X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
Fox DVD (region 1)
d. Chris Carter; pr. Christ Carter, Frank Spotnitz; scr. Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz; ph. Bill Roe; m. Mark Snow; ed. Richard A. Harris; cast. David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Peet, Billy Connolly, Xzibit, Mitch Pileggi, Adam Godley (104 mins)
X-Files: I Want to Believe takes the fictionalized evidentiary enquiry into unusual phenomena of the television series and turns it into an allegorical treatise of contemporary Christian, specifically Catholic, ethics. In doing so it emerges as one of the most repugnant pieces of Catholic apologia ever fostered on the big screen.
Agents Scully and Mulder (Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny) are called out of retirement and exile back into the FBI to help find a missing agent. The only clues are emerging from a seeming psychic – a paedophile Priest (Billy Connolly) stripped of his religious authority and living in a home for repeat sex offenders. Connolly hates himself for what he is but believes that it is God who made him that way and that God is giving him visions to answer his prayers and somehow give him the opportunity to atone for his sins. His seeming psychic ability ingratiates him to Mulder, who wants to believe, but not to Scully who is having a crisis of faith. Indeed, it is Scully who dominates this film.
Scully is a woman of faith working in a Catholic hospital. There, she is treating a child who has a rare disorder – there is no known cure or treatment. In Mulder’s arms, she curses God for bringing a child into the world and allowing him to die in this way. Her faith is eroding and she holds Connolly in sheer contempt as a serial child molester. Her nemesis is another Catholic priest, her boss and chief administrator at the hospital. This Priest wants to transfer the boy to a hospice as there is no treatment to save him. However, as Scully points out, there is one treatment – involving stem cells, exactly the procedure outlawed by Catholicism as against God. Scully is thus at a crossroads – between following the possibilities offered by medical science or following the dogma of Catholic ethics. The medical road can possibly save the boy but doing nothing and, as the parents put it, “leaving it to God’s hands” surely would mean the boy’s death. What God wants and the need to not give up one’s faith when following through in life’s challenges is the theme of this serial crime thriller.
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The film’s subtitle thus, I Want to Believe, is about the characters’ need to believe in God. For Mulder it is through an acceptance of the paedophile priest’s psychic powers, for the paedophile priest it is in his atonement for sin in deciphering the mystery of his psychic visions and for Scully it is finally in the choice to believe that the paedophile priest may indeed be God’s chosen vessel.
Thus, a key plot point involves Scully confronting the paedophile who quotes scripture at her only to later when searching for Mulder stop at a place designated by the same scriptural reference. In this scene, director and co-creator Chris Carter effectively validates the spiritualist dimension and admits that the paedophile priest is indeed a vessel of divine message and that faith in God and scripture ensures the salvation of humanity – in this case the rescue of Mulder from a bizarre plot involving Frankenstein-ian organ transplanting. This Christianization of psychic phenomena is an essentially anti-humanist message, especially sine it in effect excuses the actions of a paedophile as a holy man after all, still capable of being God’s servant. In this, this film essentially apologizes for the paedophile priest phenomenon and forgives it as the folly of God’s divine servants – following Catholic dogma to the end.
With this anti-humanist ethical confusion and religious obfuscation of responsibility X-Files I Want to Believe posits the forgiveness of the paedophile priest in the eyes of God, if not society. Connolly is shown as a humane man whose urging to Scully not to give up proves the focal point to resolve her own conflictions. That God may speak through a paedophile priest, however, seems more reconcilable to these filmmakers than the issue of stem cell research and Catholic dogma. Thus, although Scully has been able to restore her faith, she believes that God wants her to use the stem cell technique in order to save the sick boy. However, while the filmmakers forgive the paedophile priest and absolve him of responsibility for his actions in a mind-numbingly awful conception of humanity and sin, they are too timid to resolve the stem cell issue and leave it ambiguous, the film ending on a strange note – the future of faith is the boy, named Christian and allegorically representing the future of the Christian faith between Christian medicine and Catholic dogma. In the end, X-Files: I Want to Believe is a tepid thriller about the triumph of faith when facing challenges that unknown phenomena and medical science offer Catholicism, hinting that the fate of Christianity itself lies in such Catholic reaction to the ethics of medical science.
