Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Let’s be clear about one thing: there is no need for you to watch The X-Files: I Want to Believe. If you’ve seen it, you’re fine. If you haven’t, you’re fine. I am a huge X-Files fan and I (along with pretty much the entire moviegoing public) didn’t even notice as it came and went in theaters ten years ago today. Whereas the first X-Files movie, 1998’s Fight the Future, pulled off the impossible, I Want to Believe is impossible to get through.
So I don’t want to spend today, the 10th anniversary of the release of an X-Files movie I totally forgot existed until the revival started a few years ago, complaining about I Want to Believe. I’m not going to write about how the film’s treatment of gay men and/or trans women and/or the conflation of the two is scarier than even the best episodes of the original run. Instead, I’m going to write about the only 13 seconds of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that you, me, or anyone need to watch. Honestly, I’d rather you watch these 13 seconds on a loop for two hours than to rewatch I Want to Believe, they are that perfectly bizarre. How they even ended up in a movie, even a movie as out there as an X-Files one, I have no idea.
Are you ready? Make sure your sound is turned on and turned up, because it is essential.
What does it mean?! Why did that happen?!
I can give you some context, not that it will really help. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are back at FBI HQ after years away, having been called in to investigate the disappearance of an FBI agent. Their contact, the impossibly named Agent Mosley Drummy (played by Xzibit!), leaves them to wait outside of a conference room. And then…
WHYYYYY???
Okay, I get it on one level, on the left-leaning “Wow, it sure is crazy that George W. Bush is president” level. But… George Bush was president when The X-Files went off the air in 2002! Seeing his photo in a government building shouldn’t be a weird thing to them! Why is it being called out?! Is the inference that, you know, this time around Mulder and Scully are facing off with enemies from inside their own government–from inside the Oval Office? First, how is that different from anything else on the show? And second, that… isn’t what happens in this movie! At all!
But whatever–a slow pan and an inferred dig at GWB, who cares? It’s weird, but what takes this moment from “huh, that was a choice” to “whoah, that was a choice” is the sound.
Why do we hear the X-Files theme?! Over a framed picture of George W. Bush?!
That one spooky little riff turns this entire aside–13 whole seconds of the movie that withstood cut after cut, edit after edit from a professional paid to do their job (a.k.a. Chris Carter’s bidding)–into something truly bewildering. The riff comes out of nowhere; it actually sounds like it’s diegetic for a minute, like it’s Mulder’s ringtone (it so would be). But it’s not. It was placed there for a reason, because a film is the result of deliberate choice after choice.
The only reason I can think of is to say that, in the world of The X-Files, George W. Bush is, himself, an X-File.
Go on, watch it again! Question the decision for this completely out-of-the-way shot’s inclusion, question the music cue, and then tell me what answers you come to.
I believe that X-Files: I Want to Believe is telling us that George W. Bush is an alien, setting up a storyline for a sequel that would never happen because George W. Bush would be out of the White House six months later, thus negating a good chunk of the “oh god the president’s an alien!” tension. “The ex-president is an alien!” just doesn’t have the same urgency to it.
Why am I even limiting this to an alien? Dubya could also be a man in black, or bigfoot, or a liver-eating squeeze monster, or a Cher-loving mutant, or any number of creature featured on the show! All this clip is telling us is that George W. Bush is an X-File, something so outlandish, so peculiar, that the film needed to stop all action to deliver this secret foreshadowing to its devoted fanbase! When will you tell this tale, Chris Carter?! Why was it not in Seasons 10 or 11?! We got Ghouli in Season 11, but whither Ghouli W. Bush?!
Or, I dunno, maybe this was just a bad movie getting in a very lazy shot at a much maligned president while he was still in office…
Nah, George W. Bush is totally an X-File. The truth is in this 13 second clip!
