We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well. –HISTORIAN RICHARD HOFSTADTER
We X-Files fans–or X-philes, to be annoying–are double sufferers. Maybe even triple sufferers, since we are afflicted not only by history and by our own fantasies but by “creator” Chris Carter’s as well. We watch his series (and, starting this Friday, the movie) as a reverse Truman Show–wishing not so much that the protagonists could be released from their scrapes with fate as that we could join them in the fantasy chaos. It’s no accident that our favorite side characters are not the delectably evil Cancer Man (the architect of an imminent armageddon that FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully must stop) or even the beloved, bald Walter Skinner (their boss at the agency) but the Lone Gunmen, three earnest dorks who sometimes fight the future by hacking into a computer or peering into a microscope at a heretofore unknown virus.
Computers! Microscopes! The X franchise is the true revenge of the nerds. Just look at Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny). Despite their stylish wardrobe in the film–they’re costumed by the woman who used to dress Madonna–they’re lame: they don’t have sex (with each other or, it seems, anyone else). They work all the time. They believe in extraterrestrials. In real life, Mulder and Scully would be weirdos–bookish types with bad skin whom you avoid in the hallways.
X-philes are also suckers. Not just in the way all fans get suckered into buying product tie-ins. (Although, in that way too: a $55 X-Files CD-ROM game was just released, and, of course, the sound track is already out.) We’re suckered by Carter’s inanities–lapses of story and logic that you might expect from a guy who used to write about surfing. In the various Web chat rooms, we grandly contort ourselves to make it all make sense, to press hard continuity into the moist irregularities he offers up every week. His rare moments of generosity with information–one comes at the end of the sound track, when Carter outlines the origins of an interplanetary conspiracy–are greeted with mountains of interpretive exegesis in response.
I am as guilty as anyone. I recently spent most of a day furiously typing to an idiotic teenager with a risque handle (I think it was Scullyspants) that it’s not at all implausible that Cancer Man (whom the studio calls Cigarette-Smoking Man, possibly to avoid offending tobacco companies–another hot Web debate) fathered several of the characters on the show, including Mulder himself. Being a hard-core “noromo” (parlance for “no romancer,” someone who believes the show’s UST, or unresolved sexual tension, is the key to its vitality), I have also flamed “shippers” (“relationshippers,” those who want Mulder and Scully to get it on in the film) with now embarrassing vituperations, such as, “Why don’t you just go get the lame job you’re destined for at the state budget office?” In X-land, it is a terrible insult to imply that someone works for the government. I have no proof, but I’m sure I’ve communed with right-wing militia members over Files arcana.
In short, Carter has us at his mercy, us lonely hearts, paranoiacs and geeks who were actually sad when the series left Friday nights for Sundays. For months we have debated the film’s plot, casting, ending, scoring, advertising, even catering (a Web debate once raged over whether Gillian Anderson is vegetarian; no one knew for sure, but I think someone so sultry must be carnivorous). Last I checked, there were more than 1,300 postings in one of the chat rooms–all very recent, most of them guesses about the film.
So it was with odd feelings of power that I attended an advance screening of the movie last week. I approached it with a flutter, like Dorothy visiting the Wizard–with no intention of yanking back the curtain. Since I’m not a critic, I won’t review it. But I can offer a little guidance, both for the uninitiated and for the fellow traveler. If you’ve never seen an episode, the movie will look better than it feels. It’s a buddy-cop film dressed in Armani and toting a frayed copy of Ray Bradbury. And if you’re like me, stay calm: shippers and noromos both win.
