"Wow! Look how young we look on this old fanclub website."Looking back, the X-Files television show was a revelation. While amassing a rabid cult following of X-philes without the ubiquity of the today's internets, the show continually delivered the paranoid goods. Shadowy figures trolled dimly-lit parking garages, alleys and construction sites. Small rural communities were plagued by inexplicable occurrences. Seemingly ordinary humans were both the perpetrators and the victims of heinous crimes, and noises outside the house were never "just the wind."
In the center of it all, two flashlight beams pierced through the show's trademark darkness. Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the poster children for emotional stoicism, were the perfect foils for the aliens, ghosts, goblins and mutants they were investigating. While each one placed his or her life in the other's hands week after week and their personal relationship constantly flirted with the limits of professionalism, fans of the show were never given the consummation that would have left them wiping away tears with one hand while reaching for a torch with the other.
As a formerly rabid X-phile, I enjoyed seeing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (looking more radiant now than ever--the big screen suits her) slip back into the roles of Mulder and Scully in X-Files: I Want to Believe. The deadpan dialogue of their series relationship has now been replaced by a different rapport that belies a history of personal heartache and professional disappointment. From the get-go, this is the allure of I Want to Believe. Mulder and Scully come onto the scene as a pair who have given up and resigned themselves to anonymity, a footnote to a secret history, and the case that brings them back to their old selves is a perfect storm of Mulder and Scully's respective achilles heels: abducted women and crises of religious faith.
Series creator Chris Carter is behind the camera for this long-awaited (and long-overdue) sequel to 1998's X-Files: Fight the Future and he imbues the proceedings with the trademark dread for which the series was famous. On the surface, Carter's script appears to pack less punch than the more memorable episodes in the series, but "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." During the series' run, fans were left panting at the labyrinthine mystery of alien colonization, shady government operatives and what lurked in man's heart of darkness. Now, we can get all of that off the news ticker of our favorite 24-hour news outlet daily. To be sure, the mystery at the center of the new X-Files movie is a ghastly one, but our culture is one that now seems to require (after being force fed) a daily allowance of real life parallels to what once straddled the line between plausible and fantastical, the world of extreme possibilities. As a result, I Want to Believe sometimes plays like a boilerplate police procedural, but there's some wry and welcome humor here intermingled with Carter's grim proceedings and serious theme of tenacity in the face of insurmountable obstacles and spirit-crushing failure.
Even in its failures, the series was rarely dull, and ABC's Lost owes its very existence to Fox's groundbreaking show. The latest movie may prove that we cannot go home again, but at the very least, it is a memo from our not-so-distant past when things like this genuinely scared us. The new revelation of the X-Files is how quaint its investigations into the paranormal now seem. Despite their sometimes maddening inscrutability, what we really cared about was Mulder and Scully. Their search for the truth be damned. We just want to know that these two could find happiness at a kind of crossroads between their own paths to belief. If they want to throw a wolfman in there for good measure, I am okay with that too.
