Re-viewing The X-Files: I Want To Believe (dir. Chris Carter, 2008)
*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 possess broader knowledge and understanding of the relevant issues.
I feel great love for The X-Files,
which is probably why I see lost potential in the film. Much of this centres
around problematic representations of many of the characters, which I think through in this post.
Synopsis
Mysterious
disappearances of fit, professional women, including an FBI agent, lead
investigators to seek the help of former agents Mulder and Scully who had once
been assigned to investigate ‘X’ files, that is, cases involving unexplained
phenomena. The FBI search taskforce has also enlisted the help of a disgraced
paedophile priest who claims to experience psychic visions and sensations
relating to the victims. As the case unravels, disturbing truths emerge which
push the boundaries of moral thinking around to what lengths we are prepared to
go to extinguish and preserve human life.
Belief and scepticism
The subtitle I Want to Believe has been integral to X-Files since the pilot episode which
first aired in 1993. It features regularly in the mise en scène on Mulder’s UFO poster, posing a constant reminder of his desire to
believe in the conspiracies and strange phenomena he encounters and which have
deeply affected his and Scully’s lives. Many descriptions of the show,
including by those involved in producing it, will frame the lead characters’
dichotomy as believer and sceptic. Mulder is painted as a believer in all
things paranormal and science fiction, while medical doctor Scully brings him
down to earth with scientific fact.
However, the phrase ‘I want to believe’ is key. Mulder is more akin to an atheist
searching relentlessly for evidence to either support or dispel truth claims
and suspicions, while Scully, a practicing Roman Catholic, often dismisses his
claims without wanting at first to prove or disprove them. The statement’s use
as the film’s subtitle refers more to Scully this time than Mulder. She wants
to believe that there is a treatment for the rare brain condition suffered by
one of her patients, and she must reluctantly admit that she wants to believe
that Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly) can lead them to the missing women
and that he regrets his past abuse of young boys.
Bodies and medical science
In the show, Scully is
depicted as a medical all-rounder who specializes in pathology. It is understandable
for a character who spent many years mired in strange and horrific deaths that
she would want to switch to saving life. We must suspend quite a bit of
disbelief, even in alien/conspiracy-themed sci-fi, to accept the career leap
from pathologist to brain surgeon, particularly when the surgery involves
extremely rare and elusive conditions. This could probably be easy to gloss
over if this aspect of the plot were not reliant upon the product-placement for
Google. Indeed, this shapes two major plots points: 1) Scully's non-specific ‘stem
cell research’ to save a boy with a degenerative brain condition with symptoms
akin to Sandhoff disease; 2) Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) ‘Googling’
an address from his phone to find Mulder. The latter is more credible and
remains in keeping with the technological edge of the original show. But Scully
using Google as her only tool for extensive research which coincidentally helps
crack the FBI case is a reach, particularly when in the show Scully often refers to
writing and reading academic monographs and papers for peer-reviewed medical science
journals.
Scully's non-specific stem cell research being conducted by an afternoon
Googling it is irksome at a time when many university students consult such
internet search engines instead of academically-viable texts and institutional
libraries. While I appreciate that product-placement can be vital and important
for funding and marketing in commercial films, this use of Google could have
been more deeply considered and less clunky. It is one area of several that
makes me think the script could have done with a couple more well-researched
drafts.
I find it puzzling for
Scully, and presumably the show’s writers, to research/Google medical experimentation
very broadly related to stem cell research which pulls up examples of the Nazis’ human medical
experiments in concentration camps, but to not come across the Resurrectionists
(the graverobbers supplying cadavers to the Edinburgh surgical college in the
early nineteenth century) or their murderous piggybackers, William Burke and William Hare. Instead
of making clichéd references to Frankenstein, it would have been more appropriate for
the film to allude to these real-life, horrific events in history. In the late
1820s (the decade following the first publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818), the Ulstermen who had taken up residence in
Edinburgh murdered sixteen people to sell to Dr Robert Knox of Edinburgh’s
Royal College of Surgeons. The parallel with the two abductors supplying
Russian experimenters in the film is clear, and, funnily, Burke and Hare do
tend to come up on basic Google searches for this sort of thing.
