June 18–25, 1998

movie shorts

The X-Files: Fight the Future

With the movie, the X-Files universe just keeps getting bigger.

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Rob Bowman
A 20th-Century Fox Release

recommended

It's been another terrible day at the office for FBI Special Agent Mulder (David Duchovny).

In The X-Files: Fight the Future, he learns that—once again—the x-files project has been shut down. During his subsequent late-night drinking bout at a Washington, DC, bar, he rattles on about a global conspiracy and extra-terrestrial life forms until the bartender (Glenne Headley) cuts him off. Unable to find a working bathroom, Mulder exits to a back alley, where he urinates against a wall. Drunk, gazing at the brick wall in the dark in that vacant, no-one-will-see-me-pissing-here way, Mulder barely notices a tattered poster for Independence Day at his eye level. But audience members who are paying attention get the joke straightaway.

Getting it involves knowing something about Fox "Spooky" Mulder and his science-fictionish, noirish, paranoidish and flashlight-beam-pierced milieu. This is what the fans of the Fox television series—the x-philes—know: Mulder and his partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), will never be fighting a future where they get to blow up alien megaships or raise their freedom-fighting fists in joyous huzzahs alongside a trustworthy jet pilot of a U.S. president. Rather, Mulder and Scully live in a world where aliens don't come bearing conspicuous weapons, and government suits are the primary and most insidious enemies, the nefarious They who are behind an ongoing conspiracy (incorporating alien invasions, biological warfare, natural disasters, nuclear technologies, and, perhaps most horrifying of all, parental betrayals).

The popular X-Files tagline—"Trust no one"—is the organizational principle for Mulder and Scully's world, rife with distrust, cynicism and corruption. Indeed, the characters were initially set up to distrust one another. When the series was first created by Chris Carter some five years ago, Scully was assigned to monitor and "debunk" Mulder's apparently notorious work on paranormal, ET-related or otherwise weird and inexplicable phenomena. Despite the fact that she soon began to doubt her superiors' motives and to trust her new partner's hunches, the well-articulated differences between the two often drive the series' themes and plots. She's the skeptic, the scientist, the Catholic (explicit rules are important for her). He's the true believer in aliens (his sister Samantha was apparently abducted before his eyes when he was a boy), the romantic quester, the pornography consumer.

Some of the more interesting episodes over the years sabotage or challenge this personality contrast as it was originally laid out. One of these features an offscreen Jodie Foster as the voice of a man's murder-inciting girlie tattoo; at the end, after Scully has endured much hardship and trauma, she tells off her self-absorbed partner, observing as the camera pulls out from his cramped office and the scene fades to black, "Not everything's about you, Mulder." In another episode, the disturbing "Home," Mulder is revealed as being particularly insensitive concerning Scully's inability to have children, after her abduction and abuse by some mysterious forces. Mulder's conscientiousness and creepiness, along with Scully's intermittently developing independence—on top of her seemingly interminable efforts to advise, keep up with, nurture, teach and learn from him—make the series and the movie provocative and sometimes even unpredictable.

If the protagonists can be inconsistent (and I mean this as a good thing), the secondary characters are rarely who they seem to be; the nameless ones like the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) and the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) are generally not to be trusted, but it's not always clear how or why this is the case, or whose side they're on. To an extent, the movie, directed by Rob Bowman and scripted by Carter, elaborates on such tensions. (It's not necessary to have seen the series to follow what's going on; in fact, the rumor that the 1998 season finale would lead to the movie is untrue.) Like most any episode, it features breathtaking visuals (Ward Russell's cinematography is magnificent) and a plot concerning aliens and a government cover-up. The aliens in this case are of the "black oil" variety, first seen in episodes with the dastardly, now one-armed Alex Krycek (Nicolas Lea); the cover-up has to do with the "terrorist" bombing of a federal building in Dallas, for which Mulder and Scully are blamed, so that they must clear their names while re-jumping the x-files.

Also like most any episode, the movie focuses on Mulder and Scully's evolving relationship, informed by evil forces and cool settings, here a cornfield where they're chased by black helicopters à la Cary Grant in North by Northwest, a killer-bee-breeding facility where they're attacked à la any deadly swarm flick, and the Antarctic, where their relationship turns even more fantastic, with fairy-tale dimensions. Series aficionados (and they are legion—as well as vocal—on the Internet and elsewhere, eager to discuss rumors and disinformation disseminated by the wily filmmakers) have been talking for months about an anticipated or dreaded Mulder-Scully kiss. The outcome of this particular suspense (such as it is) entails intensified machinations, with a knocked-out damsel, dwarfy sidekicks (here, the Lone Gunmen, with not much to do but show up and get applauded), an eccentric informant (Martin Landau) who makes Mulder look sane, and fiendish villains assisted by goon squads in contamination suits.

What's at stake in The X-Files is how much anyone sees. (Mulder especially is often described as having "seen too much," hence his threat to the nebulous conspirators.) In the movie, there's obviously more to see, with the increased budget, screen size and effects. And there's the babe factor, which is visible to fans if not, precisely, to the characters. Restrained as they are in their suits and trench coats, Mulder and Scully have inspired enthusiastic Web sites (male and female, straight and gay).

In Fight the Future, their close-ups and exchanged glances feel vaguely more charged, as if you're seeing more, but what's interesting (and consistent with the series) is that the characters tend not to see the same things, as you or as each other. At one point Mulder tries to rouse his unconscious partner, saying literally, "Scully, you have to see this." Appropriately and ironically, he's then passed out by the time she awakens. So it's never clear if they share a specific vision. What they and you see in the x-files universe is always in doubt, and that's the particular power of the powers that be, here (they can control what gets seen by whom).

And that's the power of the movie: it's a more commanding vision, encouraging even more focused consumption of visible objects. As the audience presumably expands to include those who haven't yet seen the series, the commercial clout of the x-files enterprise expands accordingly. The famous paranoia, well-founded or justified or not, becomes beside the point. See and believe, see and don't believe. Just see and just buy… something.