ABSTRACT
Roswell knows its moment.2 It knows, moreover, that it knows its moment, for as it narrates the adventures of a group of teenage aliens doing their best to fit into a small community in New Mexico, it at once narrates the contemporary culture of Alien Chic. Roswell, of course, is the holy city of UFOlogy, the alleged site of an infamous flying saucer crash to which all true ‘X-philes’ must make a pilgrimage. There is, in fact, a sense in which the signifier itself has become, as Richard Vine put it in his timely review of the series, ‘an established brand name in what passes for the global counter-culture’.3 And this is precisely where Roswell begins, setting its pilot episode during a week in which the city is due to celebrate the legendary close encounter of 1947. The opening scene takes place in the CrashDown Café-a diner, situated opposite the UFO Center, where staff wearing extraterrestrial badges, aprons and headgear serve ‘alien-themed greasy food’—and sees one of the waitresses asking her customers if they ‘are here for the crash festival’ (a spectacular event, complete with plummeting UFO, which forms the backdrop to the episode’s climax). From the outset, that is to say, Alien Chic makes its presence felt, and the series goes on repeatedly and playfully
to invoke the cultural phenomenon to which it owes its existence.
