I suspect some of you have heard this anecdote
but indulge me.
Two Jewish men have been arguing for a long time
so a friend to both men brings them to their rabbi. The first man tells his
side of the story to the rabbi. The rabbi replies: "You're right."
The second man tells his side of the story. "You're right," the rabbi
says. The third man is baffled. "Rabbi, they can't both be right."
The rabbi looks at the third man smiles: "You know something? You're
right."
In a way that kind of approach is very much the
reason I may have chosen criticism as my major profession. It's not just that I
love writing and going into details but I also love how so many critics can
look at the same piece of work – film, book, or in my case TV – and come to
completely different conclusions about it. This may come from having been a fan
of Siskel & Ebert when I was growing up but it applies just as much
to anything else. Perhaps it's because in many ways I can see myself as the
rabbi in this argument. In some cases I can see why one person would love a
piece of work and why another would hate it for the same reasons. This is also
true for why different viewers love a work and why critics might love something
for a different reason than a fan would.
Now those of you who've read my articles over the
years also know that I tend to spend a lot of time dealing with episode guides
involving television over the years, particularly with my own writing. And in a
sense I'm going into familiar territory when I'm giving a recommendation to
these two books because I have used both frequently over the last several years
in my own writing and will do so again. This time, I'm giving you details
because if you are a fan of The X-Files and you have yet purchase either
of these books (or one rather than other) that both of these volumes are
perhaps the most comprehensive of any that have ever been written on The
X-Files in the roughly thirty years since they started writing books about The
X-Files. (And yes I own most of those books too.)
I've referenced both before but for the
uninitiated here are the full titles of both: Wanting to Believe by
Robert Shearman and Monster of the Week by Zach Handlen and Todd Van Der Waff (now Emily
St. James). There are valid reasons to own both books because to paraphrase
Vincent in Pulp Fiction, they got the same shit but in some cases, it's
a little different.
For one thing the full title of Shearman's book includes
the subtitle 'A Critical Guide to The
X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen. Shearman was a completist and
because he had seen neither series when they were on the air but The X-Files
did an episode that wrapped each series up after they were abruptly
canceled, he decided to watch all of them. (That included more of a sacrifice
then you might think, which I'll explain later.) Handlen and St. James only
chose to review The X-Files as a whole. Shearman is British and only saw
most of the series months after the fact, and vernacular penetrates most of his
reviews. Handlen & St. James are Americans and have a different view point.
Perhaps more significant is the approach each
take. If I'm going to use The X-Files as a metaphor (and why not?) Shearman's
approach is closer to that of the one Scully would. He looks at the entire
series from a detached, academic point of view, giving every single episode a
rating between 1 and 5 stars (and he allows for 1/2 stars which I applaud him
for). Like a critic, he views each individual from how enjoyable it was and as
you might expect, he tends to think the monster of the week episodes are better
than the mytharc episodes which he loses patience with very quickly. (That is
not new for any X-File fan.) He also tries to look for themes between each
season, criticize each writer and looks for patterns in their work over time. Some
of his choices are unsurprising (he thinks Vince Gilligan is the best writer
the show produces) some are (he doesn't love Darin Morgan as much as most fans
do) and he makes some connections you might not think, particularly with
authors you might not remember. (He has a sentiment for David Amann, who joined
the staff in Season 6 that I never thought of watching the show.)
Handlen and St. James, by contrast, have an
approach closer to Mulder. (For the record both books to think Scully was the
better character throughout which any self-respecting fan knows.) They don't
rate any of the episodes but try to explain why they either loved or hated each
one. (The two alternate reviews most of the way through.) They tend to review
the myth-arc episodes, usually two-parters in one review during a season and
while they grant more latitude than Shearman about its rewards, they are close
to alignment as to when it went off the rails entirely. And when it comes to
episodes that they consider classics they will give far more space to it then
the run-of-the mill ones. (Shearman, by and large, basically devotes about two
pages or less to every single episode regardless of quality.) Generally
speaking the more they love an episode the longer the review: 'Clyde Bruckman's
Final Repose' gets four pages, Jose Chung's From Outer Space gets close to five
and The Post Modern Prometheus gets the longest one at six. They also have the
benefit of having written their guide a decade after Shearman wrote his.
