X-Files: I Want to Believe

So I've been fishing around on RottenTomatoes.com for the past few minutes, and I have to say that every snide claim Orson Welles ever made about "the critics" in his masterpiece, F for Fake, seems to be holding true.

Thus, in what follows, it should be noted that I am writing with the voice, not of the "expert," but as a fan. A dedicated fan.

I am a longtime fan, first of all, of the Batman mythos, and was thrilled by the work Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale did to bring the film franchise back into line with the roots of the mythology with Batman Begins a few years back. A superb film, on its own merits, that fact only makes it more amazing for its being a superhero film. (Though I do wince at the hokey physics involved in the "we need a microwave emitter to destroy the city water main" subplot - a narrative device bested in its useless melodrama only by the "Project Xylophone" sublot in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - but I digress) .

In terms of the new film, The Dark Knight, however, I cannot give such high praise. Yes, Heath Ledger is all that and a bag or anarchic chips; and yes, I am happy - like the rest of us - that Christian Bale is the first actor since Adam West who is actually able to turn his head from side to side while wearing the costume. But (and this is a tremendous but) - I spent almost the entire film trying to will myself to like it more than I actually did. Which is sad, because I really did want to be blown away by it, but frankly, I wasn't.

Make no mistake: I am glad I saw it; it was worth watching. But I have no real desire to watch it again.

Checking RottenTomatoes just now, however, you'd think this film was the Second Coming. To quote an old friend of mine, Jesus on a Telecaster with new strings couldn't get a crowd going like the buzz afoot among the critics about The Dark Knight. 95% approval, at my recent perusal. That's quite a thundering endorsement for a film that couldn't even edit the chase scenes for consistency of street flow (watch the first Batcycle scene again - you'll catch what I mean. Its simply a mess) or getting Harvey Dent out of an exploding hospital with any sort of temporal credibility. I take some solace in the fact that X-Men III and Superman Returns were worse still. But hey, I guess, it is, in the end, just a film based on a comic book. I can let some of that slide.

The real thorn in my side, however, is that the new X-Files film, I Want to Believe, is getting absolutely hammered by these same critics. But absolutely.

Full disclosure: I am not just an X-Files fan; I am an X-Files fan who adamantly does not subscribe to the opinion that the show went downhill after Season 6. I am one of those mutants who finds all nine seasons to form a coherent and satisfying story arc. In other words, I am a nerd about this.

To digress again for a moment, allow me to make my case with a few choice points. For me, X-Files was never about the conspiracies - it is about the characters. Mulder, it is true, does have his shifts through the series (losing his "faith" in extraterrestrials, the paradoxical closure and simultaneous lack of closure about his sister, Samantha, and his strange aversion to religious convictions of any stripe), but the really interesting development throughout the series is Scully. Her portrayal by Gillian Anderson is complex and fascinating - by turns strong and vulnerable, stubborn and hopeful, faithless and faith-filled. Her slow orbit around Mulder's monomania for "the Truth" reveals that she is literally as crazy as he is, in different but equally rewarding ways for the viewer.

I submit that you do not truly get the depths of her craziness - or the orbit - until Mulder is no longer a physical presence in the series. Hence the last two seasons, 8 and 9, are not an aberration, but a completion of a trajectory that begins (you can see it - go back and check for yourself) right there in Season 1, in the earliest episodes. Without belaboring the point or psychoanalyzing too much, I'll just say that the interplay of Scully's return to her Catholic faith, coupled with the recurrent "father figure" issues she has throughout the series, leavened by the openness to the paranormal and supernatural she gains through working with Mulder on the X-Files, is handled throughout the nine seasons with gravitas and grit. Her emotional and spiritual life is messy, a hodgepodge of half-remembered catechesis and moral-compass bearings that sometimes flag from true north - in other words, her story is a lot like many of ours.

I admit that I was quite fearful, entering the theater last night, that all of this development and complexity would go by the boards, to be lost in a sea of "rearranging the story" for the purpose of shock or recklessness. I expected the worst, and was surprised beyond my hopes with a truly rewarding, well-made movie.

I Want to Believe is watchable; moreover, it is re-watchable. It is, speaking as a die-hard fan, about the most accessible entry-point into Mulder and Scully's story arc you could ask for - by which I mean, non-viewers will be able to "get" it right off the bat.

Most pleasing to me, you get the chance to see the full-blown craziness of Scully - but now with Mulder there. Seeing how they negotiate their respective neuroses and obsessions onscreen (or fail to negotiate them) was very satisfying, for many of the reasons I have mentioned above. The emotional tenor is convincing, as well. Both actors know these roles well, and though they are stretching them in new directions, the core is still there - the chemistry and the complexity are in full effect.

Most of all - its creepy. Creepy in the fine tradition of all those episodes that still make my skin crawl. Creepy - but with that inexplicable ability to remind you that there is still hope, and that in the end, the monsters will not win - that has always been at the heart and soul of the X-Files. The tone of dread and dark is palpable, but tempered with moments of true humor that flow seamlessly with the larger story. The audience laughed and gasped, both, last night, at moments when I am certain that Chris Carter - the mad genius behind it all - intended us to.

And at the end, when the credits rolled, we applauded. As a true fan, I could not ask for more than that.

