The X-Files was always such a tease. After the fairly suggestive
pilot episode—in which newly paired FBI agents Fox Mulder (David
Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) flirt and find excuses to
disrobe in each other’s presence—the characters promptly buttoned
up. As the show’s eccentric structure developed, monster-of-the-week
plots alternating with the occasional hour-long comedy and episodes that
added to the quickly impenetrable alien mythology, the writers doled
out a love story in glances and touches so chaste they couldn’t make
Jane Austen blush.
By the time The X-Files ground to a rather ignoble halt in 2002, it
had become pretty useless to describe the workings of its vast
government conspiracy or to catalog the many varieties of
extraterrestrial beings the series introduced and then dropped. The
only through-line, the only arc the writers returned to again and
again, was the evolving relationship between Mulder, the paranormal
enthusiast, and Scully, the skeptic. Little gray men aside, The X-Files was eight years of foreplay (along with one long, final year during
which Duchovny refused to renew his contract and left Anderson to moon
about stupidly in his absence).
When we last saw the characters in the series finale, they were
locked in an embrace on top of a bed, sort of… nuzzling. In the world
of the show—however absurdly—one could not assume that this
sort of behavior was going to lead to sex. The writers’ need to keep
Mulder and Scully apart for dramatic reasons had begun to imply there
was some diegetic reason for their aloofness. Castration? Virginity
pledge? Nothing was too weird for The X-Files.
But now, in the second feature film, answers are finally
forthcoming. And the show’s producers have foiled the fans once again.
(Spoiler forthcoming; forgive me.) In The X-Files: I Want to Believe,
it appears that Mulder and Scully have been sleeping together, possibly
on and off, for years. It’s a total cop-out, but it’s kind of genius.
The sexual tension in the film comes not from any worn-out
will-they/won’t-they formula, but from the question of whether their
volatile relationship is sustainable. It’s still hot stuff.
The movie—a big fat episode, essentially, with a noticeably
constrained budget—is a satisfying thriller, with romantic and
religious angst substituting for explosions and chase scenes. An FBI
agent has gone missing, and the Bureau tracks down Scully at her post
at a Catholic hospital to get her to recruit Mulder to help with the
investigation. A convicted pedophile priest who claims psychic
abilities (Billy Connolly) thinks he can lead them to her
abductor—but he keeps turning up other people’s severed limbs
instead. Scully’s usual doubts about paranormal phenomena are given an
additional rigidity by her contempt for the priest’s crimes. Meanwhile,
her day job as a medical doctor is bringing up questions about
persistence in the face of opposition that resonate with both her
relationship with Mulder and their mutual efforts to uncover the truth
about aliens in defiance of a hostile government.
The first X-Files movie sported a tag line even cheesier than “I
Want to Believe” (which doesn’t seem so bad, if you remember the often
ironic ways it was used in the series): “Fight the Future.” I almost
wish this movie had taken that dictum more to heart. It’s old-fashioned
in so many ways that its gestures toward the present day (a smirking
musical cue at the portrait of George W. Bush at FBI headquarters; a
Google search for stem-cell therapies; and, most jarringly, a reference
to the villains being gay-married in Massachusetts) feel forced.
The X-Files was, after all, unusually grounded in the psychological
climate of its time. It’s fascinating to go back through the seasons
now, in the wake of 9/11 and especially Hurricane Katrina, to see how
the series—which went on the air in 1993, near the beginning of
the Clinton administration—envisioned an American government so
monolithic, so complacent in its power that one had to suspect things
were more complicated than they seemed. In the 1990s, we were
sufficiently bored with prosperity and globalization (with Empire, as
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it) that it was entertaining to
imagine that an international cabal might be pulling the strings behind
the scenes. The chasm between that way of thinking and the current
political atmosphere became obvious to me only after I rewatched the
last movie. Released in 1998, it went so far as to suggest that FEMA
was a second shadow government, just waiting to take the reins after
alien colonization. Thanks to Mike (“heckuva job”) Brown and the Bush
administration, FEMA is an embarrassment now, not a fearsome symbol of
government’s reach into the most obscure corners of our lives.
It’s easy to believe that post-9/11 patriotism killed The X-Files,
that people couldn’t find pleasure in imagining a malevolent U.S.
government when we’d been so rudely reintroduced to foreign malice. But
I think it goes farther than that. Conservative governments love to
hate themselves; so when the show’s suspicion that the federal
government had too much power was co-opted by the Bush administration
(albeit hypocritically), conspiracy theories lost some purchase. Then
the bungled occupation of Iraq and the pathetic response to Hurricane
Katrina made it clear that an effective federal government that isn’t
afraid to exert soft power might not be such a bad thing after all. We
might have to wait until a second Obama administration for people to
ascribe such nefarious over-competence to government again. Luckily for
fans, director Chris Carter is already making noise about a new movie
in 2012.
