How X-Files' honcho Howard Gordon finally got a chance to inject some Yiddishkeit into the show
THE TRUTH, AS THE MILlions of people worldwide who passionately follow the science-fiction TV series "The X-Files" will attest, is definitely out there. In a recent episode, you could even see it - that is, if you could read Hebrew. The letters aleph, mem and tav, spelling "emet" - "Truth" - were etched on the forehead of a modern-day golem. With that, series executive producer Howard Gordon had fulfilled a dream he'd had, during four years as the show's No. 2 creative power, of imbuing such a mythic creature with life.
The episode, called "Kaddish," began with FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (the half-Jewish David Duchovny) investigating the aftermath of a brutal murder in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A young hasidic shopkeeper, Isaac Luria, had been shot five times at point-blank range. Isaac had been slated to marry Rachel, the daughter of a hasidic ba'al tshuvah, who in his pre-Orthodox life was active in the pre-state Jewish underground the Irgun. Robbery was not a motive. Hate was.
Scully and Mulder show up as the killers themselves begin to perish, one by one, in what Scully argues is a Biblically inspired series of retributive killings. Luria's killers, it turns out, were neo-Nazis acting at the behest of a local Jew-hating printer, who is intent on convincing the world that, among other perfidies, the Jews are responsible for the creation and propagation of the AIDS virus. Scully suspects Rachel's father, Jacob. Mulder, as usual, turns his eye toward a more occult possibility - that someone has unleashed a golem to exact justice.
The Truth may be out there, but as is so often the case with television, Gordon's spin on Jewish metaphysics did not reach the tube without first being run through the network meat grinder. In his original screenplay, Luria's killers were African-Americans. Gordon felt impelled, in the aftermath of what is now regarded as the first American pogrom, in Crown Heights, to deal with black anti-Semitism. But Fox Television believed that black Americans, a key viewing cohort, might take umbrage at Gordon's horror-stricken riff on recent history.
So, the 36-year-old writer from Roslyn, Long Island, reworked his episode, the first in the series' history to focus exclusively on Jewish folklore. A poignant commentary on what Gordon characterizes as a complex and subtle issue became a head-on confrontation between hasidic Jews and that scourge of inner-city American Jewry - Nazism.
Ironically, Gordon, who spoke with The Jerusalem Report in Santa Monica, believes that his episode inadvertently benefited from the network's bureaucratic meddling. "The issue of black anti-Semitism, I came to realize, was much more complex than I was able to give treatment to in this episode," said Gordon. "I needed people who were blank slates, straw dogs of hatred. Their evil or hatred had to be pure. Black anti-Semitism really is a more subtle and supple and complex issue.
"The episode, to me, was ultimately about the power of words. The Golem myth, as I understand it, relates to the power of words in a righteous context. Ultimately, the Golem has come to represent, at least for Jews, a metaphor or symbol of justice in an inherently unjust world - unjust to Jews in particular."
During its four-year rise to cult status and beyond, "The X-Files" series has explored any number of mythic themes, from the shape shifters of the Navajo Indians to the werewolves of Central Europe. Until now, though, Jewish themes had been largely off-limits, most likely because the producers feared the show's general penchant for the graphic and gory might in this case give cause for offense.
Ironically, says Gordon, during his stint on the show a number of writers have submitted Golem story ideas, including David Duchovny's father. Amram Ducovny is a successful playwright, author and former publicist for the American Jewish Committee now living in Paris.
When asked what Mulder's religion might be, Duchovny himself announced some years back that he was "Jewish until further notice."
That notice came when Gordon, in his first episode, in October 1993, placed Mulder in a church seeking closure on the fate of his sister, allegedly abducted by aliens. Indeed, "Mulder" was the maiden name of series creator Chris Carter's mother, and is Dutch. In another episode, however, Mulder experienced a number of past lives, one of which was as a Jewish woman in Poland during the Holocaust.
And in the Golem episode, when the neo-Nazi printer informed Mulder that "you look as if you might be one (a Jew) yourself," Mulder hardly batted an eye. Gordon says the line was an in-house wink at curiosity over Duchovny's ethnic identity. That interest could only have been heightened by a Duchovny ad-lib in the same episode, Mulder's retort to skepticism that the corpse of Luria might have been resurrected, albeit as a Golem. "Why not?" he asks the Nazi. "Another Jew pulled it off 2,000 years ago, no?"
