I want to believe (in God)

The premier pic that says it all.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe
2008

It’s 1995, and I’m watching X-Files with my parents, while my dad (who was one of the five people watching from the very first episode) explains the backstory. Three years later, it’s a half-dozen college students crowded around a 10-inch dorm room tv, and I’m the one explaining where Scully got her implant and why Mulder’s so funny about his father. In 2002, I’m watching the finale on mute while talking on the phone and looking up Buffy trivia online.

I re-lived all of this recently when we came to possess the entire X-Files run and blew through them in a month. The husband and I compared the memories it brought up, mine aging along with the show, his scattershot as they were caught in nonlinear UK airings. We agreed that if anything captured the gestalt of the mid- and late-90s, it was X-Files: the paranoia and suspicion that came with the communication explosion of the internet’s unattractive adolescent years, along with the righteous attitude that us ordinary people had the right, even responsibility, to investigate our power structures.

The show followed to arc of the times. First, the excitement and cost of venturing where unquestioning citizens feared to tread, all new information tempered by the loss of safety, health, and loved ones. Next, the winking postmodern self-parodies that deconstruct the patterns and the show’s intensely loyal audience, interspersed with straight episodes that expect to be taken as seriously as the first season’s. Finally, the disintegration of intellectual irony and recreational scepticism as religious terrorism took the nation’s focus, with the alien and government conspiracies all but replaced by po-faced explorations of evil and demonic possession. This last era was marked by a switch in characters, adding in the straightforward and unimaginative Doggett as the new sceptic (lacking even Scully’s religious faith) and the less individual, believer in woo-woo, Reyes. I quite like both characters, particularly compared to the tired, reluctant performances of the former leads, but the fact remains that neither had the same rigorous, researched imagination of Mulder or the intellectual background of Scully. It could have worked quite well, but as an honest spinoff: CSI: X-Files.

The second X-Files movie picks up where the series left Mulder and Scully: the grinding misery of conspiracy chewtoys, driven into a half-hearted relationship by inertia and a lack of other options. In an effort to be edgy and deep, these characters suffered the inevitable losses of all non-investigatory aspects of their lives, with even miracles introduced only to punish them by their removal. Both look old and tired (Duchovny now a dead ringer for Gary Shandling), and their interactions, even their pillow talk, betray only decades of bottled up resentment and disappointment in their present lives. When Scully threatens to end the relationship throughout the film, there’s no tension – why should we be pulling for this lifeless codependent slog to continue?

Mulder and Scully don’t want to be together and they don’t want to investigate for the FBI, only getting pulled in by the tug of a half-remembered youthful passion. As the director is not named Bergman, it’s painful to watch, almost guilt-inducing – as if the audience is forcing an elderly, arthritic showpony to limp through its old routine.

The plot is also reminiscent of later X-Files episodes, focusing on good v evil with only passing references to aliens or conspiracies, but also barely glancing across a potentially rich Dr Frankenstein-esque Monster Of The Week. There’s a lack of both set-ups and resolutions, while more time is spent on far-fetched and weak morality plays. Plays with little to ponder because, as far as any characters with extensive dialogue are concerned, God’s existence and activity in earthly matters are both a given.

Scully is possibly affronting God, or at least her be-collared bosses, by using stem cells to treat a deathly ill boy in a Catholic hospital? The dying, altar boy raping, defrocked priest is possibly having visions, possibly with one of his former victims as a conduit, because the victim (now dying of cancer himself) is gay-married to the Russian (always Russian in this show) kidnapper and organ harvester? And is it the organ harvesting, child raping, stem cell treatment, the use of Google, or gay marriage that is most affronting to God, possibly causing Him to send punitive visions? And Scully’s ending her relationship with Mulder because he’s pursuing the case she persuaded him to take on? But it’s all ok because they end up in a rowboat in the tropics?

And there’s a two-headed Frankenstein dog? And a late-arriving Skinner wraps up Mulder’s case in three minutes and has a wee cuddle with him in the snow, the most genuine emotional connection in this entire beast?

And the ultimate moral of the story: people should put some damn chains on their tires during a Vancouver West Virginia blizzard, which would make so much of this plot not happen.

…I miss Doggett and Reyes.

Who, if Chris Carter writes another movie, will be miserably married in Mexico and have had three kids, all of whom were abducted and brutally murdered, on sequential Christmases. So…let’s hope he doesn’t.