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Part 1 Part 2 Part 3   Part 4 Reframing Violence Just before the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, David Miller pointed out that since the end of World War I in 1918, ‘[t]he guiding light of British policy […] has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics. This was managed quite successfully until 1968, when the North exploded on to television screens around the world. Since then, British policy has been directed to containing the “troubles”’. 1 The constructed concept of the ‘Troubles’ – a term which connotes a containable and manageable group of homogenous events – was coined by the British press in the 1980s and spread into common parlance. All the while, that parallel containment of the conflict in politics and journalism, Miller continues, emphasized the ‘criminality’ of the Irish Republican Army which, as Miller points out, only served to raise the ‘news value’ of the political violence (pp. 2–3). What it also achieved, ...

*Spoilers ahoy* I can’t remember how it came up in conversation, but himself indoors didn’t believe me that there had been a second X-Files movie. Although he watched the show when it was first broadcast, he has clearly never been an ‘X-phile’. His lack of awareness of the film is perhaps indicative of the show’s continuing cult status. Even when I informed him that my DVD copy was in our house, he remained sceptical. Upon returning home, I produced the undeniable evidence. He decided that it was the next film we should watch, so we did the following evening. We had to pause a few times so I could catch him up and explain a few in-jokes planted for the fans, e.g., why Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) share a bed, the pencils in the office ceiling, and so on.  It had been quite a while since I last viewed the film, probably not since I got the DVD when it came out, and some aspects niggle at me now that I’ve had critical distance from it and ...