(Shearman published his guide in 2009; Handlen and St. James wrote theirs in
2019.) And as a result they cover both revival seasons of the series, which
they refer to as Seasons 10 and 11. Their devotion is shown in footnotes
throughout each episode where they make personal asides, some humorous, some
unsettling.
The real argument to buy Shearman's book is his
criticism of Millennium. He almost seems to argue that this is the
superior Chris Carter series and while that's a bit extreme I won't deny its
persuasive nature. I purchased the book in 2009 entirely for its X-Files reviews
but after reading his reviews of Millennium (which I'd glanced at a few
times when it was originally on the air before dismissing) I decided I needed
to see it. In the mid 2010's I rented it from Netflix (as of this writing it is
still unavailable for streaming anywhere) and with each episode I began to see
what Shearman found so appealing about it. Thematically it never had a
connecting thread during the entire series or even from season to season but so
many of the episodes connected with me on a visceral level and both the writing
and the work of Lance Henriksen made me realize it was a forgotten gem of the
1990s. And having watched the X-Files episode that dealt with it after the
fact, I now realize why it was such a disappointment to fans of the show and
fans of the X-Files. If the
'Millennium' episode of The X-Files had been my only taste of the series
I wouldn't have understood why anyone liked the original series. Having seen
the original series by now, I keep thinking it should get a revival too.
Harden and St. James don't seem to have thought
much of that show (the only time they refer to it outside the X-Files episode
it's in a derivative way) and that's understandable considering they intend to
show their love of The X-Files. And it's
the way they review individual episodes as opposed to Shearman's that
make both books required reading and comes back as to why some episodes are
classics and some are messes. Shearman may be holding The X-Files to a
harsher standard than Monster of the Week does but he's clearly as much
a fan as Handlen & St. James are. (You wouldn't watch 200 plus episodes and
two films if you didn't enjoy The X-Files and you wouldn't subject
yourself to such stinkers as Teso Dos Bichos and Excelsis Dei if you weren't
truly devoted.) But Shearman's objections are clearly different then the
problems that Handlen and St. James have, particularly when it comes to the
myth arc. It's not just that he doesn't think it ever made sense; it's that
he's more aware of the flaws in it in a way that Handlen & St. James rarely
admit and that's in particular the horrible purple prose which he refers to,
pointedly and accurately, as 'Carter-speak."
It's in these segments that you get to see
Shearman's humorous side the way that inspired Roger Ebert when a movie was
truly terrible. A few passages from his one-star review of Season 4's 'Terma' will probably suffice:
"In fact, a lot of this feels like the
writers have set themselves a game: the scene between Skinner and Scully
outside her apartment has the two rabbiting exposition at each other with as
many subordinate clauses squeezed in as possible. (Mitch Pileggi wins by coming
up with one sentence which boasts no fewer than eleven.)
…Gillian Anderson is required to speak ever more
complex and facile speeches, until at last you can see her give up and switch
on the autopilot. It's dreadful, boring and facile. Just when you think the
dialogue has got as bad as can be, Mulder stands in front of Congress and tells
them they should all be held in contempt for not believing in aliens. In
response, everyone looks bemused. I know I was."
It almost makes you want to watch the episode to
see if its really that bad. (It's not, but it's close.) Handlen and St. James are slightly more
charitable to it than Shearman is (they review this episode in conjunction with
'Tunguska' which it was paired with) but they're inclined to think it's just as
much a mess. Their problems with the mytharc are story related rather than
dialogue. They think the episode is trying to much of its era (1996) and
they're also pretty sure this is where the mythology begins to lose whatever
chance it had of making sense. (Shearman basically agrees with them but for
different reasons.) They have more patience for the set pieces of the show than
Shearman does but even when they praise them, they do mention that it's now clear
the show runners were building a house of cards that got more unstable with
each season.
