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At cross-purposes

Scully and Mulder are bound together again
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The truth is downloadable. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson continue the quest.
X-Files: I Want to Believe


Directed by Chris Carter
With Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, Billy Connolly and Amanda Peet
Long before a certain itinerate Nazarene was hauled down from one, the cross had played a symbolic role in Mediterranean religions, with both Horus and Dionysus (older characters in dying god narratives) found similarly crucified in images that predate the Christian miracle. The cross is a symbol for the intersection of material reality (the horizontal) with spirituality (the vertical). It denotes a greater power, it’s positive, and carries on into mathematics as a “+” and an “x.” Yet it’s also a sign of mystery (and what dead god’s resurrection isn’t?) — occultist, signifying something unknown except to adepts. Anyone collecting or investigating a series of mysteries might create their own X file.
The X-Files television series always traded on the multiple meanings of the X. FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder tracked cases that possessed some inexplicable weirdness involving mysterious kidnappings, creatures and diseases. But the show also delved into the religious aspects associated with the sign of the cross. Scully, the rational, detective-minded doctor, struggled continuously with her Catholic upbringing. Too many of the things she encountered on the job challenged her beliefs.
Mulder, on the other hand, a connoisseur of the strange, suffered from an anguished mysticism. He wanted desperately to believe in something, to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical. The dramatic tension of the show existed in the clash of these characters — two strong individuals who would, after many seasons, finally become whole as a couple: the realist crossed with the idealist.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe has a valedictory air to it. There are rumors of another film to follow, but this one strikes the proper grace note for the story, perhaps because it also captures some signs of exhaustion among its principals.
It’s not necessary to have followed the TV show to understand the film, though some familiarity will help, primarily with the later seasons. On television we left Mulder (David Duchovny) on the lam from the law after he was implicated in a murder. Believing that his trial was only for show, and that he was being railroaded, he was aided in escaping by Scully (Gillian Anderson) and their FBI boss, Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). The final episode concluded with a shot of Mulder and Scully in bed together for the first time (in Roswell, New Mexico, no less), where the two finally and fully inhabited a common philosophical ground.
Six years later we find Scully, retired from the FBI, working as a surgeon in a Catholic hospital. She’s occupied with trying to save a young boy dying from a rare brain disease, though the hospital’s top administrator, Father Ybarra (the appropriately named Adam Godley), tries every means to thwart her, having decided the boy is a financial burden best consigned to a hospice.
Unwelcomed, FBI agents arrive to ask if Scully can locate Mulder for them. A strange disappearance of an agent finds the agency anxious to forgive Mulder, whom they believe to be the perfect person to crack the case. The mystery of the missing agent is compounded by a priest, Father Joseph (Billy Connolly), who is disturbed by visions of the crime. But the priest comes with baggage: He’s a convicted pedophile. It isn’t long before Scully and Mulder are back on their beat in the precincts of the fantastical.
Still, as X-Files plots go, this one is more police procedural than supernatural. The mounting crimes are closer to Silence of the Lambs, complete with psychopathic gays (with an uncalled-for reference to Massachusetts’ marriage laws). The film has an unsettling pace, prodded by Mark Snow’s nervy score. Director Chris Carter, the creator of the series, has produced stronger work within the X-Files world, though he is again a master of siting action within a particular environment (fans of the show’s first seasons will be happy to learn that fog-bound, snowy British Columbia is again the tale’s terrain).
Yet the primary focus falls again on Scully and Mulder’s search for belief. Scully’s Catholism is challenged both by her hospital and by the fallen Father Joseph. Groping for something solid, Mulder becomes Father Joseph’s only believer, although this theme is poorly explored in the script, complete with an unexplained doubt that the FBI casts on the seer priest, even though he’s been proven right, and even when his visions cause his eyes to weep blood.
Duchovny and Anderson, particularly, are good, as is Connolly in what is perhaps his most serious role to date. Amanda Peet as an FBI agent seems strangely marginal to the story.
Crimes aside, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is a film about salvaged grace, one reason more that things finally seem satisfactorily concluded at the credits. Those great opposites, Scully and Mulder, again find themselves emotionally bound together at, as Eliot wrote, “the point of the intersection of the timeless / With time.”

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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