You can believe it

Kira and I just got back from the midnight premiere of the new X-Files film. I'll write more about it probably, but before I go to bed I just wanted to say it's really, really good. And spooky - just the way I like 'em.

Worth your time. I'll be going back to see it again.

"When did we see you, Lord?"

In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing (from the Hippocratic Oath)

A couple of days ago I was on the phone with my Mother. She has recently undergone cataract surgery for both her eyes - a series of operations that have brightened her outlook, both figuratively and literally.

Because of a program in the city in which she resides, and because she is on a pretty fixed income right now, the procedures were very nearly free. During our conversation I made the comment, "Hooray for socialized medicine!" Mother, a lifelong Libertarian and congenital contrarian, was quick to chide me.

"This is not socialized medicine," she insisted. "Socialized medicine would be terrible!"

This is what I would call a typical conversation between my Mother and I on such subjects, and it is a disagreement we have had for decades. For her, the Market (always with a capital-'M') is the Answer (again, you can almost hear the capital-'A') to all problems - social and personal and all the potentially-unhygenic crevices in-between. I am inclined to disagree.

I was in mind of this conversation these past couple of days as I came across the following two anecdotes, related to me by various friends.

First, one friend, just recently returned from five weeks in China, told of getting a cut on her ankle, which then got badly infected. After a couple days of just trying to let it heal on its own, the wound began turning blackish, and so she went to see a Chinese physician.

At the clinic, she was immediately seen by a (female) doctor, who instructed the (male) nurse, who in turn cleaned the wound and bandaged it properly. The infection was treated with antibiotics and is now fully healed.

Total time in the clinic? Less than an hour, with a translator, no less. Total cost of the antibiotics? $1.50. Total cost for the visit itself? Fifty cents, American.

The second story, slightly less rosy, involves a graduate school colleague of mine, who has taken part of the year off for medical leave. The leave is official, recognized by the University, and is, in effect, simply a "pause" in her studies. In other words, she is still a student.

However, she was recently informed, by the administrator of the school's insurance plan, that she would not be eligible for school medical insurance while she was on school medical leave. Never mind that (to quote the Book of Esther) it was for such a time as this that medical insurance was invented in the first place; my friend has been caught up in a bureaucracy with its own illogical logic.

While I am not privy to all the details of the discussion that followed, I am reasonably certain that the frank absurdity of this was noted to the administrator by my colleague.

The points I want to make here are the following:

1) as much as I may dislike the practices of the People's Republic of China on issues of liberty, I cannot fault them for having an inexpensive health care system that seems, at least on my limited knowledge of it from my friends who have been there, to work.

2) the argument often made against socialized health care - by my Mother and those of her mindset - is that such a system would be mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, such that those who need care might not get it at the time they most need it. What I am observing, however, in my own health care and that of others, is a similar bloated inefficiency - with the added insult of an obscene price tag.

My evidence is all hearsay and anecdotal, I admit, but the physicians I have known who are idealistic and truly concerned for the full health and wellbeing of their patients were all encouraged by the partners in their practices to leave. One now works for the public health establishment. I have been acquainted with other doctors, as well, who were concerned chiefly with dollar signs. One such soul was recently involved in callously dispossessing Kira and I of our apartment when it became profitable to turn them into condominiums. So let the reader be aware I do have a bias in these discussions. Caveat emptor.

"Health care for profit" is not simply an oxymoron - it is a blasphemy. I think of another image - a college classmate, weeping openly at graduation, not for joy, but because she had both diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis and no job yet, and therefore no job-related insurance to replace the school's plan by which she would no longer be covered. She was weeping because, despite all the high talk of the Market and its forces of supply meeting demand, she was simply uninsurable - even if she could have paid the premiums, private insurance would have refused to cover the very conditions for which she most needed insurance.

I am aware that this is a complex issue, and I am aware that the answer is not simple charity. The Nazi's, after all, gave bread to the poor. But there must be a point at which reason - and reasonable kindness - prevails, mustn't there?

I do not care what it is called - whether it goes by the name "socialized medicine" or not - but there are countries all over the globe, of every stripe of politics and resource, that are delivering efficient and affordable, if not free, health care to their citizens. The quality of this care beats the best that the American medical market seems to provide; in fact, we're pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to the effectiveness of our care system.

So, to be blunt, call it what you will, but I am tired of waiting. Health care, by my lights, should be readily available, highly effective, and free. I have little interest in discussing anything short of that anymore. We can do it, and we aren't, and that is simple foolishness and petty jingoism.

So often humans are made to suffer so that the word choice of a few can be untarnished, or for some idiocy of ideological resistance. Systems put in place to preserve the systems themselves and not the lives put in their care.

We will be judged, I am told, by how we have cared for the least among us. They deserve better than we have offered them so far.

"The New Criticism"

My ruthless pen at your throat
slashing lines, across your poet face,
the clogged arteries of your words

Every surgeon is a madman

at least,
this is what I tell myself,
standing, scrubbing hands
over the scour-bare sink

Bend the Hundred Acre Sinister

Kira and I have moved to a new apartment, and this entails, among many other things, a reorganization of books. As I was about this task today, I was suddenly pleased to note that, among the many volumes of fiction we own, Vladimir Nabokov sits dangerously close to A.A. Milne on our fiction shelf.

There are pleasures, and then there are pleasures. This morning, with that, the universe provided the latter. Thank you.