Chapter Two
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
By Brett Ballard-Beach
September 15, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The X-Files premiered on September 10, 1993, the end of my first week as an undergraduate at Lewis and Clark College. And no, I can’t claim that I was in on the buzz from the beginning and watched it on the first night. I was out with a friend seeing True Romance on a ginormous screen in SE Portland at a tri-plex theater that has long since been converted into a Slavic Pentecostal Church. And as enjoyable a movie and movie going experience as that was, if I had been less of a terrified putz about going out to concerts on my own during that stretch of my life, I could have been catching Counting Crows opening for The Cranberries on the first trip through town for either band, for the ridiculous price of $3.
The X-Files ended its run in mid-May 2002, around the same time that New York University was holding its commencement exercises for its latest crop of graduating students, which included me bearing a Master of Arts in Cinema Studies that, in the stellar tradition of former grad students everywhere, I have put to shamelessly little use. I briefly considered pursuing a Ph.D., but in being perfectly honest with myself, I had to admit I didn’t know if I had the drive to sustain me for five to seven years. Added to which, if I decided to pursue that end, I was entirely uncertain if I wanted to keep living in New York City for that long a stretch, either. (And, I shouldn’t hesitate to add, the odds of that acceptance would have been markedly slim to boot - on average, only three Ph.D. candidates admitted a year, with generally only one of those coming from the preceding year’s MA ranks at NYU.)
But that is me simply finding continuity within my own life. Consider this as well: The X-Files broadcast its first episode six-and-a-half months after the February 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, in which six people died, and aired its final episode eight months after the attacks on the morning of September 11th claimed the lives of more than 3,000. I realize that such a comparison is both ghoulish and (seemingly) more than a little trivial and it is my hope that no one finds it overly untoward or distasteful. What I mean to suggest is the difference between the world in which the show sprang to life, and the one it rather lacklusterly bowed out of nine seasons later. I haven’t seen even close to half of all 200+ episodes of the series, but in my bones it feels like the series captured the jittery and jangled vibe of 1990s America as no other show did.
Watching the first X-Files movie (aka Fight the Future) this past week for the first time since 1998 reawakened a curious sort of nostalgia for me for the decade. No, that’s not exactly right. Rather, I found myself processing it as the first decade in which, thanks to the dawn of a 24/7 news cycle, the explosion of talk radio outlets, and the beginning rumbles of a world-wide web and planet-unifying social media, the sorts of conspiracy theories that were once relegated to an underground network of kooks and nut jobs passing information around in pamphlets, were thrust into daylight, legitimized, transmitted worldwide, and breathlessly reported as galvanizing journalism.
The show aired during a stretch of American life marked by: Presidential word parsing in regards to the specifics of sexual relations (or lack thereof); the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City; government/citizen standoffs that resulted in shootouts and blazes in Waco and Ruby Ridge; the Unabomber Manifesto and the eventual capture and unveiling of one Ted Kaczynski; and the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult.
The X-Files ventured into the paranormal and unexplainable on a weekly basis mixing and contrasting the fervor and sardonically soaked open-mindedness of FBI agent Fox “Spooky” Mulder with Dana Scully, a fellow agent raised on science and medicine, whose overriding skepticism made her the perfect audience surrogate for those who might not be caught dead watching tales of little green men, evil bureaucrats, and other things that go bump in the night. Although most of its episodes were not “ripped from the headlines”-type stories spun out with a supernatural gloss, the majority of them did invoke the universal specter of fear that was increasingly turned to by news outlets to push their headlines: the fear of government, of cabals of rich and powerful white men in possession of shadowy secrets, of ruthless and malignant “illegal” aliens bent on global takeover. “The truth is out there”, the series’ most notorious tagline urged, but inherent in that simple statement is a binary that was also at the core of the show: if the truth is not among “us”, it must be hidden out somewhere among “them”.
I was never the most regular watcher of the show. If my college friends were shacked up in someone’s dorm room or in the commons lounge on Friday night watching it, I might join them. I do remember checking out the tail end of one of FX’s Viewer’s Choice marathons on what must have been Thanksgiving ’97 - a supremely rotten one in which I both had to work and got my wallet and a just-purchased cassette copy of “Invisible Touch” stolen out of my employee locker - and the ones I did get to see included favorites like “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”, and the No. 1 pick, the deliciously gothic “Home.”
Standalone episodes were always preferable, truth be told, because I could never completely buy into the mythology episodes. Besides, the show appeared to me to have the most freedom when it was a story that could be told in 45 minutes and would have little to no effect on future installments. Standalones often offered a tone that was more humorous, if not downright jokey, than those that comprised the series’ arc and I feel that humor was the series’ stealth weapon and its most undervalued asset. I did become a regular in the home stretch, watching every episode in the 2000-2001 season after David Duchovny was no longer a regular, and Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish were brought on as the Coy and Vance Duke of the FBI’s paranormal activities wing.