Now I do realize that for me to recommend not one
but two different episode guides about the same TV series is going to have a
limited appeal to those people who aren't X-Files fans. I'm not so much
worried about that niche (especially considering we may get a revival very
soon) as to those who might not necessarily want to read TV criticism or even
fan love in books when they can read them online. But think of it in terms of the
kind of YouTube or TikTok sites where you see people criticizing the most recent
action film or marvel movie or for that matter a Scully and a Mulder looking at
episodes in different ways. Sometimes it's how you see things that matters.
I could give a dozen examples of this throughout
the book but I think the best way is to do one episode that Shearman loves and
Handler and/or St. James hates, one the other way around and a classic episode
they both love but for different reasons.
Let's start with Season 6's 'Milagro' an episode
that I found problematic the first time I watched and will never consider a
favorite. This is why Handlen loathes the episode:
'Milagro' is a self-serious, intermittently
insulting chunk of television…It's not very good – because it's pompous, and
because it treats Scully with the sort of ill-defined contempt and exhausting
male gaze that forces the viewers that forces the viewer to ask some really
uncomfortable questions about just what the writers think of her…It's bad
enough that Scully is once relegated to victim status; even worse, the episode
makes him the puppet of (the villains) creepy infatuation before he gives up
upon realizing she's already in love with Mulder'
The problem Handlen says along with all this is
among other things the episode is too serious and that the prose is terrible ,
like watching someone's fanfiction come to life…and that the episode is
'fixated on the sort of vague philosophizing that makes Carter's monologues so
goofy. Handlen ends the review – which almost comes into the so bad its good
territory by saying "it's intermittingly captivating and frequently
horrid, with all the profundity of a late night jam session between two stoned
(male, single) philosophy majors.
Handlen is absolutely right.
Shearman doesn't entirely deny this but argues
that the episode is something of a self-portrait of how Carter himself views The
X-Files. He says that the main villain is essentially a metaphor for Carter
himself and that so much of what Handlen considers bizarre about it is an
expression of Carter's frustration at The X-Files which he never
expected to succeed this well is now so popular that it has completely consumed
him. He says:
…this is an episode about writing, about how
if the writer becomes God and makes his characters do what he tells them
against their inclinations it won't be true or sincere, but if he allows
himself to be a vessel for where the characters direct HIM he may produce
better art but end up powerless as a result."
Considering that by this point the episode had
run long past the intended run of the series and had now been moved from Canada
to LA, it's a subtext worth considering as well as the fact that Carter never
intended Mulder and Scully to get together but the fans had been pressuring him
so hard for five years it was becoming a constant drumbeat.
And as for the horrible nature of it:
It's a piece of self-indulgence, of course. It's
vague and it's flabby. And it's by Chris Carter, which means the writer's
voiceover prose has passages of brilliance and passages of pretension. In some
way, though, all these faults are part of the point; this is a study of
overwriting with all the mistakes left in, all the frustrations and
inadequacies a writer has to endure…And after six seasons of being a runaway
hit – and still going strong, Carter won't be off the hook for years yet! – the
show couldn't make something as inward looking as this. It shouldn't still be
running at all.
Shearman is also absolutely right. (It doesn't
make the episode better but he's still right.)
Now let's do the reverse with All Souls a
fifth season episode that tells a story that – well, I'll let Shearman who
considers this one of the worst episodes in the entire history of the franchise
describe it:
"So, this is the one about a killer who's
hunting down four girls. And burning their eyes out. But it's okay because the
killer is God. Yes, God. That's right. And it's doubly okay, because the girls
are disabled, and not 'meant to be'…I'll let that one sink in a moment. And
when Scully gets the chance to save the last victim's life, she's persuaded –
get this – by a vision of her dead daughter to let her die as was intended. The
daughter who was, unless we forget, also killed earlier in the season
because she too wasn't meant to be. (To be fair, at least in Emily, the girl
was an alien hybrid with green acid blood. And she wasn't disabled? Did I
mention that these other girls have no right to live because they're disabled?
