this context how Kevin and Schally described themselves as becoming immersed in the text through an emotional identification with Fox Mulder. Chantal described the characters as “old friends,” a term repeated by Nina: “I am sitting down with old friends; I know they are not going to let me down.” As already noted, Aden suggests that viewers “accompany the agents on their journeys” (1999: 153); Bellefleur echoes this idea that the characters, rather than other fans, can be a viewer’s fellow travelers. “They take the audience on a journey, or Mulder takes Scully on a journey and thus the audience along with her.” Fans can achieve a sense of belonging by entering on their own into the familiar world of the text, and a sense of companionship from reuniting with characters they know almost as family.
A Sort of Homecoming
Fan viewing of The X-Files has changed since Aden’s research. Seven of my thirteen respondents made a distinction between watching new and unfamiliar episodes, which for them was now only a nostalgic memory, and their current practice of re-viewing the show on DVD and video, or catching a repeated episode by chance on TV. In the latter case, the experience was entirely different. Kevin spoke of feeling “just reassured because it’s familiar […] I could have a really bad day, and pop in an episode”; Maddy expressed her feelings of “relaxation, assurance, happiness—I am always cheered up.” To Chantal, episodes now are “a much more relaxing experience[. …] I really miss the excitement of having unfamiliar episodes,” and Nina, as already shown, used similar terms: “I feel relaxed and reassured. I am sitting down with old friends; I know they are not going to let me down.”
Is “pilgrimage” still the right word for these reassuring, therapeutic, cheering sessions with familiar guides and confidantes? Revisiting one of Mulder and Scully’s old journeys evokes a nostalgic trip to the known past, like an evening with old diaries and holiday videos, rather than an expedition into the unknown. Should pilgrimage not involve more sense of effort, struggle, trial, and test, and imply a transit away from the homely towards the sacred? How can an immersion in both physical and emotional comfort, a session with “old friends,” be discussed alongside the ordeal of pilgrims at St. Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg, where sleepand food-deprived visitors must repeat night-long circuits along stony paths, repeating scores of Hail Marys and Our Fathers? (Turner 1978: 119).
Alan Morinis, while embracing the concept of inner, or nongeographical, pilgrimage alongside more traditional, physical journeys, suggests that a factor in all pilgrimage must be a passage from one pole (which he lists as familiar, known, human, social) to the other (mysterious, divine, ideal, perfect); a movement between the “all-too-known” and the “unknown” (1992: 25–26). These fan testimonies of watching The X-Files in its current form—and the same must be true of every show that has passed from the excitement of weekly installments through finale to DVD archive—clearly describe the first pole, the origin point, but with no apparent transit to a destination. Although the experience of an unfamiliar episode—an hour of anticipation, tears, joy, and anger, which encourages the viewers to question what they know, strengthens or challenges their spiritual faith, invites them to sympathize with villains and believe in the inexplicable—could fit within this structure of oppositions, cosy re-encounters with a familiar show would be a more difficult case to argue.
The answer lies in a revisiting of what pilgrimage means. The case of Lough Derg is a particularly extreme example of physical deprivation and committed faith, but the performance of apparently endless stations, devotions, and circuits on jagged rock and in rain, with only lake water and dry bread for consolation, offers its pilgrims a remarkable feeling of comfort. Lough Derg is a center for Irish nationalism, and many of those who make the devotional trip are overseas Irish, connecting, though they have left their everyday environments behind, with a powerful sense of homeland. Turner quotes a 1944 volume on the pilgrimage that stresses the deep pleasures in the physical punishment: “Most pilgrims develop for this rocky island and its harsh routine an affection that really defies explanation. Again and again they return to it with a gaiety, an uplifting of the heart, a profound sense of relief, in short the very sentiments proper to homecoming after life-long exile” (Curtayne, quoted in Turner 1969: 124).
This experience of pilgrimage as a homecoming—a sense of rejoining a community, even if the individual travels far from home—is, Turner notes, also central to other cultures, such as the Guadalupe pilgrimage with its importance to Mexican ethnic identity (1969: 125); we might consider the Islamic hajj to Mecca in the same context. However, the feeling of belonging to a community is not confined to nation and race. Sandvoss, writing of football supporters and media followers, suggests that fandom “best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call ‘home,’ to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat” (2005a: 64).