And though I rib the series’ mule-headed tenacity to carry on past its expiration date, I enjoyed those cast additions, even as the ever-unwieldy mythology eps drove me batty. I actually vowed in the summer of 2001 that I would watch the show as long as it was on the air, both because of and in spite of its ability to enrage me at least half the time. Thankfully, the next season proved to be the last and I was among the proud millions who slogged through the courtroom histrionics that comprised most of the finale.
Based on what I have revealed to this point, it would seem fairly obvious that I must cringe at Fight the Future and adore I Want to Believe. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as all that. Yes, Fight the Future is a mythology “expanded episode” and a very bold choice for a feature film in that it segued directly from the 5th season finale and set up the 6th season premiere, even as it was structured to appeal to a broader audience who might never have seen the show. And I Want to Believe takes place years after the show’s end, but is more concerned with a one-off mystery than in answering many of the questions left unanswered from the finale. In spite of that, it still seems more directed at core fans than the preceding film.
And if pushed, I would have to affirm that Fight the Future is the better feature, but not primarily for reasons of art, technical craft, or even storytelling. What I Want to Believe suffers from is twofold. First, the central mystery isn’t all that compelling, rates fairly high on the “oh, c’mon” scale and carries more than a whiff of homophobia. This is coupled with the movie’s seeming awareness of its own antiquity, a moroseness that sucks a lot of life and most opportunities for humor right out the window. (A visual and aural gag at the expense of George W. Bush and J. Edgar Hoover is a rare exception, but it falls flat in presentation.) And there was a definite air of anticlimax when I Want to Believe arrived.
To simply compare numbers, Fight the Future was released at the height of the show’s popularity and pulled in $84 million domestic and $190 million total worldwide. People were paying to see a two-part episode on the big screen. Ten years following that, six years after the show went off the air, and about five years later than intended, I Want to Believe didn’t make in its domestic run ($20 million) what Fight the Future made in its first two days. It finished 75% back of the first film here, and over 50% off abroad. The saving grace is that the sequel was significantly less expensive than the first film.
Jumping back a moment to why the mythology and connecting plot strands would give me fits, can also help explain the big “lack” that I think is the emotional doughnut hole of the second film. What The X-Files seemed especially good at (and I would attribute this to creator Chris Carter) was creating intriguing, long-running mysteries and then providing answers or closure long after it ceased to matter for any one particular puzzle - the disappearance of Mulder’s sister let’s say - and long after the show had piled on numerous other threads that would be followed far longer than they should have been. To make another comparison, the finale of Twin Peaks may have been maddeningly and intentionally populated with cliffhangers, but it was true to David Lynch’s spirit. As The X-Files lurched into its final seasons, the overarching conspiracies seemed to matter less and less, yet they still commanded the lion’s share of story time. Carter’s vision for the show seemed misplaced.
Mulder and Scully are fascinating and complex characters, but in I Want to Believe, it is as if time, and a post 9/11 world, has passed them by. With the X-Files division still shut down, the two are called in to consult on the disappearance of an FBI agent from rural Virginia. Assisting in the investigation is a defrocked priest, convicted of pedophilia, who has been seized by visions of the abductees. Mulder and Scully’s personal relationship is tested by this journey back into the dark, while she wrestles with her own demons in the medical field by way of a young patient with a rare illness who might be helped by a radical, but highly painful course of treatment.
The film touches on issues of faith, forgiveness, science and medicine vs. belief, and the power of prayer, but throughout, it suffers from an emotional honesty at its core. It doesn’t feel believable, or right, that our two heroes would be at this place at this point in their lives. With the end of the world not at stake until 2012 (based on the show’s timeline), the movie isn’t aiming to resurrect the paranoiac zeitgeist the show rode in the ‘90s. Thus, by design, it is a curiously muted affair with only Billy Connolly (as Father Crissman) making any kind of strong impression among the film’s new characters and the sole chase sequence feeling conspicuously out of place.
Ironic then, that the one thing I would not accuse I Want to Believe of being is a cash grab. Carter, replacing Rob Bowman as director this time around, believes very strongly in his material, and has attempted to craft something of substance. He just hasn’t found a way to do it with these characters in the latter part of the ‘00s. As unlikely as it may sound, the most compelling sequence in the film plays out over the closing credits. Set to a remix of Mark Snow’s score and a hypnotic tune entitled “Broken”, both performed by the band UNKLE, a sequence of images sometimes tracking forward, other times backward, moves through ice and snow, frozen tundra and rocky hillsides before eventually pushing on to gentle lapping waves and a completely unexpected reveal. If it were at the start of the movie, it would suggest a far more compelling movie to come. Ending the movie as it does, it instead calls to mind what might have been. At this stage in the game, wanting to believe simply isn’t enough.
Next time: An end of summer “how bad do you want it” mash up column featuring the raw sexual power of Prince, Morris Day, and, um, Ron Howard? What else could it be but More American Graffiti Bridge?