Okay. Good. I thought I had.)
Now let's ponder. What sort of message is being
sent out here?"
To be clear most of the time in Shearman's
reviews he doesn't let his own personal beliefs cloud his judgment: he clearly
has them when it comes to the political incorrectness of certain stories that
have aged badly but he doesn't let it always be a factor. That he takes such
offense to this story is very telling and it does get to one of the biggest
flaws with The X-Files overall. Whenever The X-Files deals with
religion, organized or otherwise, it far
too often became offensive. I'm closer in a sympathy with Shearman on this
episode than I am in Milagro but that doesn't change the underlying fact that
there is something very offensive about this.
Now I should mention one of the central themes of
Monster of the Week is how so many of even the best stories on The
X-Files can be problematic either because they've aged poorly or because
they deal with troubling subtexts, most notably when it comes to consent. (That
is no doubt one of the issues driving the contempt towards Milagro by Handlen.)
You'd think this same issue involving all of the problems above would
trouble The problem is that when St.
James reviews this episode it's clear that their love of Anderson is enough to
carry the day. This is how St. James deals with all of the very real issues
with the episode:
"Just don't think about its somewhat
nihilistic theological implications too much and you'll be fine."
St. James almost always handles most of the
episodes that deal with consent in a humorous fashion with the delicacy they
deserve. They acknowledge their problematic but you can get over it. Both
authors have considerable issues with some of the more racist storylines which
tend to bother Shearman somewhat less. St. James acknowledges the reality of
the storyline phrasing it like this: "Scully is pretty sure that God sent
four mentally handicapped girls with the souls of angels into her life so he could
burn out their eyes, take them to heaven and let her know it's ok to let go of
any residual sadness she has about the death of (her daughter) earlier this
season".
St. James seems to be acknowledging the absurdity
and the dark implications but she has a different perspective:
"Of course God would want to tell Scully to
proceed with her work. Of course he would contrive an elaborate scenario
wherein he sends four of his angels down to Earth in the form of endangered
young girls, purely so he could call them back at some point to teach Scully a
lesson about letting them go. And of course he would let this entire cosmic
battle play out before her very eyes as a way to let her know what path to
follow."
This scenario is, if anything, more ridiculous
than the one Shearman described in his review. But St. James is playing it more
or less straight because of her overriding love for Scully. If anything she
doubles down in the final sentences.
"Scully, you see, is just that important.
She's not just the rational skeptic, there to give Mulder the support he needs.
She's the skeptic, the woman who stands out between the mundane and the
unexplained and sees demons and doesn't get her eyes burned out. She's on the
front lines, and that's exactly where the almighty wants here."
In other words God loves Scully as much as the
rest of us do and that allows us to excuse a storyline even St. James
acknowledges is 'preposterous'. Shearman loved Anderson's work as Scully too
but even he isn't willing to go that far.
And now let's close this with an episode where
both books are in complete alignment on a classic episode. Let's do one of the
all-time great's Vince Gilligan's Season 4 classic 'Paper Hearts'. This is a
classic episode and I'll let St. James tell you why:
Paper Hearts spends its entire running time
trying to get you to believe a lie. More than anything, it wants you to think
the show will throw away one of its most important structural underpinnings in
the service of a Monster of a Week episode that seems cribbed from a more
earthbound detective show. Chiefly, it wants you to believe that Mulder will
uncover that his sister's disappearance is due to a man – a monstrous man, but
a mere man, nonetheless. Not aliens. Not a conspiracy. Not a shining light in
the sky. A man.
Now I'll let Shearman explain why this man, a serial
killer named John Lee Roche, is so unsettling and why the trick works so well:
"Vince Gilligan (the writer) has a disturbing
ability to take serial killers and make them pointedly ordinary; there is
nothing 'Silence of the Lambs like in his approach to his human monster,
nothing to glamorize them. But nor does he demonize them either. John Lee Roche…is
a man who is an interested in the details of his vacuum cleaner sales as he is
the trophies of his child murders.