While the nineteenth-century
advancements in pathological science combined with the fictional Victor
Frankenstein’s use of cadaver parts to animate new life closely resembles the
Russian medical experimentations in the film, the show had a Frankenstein-like
story in its hey-day, namely the season 5 episode ‘The Postmodern Prometheus’.
The more serious take on it in I Want to
Believe combines the show’s ‘monster of the week’ model with the need for
a story worthy of a decently-budgeted feature film and to appeal to fresh
viewers, but, it feels, at the expense of the weighty discussions the TV show often carried so well.
Ethics
The questions raised
for moral philosophy are worth exploring. Medical science advanced
exponentially due to underhand activities, and there was a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’
policy for the purchase of cadavers as the trade was illegal. While it was
wrong and horrific to supply stolen and murdered bodies, no less for financial
gain, the practice sped up the advancement of medical knowledge and very likely
subsequently saved many lives. A deeper examination of such an ethical
minefield in the film would have been more satisfying than the suggested good
vs evil binary that emerges, and could have intersected more clearly with important discussions around use of the Nazis' research findings gleaned from their war crimes.
Instead, the film polarizes
'good' surgery and 'bad' surgery. The 'good' defies Catholicism and parental
consent to save a North American boy called Christian (Marco Niccoli). The 'bad' is body-swapping
implemented by unnamed Russian scientists and doctors to simultaneously overcome terminal cancer and to reassign gender. Both
types of extreme surgery in the film are made possible in the long or short run by the brutal
deaths of others to facilitate experimentation and provide transplant
materials at cellular and full-body levels. Both involve the painful prolonging
of the patient’s life with the indication that their consent in these cases has
not been directly sought for or given.
Christian is around the age that
William, the son Scully and Mulder had to give up, would have been. As a mother
and a physician, Scully makes an emotional decision to save the boy’s life. She
had done similar with Emily (Lauren Diewold) in season 5 who turned out to be
the product of one of Scully’s stolen ova. Meanwhile, the main
abductor of the women in I Want to
Believe, Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie) is trying to save the life of
his partner (Franz Tomczeszyn played by Fagin Woodcock), a person who suffered
another kind of major childhood trauma and, we can presume given the nature
of their relationship, has never gained control of his own life. He too is
being saved by someone who wants to keep him alive for their own reasons while
his view seems not to have been consulted. Dacyshyn seems to be a raging
misogynist, yet is replacing his husband's diseased and dying body with a
woman's. Both situations are difficult to defend morally.
Christian and Tomczeszyn
are prevented from exercising their right to die. Yet the film’s default moral
position is: Scully experimenting with stem cells to save a sick young boy
equals good; Dacyshyn and the Russian surgeons transplanting live bodies
(notably, with the ability to keep the heads alive, and as implied by the
two-headed dog, preserve life albeit in a perverse way) to save a terminally
ill survivor of childhood sexual abuse equals bad. This moral turmoil is
underdeveloped in the largely nameless group of Russian perpetrators, who are placed
at much more of a distance than typical 'monsters of the week' in the show. However,
Fr Joe, who happens to have abused the younger Tomczeszyn, is fleshed out to the
extent that it is possible to feel compassion for him and he is permitted
opportunities for redemption.
Given the tensions around experimental,
life-prolonging surgeries and relationships between victims and perpetrators of
abuse set against the backdrop of religious belief, it would have been
interesting to develop the debates between atheism and faith, and the clashes
between morality and medical science that the film skirts around.
Politics, gender and sexuality
The film was made at a
time when the USA and Russia were clearer enemies, yet the Russian group in the
film go to the USA to perform experiments in Frankensteinian sex change
operations – a bodyswap approach that smacks of biological essentialism. Under
the current Trump administration, the US’s enemy status with Russia is less clear, and his and Putin’s feelings towards women, homosexuals and
transgender/non-binary people are relevant to the misogyny and homophobia which
underpin much of the film. Fr Joe, for example, is a priest so horrified at his
sexual urges towards young boys that he claims to have castrated himself aged
26. It is unclear where Fr Joe practiced. He has a Scottish accent with an
Irish twang, and his crimes took place roughly 40 years before the events
depicted in the film. Tomczeszyn, one of his alter-boy victims-cum-perpetrator,
never speaks, so there is no knowing where the abuse took place. Presumably
they were both migrants to the US.