The association of a sacred place of fandom with belonging helps contextualize the practice and experience of fan pilgrims. The visitors to Graceland in King’s 1993 account “have travelled thousands of miles, from Japan, from Europe and now from Russia” but now experience “a feeling of shared purpose” in candle-lit vigil and quiet devotion, where Elvis impersonators “greet each other solemnly” (King 1993: 102–3). Similarly, Doss describes Graceland as “the most visible public place where they can comfortably and collectively express their private feelings for Elvis” (1992: 90). The Lewis Carroll Society of Great Britain returns regularly to Charles Dodgson’s birthplace in Daresbury and grave in Guildford: though reserved, their testimonies are invested with emotional connection. “One gets a bit closer to the man and his time by being in places associated with him”; “Seeing where it all began, Daresbury Parsonage, was very affecting” (Brooker 2005a: 282).
They depart from their own habitus and the frameworks of everyday life, but those who travel to the homes or final resting places of Presley and Carroll experience their destinations as familiar, safe, places of communion and reassurance. The terms Morinis associates with the two poles of pilgrimage’s origin and destination should therefore be adjusted: though the destination point does carry, as Morinis suggests, the values of “perfect ideal,” that ideal can also be bound up with the “familiar,” the “known,” the “human” and “social” (1992: 26).
In Sandvoss’s conception of Heimat, the feeling of belonging can operate at a conceptual level, as well as in physical space. The latter offers a deeper, more intense experience—offering “the rare opportunity to relocate in space a profound sense of belonging which has otherwise shifted into the textual space of media consumption”—but Heimat can also signify a “symbolic, personal space” (2005a: 64). So, just as football fans describe both their club (as a concept) and its stadium (the physical place) in the same terms of security, stability, and warmth, so entering the textual world of The X-Files can provide what Sandvoss terms a “mobile Heimat,” less profound than standing where Mulder stood and inserting oneself into the fiction, but nevertheless a sense of returning, of immersion in a place of belonging, that fits the broader definition of pilgrimage.
During this research, I undertook a journey of my own. Despite my own initial resistance to Aden’s treatment of TV viewing as metaphorical travel, a revisiting of pilgrimage’s connotations—combined with the testimonies of viewers engaged in the same fandom as Aden’s respondents—convinced me that this ritualized, immersive TV viewing common to fan practice can qualify as “symbolic pilgrimage.”
As a final note, I would go further, and suggest that “symbolic pilgrimage” is more than just a subcategory of or poor cousin to “real,” geographical journeys, offering a fainter taste of the same sensations and a shallower sense of connection. In fact, symbolic immersion and psychological leaps of faith are integral to many, perhaps the majority, of geographical media pilgrimages. When a fan visits Union Station, Los Angeles, it takes significant imagination and investment to transform this busy, modern railway hub into the dingy police headquarters of Blade Runner. Hills admits that the Vancouver sites of X-Files pilgrimage are “banal: a back-street alleyway, a university building, a shopping precinct escalator” (2002: 149). Cavicchi describes Springsteen fans visiting an ordinary house in New Jersey: “No big deal, you know. Could have been anyone’s house. (pause) But it was Bruce’s house” (1998: 171). Even Graceland, Doss observes, is a “mundane mansion,” unremarkable in itself: “well, gee, Graceland’s not that grand and Elvis’s guitar-shaped swimming pool is awfully teeny” (1992: 23). These places are made special for the most part through their symbolic value, serving as a physical, earthly focus for something greater and intangible. This is what Sandvoss, drawing on Edward Relph, calls “‘other-directedness,’ places not experienced in and for themselves but in reference to absent codes and symbols” (2005a: 58). The alley, the grave, the stadium, the station may seem mundane to non-fans; but once the pilgrim has made the geographical journey, he or she makes an internal leap (“this is where Deckard stood … this is where Carroll lies”) that completes the connection and enables communion. Just as a fan may “travel” metaphorically without moving to a place of belonging, so fans who travel physically may well, at their destination, still have a symbolic journey ahead of them.