Resumo

I propose an authorial study of the American screenwriter Darin Morgan (1966-) concerning his work on “animality” in the television series The X-Files (Chris Carter; 1993-2018). The first step is to show how the author positions himself on a deconstructive margin of The X-Files’ conventions, looking from the outside in, through a register of dark humor and incongruity. This aligns him with a conception of humanity already described in terms of a “compassionate misanthropy” (Kenji Fujishima 2016). It follows that Darin Morgan emulates, as a screenwriter, the zoopoetic protagonism of “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” (2016) and “War of the Coprophages” (1996) – the two episodes focused on here. That is, his animalistic perspective of an other staring at the norm constitutes his idiosyncratic treatment of animals within the series. These episodes are analyzed by crossing them with sci-fi studies in a sort of zoological science fiction – bringing up issues such as xenotransplantation, laboratory/pharmacological guinea pigs, or genetic manipulation. I seek, ultimately, to address the way Morgan depicts our entrails being eaten to the point of estrangement. Whether through a scapegoat lizard-man whose reading can deconstruct and reappropriate the famous reptilian conspiracy theory; or through hypothetically alien/robotic cockroaches that appear to cause an apocalypse. In the first case, the spotlight falls on an anthropomorphic lizard, uninterested in a humanity invisible to him (until he is assailed by a sociopathic human bite). In the other, the leading role is occupied by silent cockroaches facing human stupidity and blindness.