…There is something truly macabre in his opening
scenes with Mulder, the way they greet each other as calmly as familiar acquaintances.
And what this achieves is the unthinkable – you spend the episode hoping that
Roche really is the man who killed Samantha, because it would somehow bring
closure, it'd bring peace. When Mulder and Scully visit Frank Sparks, some
twenty years after the abduction of his little girl, it's clear from the way he
greets the FBI at the door that he's been keenly waiting for the news all this
time, that the mystery has never for a single day stopped haunting him. He
talks about how its better to know than always to wonder – and yet, conversely ,
how relieved he is the child's mother is dead so she's spared the news.
And it's that contradiction which is at the core
of Paper Hearts' success. You want to find out the truth. You dread to find out
the truth. David Duchovny's performance – one of his very best – captures the
dichotomy of this brilliantly, digging in the dirt with his bare hands eager to
discover the body of his sister, relieved and yet anguished when he realizes
the corpse on the autopsy table is not Samantha, meaning that she still has not
had the resolution he needs.
I'll avoid revealing how this episode plays out
exactly and why so much of this is agonizing. Instead I'll let St. James
conclusion to her essay – which covers the same ground in different ways –
explains its power:
The comforting idea of a conspiracy theory is
that it removes all room for random chance, that the death and misery that
greet our time on Earth can be written off as the machinations of the devil or
a secret cabal that controls everything that happens. The boldest move of 'Paper
Hearts' is that it takes away the certainty that some kind of evil order
prevails and replaces it with the idea that it all could be random
chance. In real life, most of us eventually come to accept this as a fact of life.
But in fiction, particularly in fiction like The X-Files, where there's a place
for everything and everything has it's place, it can be disconcerting.
'Paper Hearts' lives in that uneasiness. Its suggestion
that sometimes its not your dad turning you over to aliens, that sometimes It's
just a nut with an El Camino and a horrible secret, is almost radically simple
for the show. The possibility that there could actually be a rational explanation
becomes a doubt that nags and can never entirely be dismissed, even as you know
it for the lie for what it is. The X-Files, for all its feints towards
ambiguity, exists in a universe driven by an almost godlike conspiracy that can
do whatever it likes, and there's a comfort in having that kind of certainty in
our fiction. But there's a power in embracing the mystery, the idea that life
is a scary, random place."
To be clear neither of these books are the kind
of books you sit down and read from start to finish. They fit the definition of
a coffee table book, the kind of book you randomly open to any given page when
you have free time – or when you've seen an episode of these series. For me, one
or the other has for the last several years been the kind of book I read a few
pages of before I go to be each night. And no, reading these books late at
night doesn't make me have trouble falling asleep because of the frequently
disturbing subject matter in them. No I sleep just fine…because I've been
replaced by an alien shape-shifter or a man with a tail or I work at a cubicle
and my boss called him and now I'm a zombie. (Just kidding…or am I?)
In all serious both of these books are the kind
of project that all fans of Ten-Thirteen either have already or should have.
For those who are still uninitiated in the world of Mulder and Scully, it might
not be the worst idea to see a few episodes of the X-Files on streaming (they're
always on one service or another) Monster is probably the better one for
just that book as neither Millennium or The Lone Gunmen are on
any streaming service yet. For those Millennium fans who are out there
(and there is a new graphic novel series so I know they are) Believe will
help you wander down memory lane and maybe track down the DVDs. It did for me.
Either way both of these books will appeal to a
certain group of fans out there. You know who you are. (And so does the
Syndicate.) With Ryan Coogler's revival of the series supposedly coming very
soon, you might want to get acquainted again, if only to see what the show did
right and what it did wrong and begin the wondrous debate over one of the
greatest series of all time.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to pick up a pack
of Morleys. Just kidding…
No comments:
Post a Comment