Gordon's own ethnicity, however, has never been a winking matter, he says, and in light of the recent bid by the small-membership, large-voiced Union of Orthodox Rabbis in the United States and Canada to delegitimize Reform and Conservative Judaism and their followers, it remains even less so today.
"THE VERY THING THE Orthodox Union is attacking today is my upbringing," recalls the Flushing, Queens-born Gordon. "My upbringing during the 1960s was straight out of the TV show The Wonder Years.'" Gordon's father, now deceased, was a dentist; his mother, a high school guidance counselor. The family belonged to Roslyn's Reform Temple Sinai. Gordon celebrated his bar mitzvah, was confirmed, and visited Israel twice during high school.
Gordon's undergraduate years were spent at Princeton, where he studied writing with Joyce Carol Oates, and wrote a prize-winning thesis novel about two brothers whose parents were killed by a terrorist bomb in Israel.
Gordon had a writing partner in school, Alex Gansa, and after getting drunk one night, they piled into a car and headed from New Jersey to Los Angeles to try their hands at screenwriting, giving up plans to attend graduate school.
"I think marriage, war and coming to Hollywood are the three things you're better off doing when you're young," Gordon noted when asked if he had experienced any trepidation at the prospect of breaking into the entertainment industry. The partners sustained themselves by tutoring affluent youngsters for their college-admission exams; within a short time they had 300 clients per semester.
For particularly bright Hollywood aspirants, he explains, this kind of endeavor beats waiting on tables hands down. The money is excellent, the hours short, and the clientele can open doors, which is exactly what happened to Gordon. A student who knew of his starts at screenwriting recommended the pair to her father, who looked at their work and hired them to work on a new series based on some Robert Parker mysteries.
The show was "Spencer for Hire," and after a few years writing for it, in the mid-80s, they moved on to establish a cult favorite, CBS-TV's "Beauty and the Beast." During the next three years, they would become producers, experience that would stand Gordon and Gansa in good stead later on "The X-Files."
"By then we were pretty high in the food chain," Gordon recalls, "so we did our own pilot for ABC. It didn't go anywhere, but it did bring us to the attention of Chris Carter, who took us on as supervising producers."
There are two kinds of "X-Files" episodes, explains Gordon. The first belongs to the "X-Files" mythology, and generally involves a long-running narrative thread about UFOs, aliens, genetic experiments with human DNA, and government efforts to sustain a cover-up about all of the above. These, says Gordon, have largely become Carter's bailiwick.
The second type of show, which Gordon prefers to write, is the stand-alone episode, and often deals with emotional issues. The Golem episode was clearly such a show. "One of the challenges," recounts Gordon, "was not just creating a monster, but one with identity. The idea of the Golem as Mud Man' would have been extremely silly. But in my own reading of texts beyond the obvious authorities like Gershom Scholem, I discovered that the Golem actually came from early resurrection myths as well as 11th- and 12th-century stories.
"These gave me the idea of someone separated in death from a loved one, and trying to bring them back with all the best intentions. I was interested in the hubris of that - of going into God's domain, whether you're creating life from mud or re-animating someone who is dead. The fact that Rachel had a relationship with the Golem made him a more interesting character."
Reaction to the episode, which ran in the U.S. in February (and in Israel in April), was heated, says Gordon, with some of the most vociferous responses from Orthodox Jews who asked, among other things, how he could have let Scully be so insensitive as to wander into the men's section of a synagogue unimpeded. One fan, more interestingly, suggested that "by giving the Jews the ability to create a Golem, I was actually fostering the myth of Jew trickery. It's an interesting possibility, but vastly overstated," says Gordon. "The fact is, on this show, you get slammed no matter what you do."
If so, fans may soon no longer have Howard Gordon to kick around anymore. The producer has a new baby at home, and wants to spend more time with his family. He is tired and more than a little burned out by the endless commuting between Los Angeles, where the production office is located, and Vancouver, Canada, where the series is shot. "I think this may be my last season," he says.
I asked Gordon whether, after four years on the series, he might be able to shed some light on what the show - or at least its evolving "mythology" - is really all about. "You must be kidding. I've been on it since the start and I still have no idea what it all means."