Tomczeszyn is rendered
down to being the silenced partner of the dangerous Dacyshyn who stalks and
violently abducts women who share Tomczeszyn’s rare AB- blood-type. By
going to such extreme lengths to change Tomczeszyn’s biological body, and in
showing Dacyshyn’s clear pleasure in watching his second abductee swimming, there
is an indication that the film or its characters regard same-sex marriage as
dangerous. It could also be read as a comment on perceptions of homo- and
transphobia in Russia, with the ‘bad’ Russians taking too much advantage of
American freedoms.
Tomczeszyn has terminal cancer (lung, I think), so the
procedure will ‘cure’ his body in two ways: by replacing his diseased body with
a well body, and in changing his biological sex to female. This complicates
trans identities and would ‘correct’ the couple’s gayness by re-establishing heteronormative
marriage. It seems that Tomczeszyn is yet again the voiceless victim of another
overpowering man with deviant, violent sexuality exhibiting signs of a
homophobic misogynist.
This part of the plot
is uncharacteristically underdeveloped for The
X-Files. Normally the motivations of
the ‘monsters-of-the-week’ are more fully revealed. It remains unclear why the
transplant bodies must be those of women, and why Tomczeszyn and Dacyshyn cannot continue to be a gay couple.
It is unclear whether Tomczeszyn consents to the procedures that could save but
radically change his life. I fathom that Dacyshyn is not in fact gay and has
married someone whose identity has been so tremendously shattered by past
traumas that he is willing to recklessly shatter those of others to survive at
all costs, and that Tomczeszyn’s illness provides the necessary window of
opportunity both for him to change sex (rather than gender) for Dacyshyn, and
to become a lab rat for the Russian scientists. After all, he has no further use for a dying body, so he may as well re-grade it.
Clunky plot points
Another clunky plot point I can’t reconcile with is the
blood-type bracelets. Perhaps it is different in the US, but himself has the
rare AB- blood-type and does not have to or choose to wear a medical bracelet
to that effect – the kind my dad wore as a type I diabetic. How improbable is
it that two people, never mind two fit, healthy women in their 30s, with such a
rare blood type could both be found frequenting the same swimming pool in what
looks like the arse-end of beyond in rural USA? The surveillance intelligence
gained by hacking blood donor records might have been more plausible, and more
in keeping with the show. I don’t even know where to go with how convenient it
is that Dacyshyn managed to get work as a donor organ transporter. I suppose that
was the way in to the horrid business, but how did he know the unnamed,
incommunicative Russian surgeons?
Another missed
opportunity in the screenplay surrounds the remains of first abductee, Special
Agent Monica Bannon (Xantha Radley). Given that Dacyshyn drops the case
containing her frozen head when Mulder sees him and gives chase, it is implied
that until then she had a chance of survival in the most horrific of ways.
Along with transplant patient Tomczeszyn and second abductee Cheryl Cunningham
(Nicki Aycox), their heads may have ended up sharing other bodies in the way
the successful two-headed dog experiment shows. Mulder seems to understand this
when announcing that Bannon is not dead, but in making Dacyshyn drop the organ
carrier and Special Agent Mosley Drummy (Alvin 'Xzibit' Joiner) opening it to
discover the horror within, her fate is sealed and her last chance of survival
is ironically lost at the hands of the ‘good’ guys.
Frustrating amounts of
incompetence abound amongst the agents. Special Agent in Charge Dakota Whitney
(Amanda Peet) is out-run in the chase by Mulder, around 20 years her senior and
who has been out of action for nearly a decade (not that an older person can’t
be fitter, but it is implied he has been sitting around in an office feeling sorry for himself the whole
time). Her ineptness and doe-eyed focus on Mulder and his whereabouts in the
construction site leaves her vulnerable to Dacyshyn who seems to enjoy
callously pushing her to her death. It’s hard to buy that one. Drummy also
lacks depth. He does not seem phased by the brutal murder of his two colleagues. His
performs a one-dimensional put-upon angry sceptic throughout.
In saying all that, I remain a fan. I enjoyed re-watching I Want to Believe and spotting the guest
actors from the show’s first five years filming in Vancouver. Especially now
that showrunner and creator Chris Carter is slowly relenting to demand to make
the show’s cast and crew more diverse by adding women
to the writing staff on season 11, I will watch on. It's about time he handed over writing duties to people who are less likely to send me off on one about plot-holes.
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