X-Files: I Want to Believe

Spooky.

I wanted to write about the new X-Files film, but I couldn't muster the self-delusion to do it.

Something has buffeted the self-aggrandising egoism out of me. I don't think anyone gives a steaming mug of donkey piss what I think about anything and I don't know what made me think that they did in the first place.

I did used to drink significantly more than I do now. Perhaps it was the hangovers.

But then it struck me that it's important to write and get this shit out regardless of whether anyone is reading it, or agrees with it, or leaves comments and kudos to bolster my ailing self-belief. It's important for exactly the same reasons that the new X-Files film is a far smarter and cleverer reflection on our times than any of the critics I have read / heard have given it credit for.

The spooky thing is that I had just decided that that would be my angle of attack when I read a columnist over at The Guardian writing, more or less, exactly the same thing.

Rewind: admitting that you like the X-Files isn't cool, is it? Shagability is in inverse proportion to one's familiarity with geek television. And a show that's appeal orbited the chaste chemistry between its two leads is bound to attract more people who think about sex more than actually have sex. Was The X-Files the first hit television series that targeted the sexually disenfranchised? A pre-millennial Brief Encounter with more aliens but less, er, steam.

It's interesting to contrast the X-Files with other cult sci fi TV series in that respect. Dr Who, for example, was a relatively chaste affair until Russell T. got his lubed-up latex gloves on it. Okay, there was more than a frisson in my Star Wars pyjama bottoms when Layla or Sarah Jane were on screen, but there was no suggestion that the Tardis had some kind of expansive boudoir in the back where the doctor could reveal his other doubled up bodily organ.

If I remember correctly, Mulder didn't even have a bed in his apartment until the 5th series.

And he watched a lot of porn.

But Mulder was a man with bigger things on his mind than getting a shag: he had his sister to save and a sceptical world to convince of the complicity of the US government in a conspiracy to cover-up the existence of extra terrestrials -- a Viagra busting sentence, if ever there was one.

No man has bigger things on his mind than getting a shag, ergo Mulder wasn't a man, ergo Mulder must have been an alien. Obvious, really.

I didn't intend writing about sex in the X-Files. You've probably just eaten your lunch. Or you're wondering why on earth [the planets that the aliens came from was never made clear] I'm paying so much attention to a TV series that fell into the bargain bin of the collective conscience almost a decade ago. Especially when you consider that the latest incarnation of the 'franchise' has been universally lambasted by the critics.

Why?

Well those critics are wrong.

And the X-Files isn't just any old piece of television. It dares to make us think about big questions, mostly regarding faith.

Where does faith fit in to our cynical times? I say "our" cynical times because *I* am faithless and *I* am cynical. I'm the pampered product of a society that has brought me up to believe in little more than consumerism. It's no wonder that I have whiled away thousands of hours reading books and watching TV series that invited me to invest my faith in them. I have spent the majority of my life mocking people who live by the fairy tales of religion, oblivious to the fact that I had been investing my faith in programmes like Doctor Who, Lost and the X-Files. Obviously none of those shows is a code for life. I'm not going to want to kill anyone if they don't watch five episodes of Lost a day with their television screens pointed at Hawaii. Neither will I pray for the damnation of those who think there is nothing more to the X-Files mythology than a series of scripts built into a teetering house of cards. But I do share the Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, Pagan, Islamic et al urge, to believe in *something*.

They are all stories we use to make sense of the world around us.

Stories.

Is that blasphemous?

But the key aspect of all of these stories is the one that I read about the least. Most religious education and experience that I hear / see has focused on the differences between faiths. But there is something universal that links all of these faiths and the scripts and manuscripts of all of my favourite television, film and books...

It's us: humans.

We're in all of those stories. And it's our tribulations throughout those stories that arouses our empathy and our desire to believe in the characters, whether the character in question is Mulder, Scully, Jesus, Jack Shepherd [ah, I see!], Lyra, Siddhartha, Satan, Skywalker, Mohammed...

They're all reflections of us, aren't they -- versions of us dressed in fairy tales and surrounded by metaphors, but us all the same. So, in essence, people of faith believe in us and people who claim to have no faith believe in us, too. It's like the basic fractions I used to do at school: the religions cancel themselves out leaving us, the lowest common denominators. Just us. Me and you and him and her.

It's not, exactly, a revelatory thought.

It's the basis of humanism and it's a thought that has struck people millions upon millions of times before. When LSD is wearing off is a popular time, I'm told.

What has this got to do with the X-Files and I Want to Believe. Everything and nothing! [I should write my own religious text!]. When you come to the realisation that all we believe in is echoes and manifestations of ourselves you're left with the one and only true test of faith left.

Are you willing to believe in you and are you willing to believe in me?

In other words, trust every one.

The anti-credo of The X-Files.

Which brings us back to the film.

The general consensus is that 'I Want to Believe' is a major disappointment. Where have the aliens gone? What are Mulder and Scully doing in bed together?!

But the genius of this film is that it focuses, after all of the smoke and mirrors of the TV series, on the most human aspects of the X-Files: our capacity to love each other, and our capacity to inflict shocking and terrible pain on each other.

I think it's a dark and subtle triumph.

I don't think that there will be a next time, simple economics will dictate that. But, if there is a next time, I would like to see some aliens, please. ;0)