I Want to Believe
This post serves as a contribution to The X-Files Blog-a-Thon.
Earlier this week I completed a quest I set out upon last November: to watch all 202 episodes of The X-Files before the new film was released. I’d never really dedicated myself to following a television show until college rolled around, with the exceptions of From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers. Science fiction always intrigued me, and I did manage to watch The X-Files: Fight the Future and a select few episodes from that time period, but otherwise the show slipped by me, to remain on my periphery until I was spurred by the specter of a new film and blessed with the wonders of Netflix. And so I spent nine months combing through all nine seasons.
The X-Files always spent a good deal of time on the debate between faith and reason, the irrational and the rational. The show was in no way subtle in crafting its leads as characters who would embody one or the other. At least until the last couple seasons when some roles were shifted around, Fox Mulder was the one willing to take irrational leaps of faith while Dana Scully stuck to science and fact. Their interpersonal chemistry and philosophical debating sustained much of the series, through subpar plots, hokey mythologies and awful early ’90s fashion.
The problem, as I see it, is that the viewing audience was rarely, if ever, asked to participate in the debate between Mulder and Scully. As most episodes progress, Scully is inevitably asked if not begged by Mulder and/or circumstance to concede the possibility of the impossible. The viewer, however, never even has the chance to make that leap. Rather, the show’s structure leads us to have actual knowledge of what Scully must eventually consider possible, and of what Mulder might suspect and believe. Typical episodes open by giving the viewer a privileged insight into the unbelievable act that the show’s FBI agents will proceed to investigate during the remaining forty minutes. We witness the alien abduction, the creature attack, the religious ritual, etc. Even if certain things are left to our imagination for the time being – like a complete view of the monster-of-the-week – we see more than enough to know that we’ve been privy to something out of the ordinary. Even when Mulder’s initial thoughts about a case prove wrong, often by way of Scully’s scientific sleuthing, we don’t doubt that something unbelievable is happening. The question is always what or how that something is, not whether it is.
Mulder and Scully
I frequently found myself hating the segments of the show that would cut away from our leads to show us suspect’s life or another attack by the monster or shady men in black suits conspiring in smoke-filled rooms. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to be convinced by Mulder. I also wanted to be stymied by Scully’s science. Most of all, I wanted to be in the middle of that battleground of ideas. I wanted to have to grapple with both sides, reconcile one with the other and try to figure out what was truly occurring. Maybe that’s way too much to ask from a network television show riffing on police procedurals, but I think it would have been positively brilliant, especially if they were really daring and didn’t satisfy audience expectations for constant supernatural solutions. Mulder could win some weeks, Scully could win others, along with mixtures of both or neither. Keep us guessing and keep us involved and engaged.
I often mourned the manner in which Scully was in the unfortunate position of almost always being wrong about the big picture answer to any given case. She might successfully sort through the details to help hone Mulder’s crazy theories, but it was Mulder who would be right, even if his thoughts didn’t help write up a report for Assistant Director Skinner. This short-shrifting of Scully would grow more frustrating in the episodes where Mulder actively leaves her in the dark about his theories, generally later in the series. In eventual episodes (dare I point to the series finale?) this pattern would develop into an extreme exaggeration where Mulder is an all-knowing messiah ready with ridiculous insight into a situation while Scully isn’t even sure what the situation involves. There’s a point where I just feel sorry for Scully, having to deal with a partner who denies her true participation in the questions of a case. Not even she would be asked to believe in what Mulder might profess. At these times, Scully became a cypher for my own feelings of not being allowed to join the debate between faith and reason. I couldn’t choose or investigate those questions because the given episode would have revealed part of the answer to me. Scully would be unable to join the debate because Mulder (and the writers) was too busy playing cock-of-the-walk at a pace three steps ahead of her.
There are of course episodes that do a better job at disguising or limiting what the audience is shown, but we’re still rarely invited in. We’re outside observers, nodding in agreement with Mulder and hoping Scully will allow extreme possibilities to exist in her mental framework. [Of course, eventually Scully assumes the position of the believer in opposition to Agent Doggett - occasionally replacing Scully with Reyes - or turning it into a three person spectrum, but the formula remains the same.] I’d submit that this is one of the areas in which “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” succeeds so wildly, by constantly relishing the various narrators’ unreliability and subverting what we think we know until the end. This episode, and the few others by Darin Morgan, had some fun with the lead characters and our knowledge of the given situation, but we were still left out of the show’s quintessential question of faith versus reason.
None of this is meant to take away from all the things The X-Files did well, but I’m left believing there’s plenty of room for further development. Other shows have taken various aspects from the groundwork of The X-Files, so perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the core philosophical debate is rekindled elsewhere and taken to the next level. Time will tell.
