Odd Ones, Young and Old

‘Excelsis Dei’ and ‘Die Hand die Verletzt’

I have no witty connecting text for these two, sorry.

2x11: Excelsis Dei

Our first misjudged uptight joke about kink within the first three minutes, maybe a new record, and then the ghost-rapist-at-the-nursing-home story with the healing-shrooms chaser.

Here’s a perfectly serviceable hour of lite-paranormal suspense whose dark message about systematic abuse and ‘benign neglect’ isn’t subtle but isn’t particularly forceful on its own…though it gains power when seen in combination with the overarching themes of the series.

Here’s Chris Knowles (over at The Secret Sun) giving his take on the deep subject of The X-Files:

If you asked most people what The X-Files was about, they’d probably say something about aliens and conspiracies and monsters of the week. If you asked me, I’d tell you The X-Files was about Acid, Abuse and Ancient Astronauts.

I forgive Chris his Oxford-comma-related oversight, just this once.

Think of this episode’s story: a group of discarded, abused old folks at a run-down nursing home are poorly served by institutional Science, so they turn to the Magical Asian (sigh) whose magic mushrooms both reverse the course of their Alzheimer’s Disease and connect them to the land of the dead. Their visions come at a price, though — nurses and patients (inmates) start dying. The pitch-black ending of the story: the government steps in, deports the mushroom dealer, destroys the crop, and returns the institution to financial health…and lets Alzheimer’s (a real-life invisible killer) take away the last of the patients’ personalities, their wellbeing, their identities.

In other words: the ‘rescue’ at the end of ‘Excelsis Dei’ is the government abducting a nursing home full of vibrant human beings and robbing them of their memories. The ‘petty’ abuses inflicted on the patients by the dickhead staff members can’t approach the deeper hurt caused by the removal of their magical hallucinogen — or for that matter, their abandonment to this run-down heap of a nursing home in the first place…

You’re a person of taste and discernment, so you don’t need me to point out what’s faintly embarrassing about this episode; see above re: ‘Magical Asian,’ for a start. And while I think Mulder’s rather nasty dismissal of the ‘ghost rape’ case is intriguing and unpleasant, I have no comment on it that you can’t (presumably, if any critics are even half awake) get elsewhere. But I will say I’m deeply impressed by the way this somewhat schlocky hour ties into the deeper themes of the show. In the end, the Machine steamrolls right over the lives of everyone involved, and the experience of the sublime, the miraculous(the patients’ recovery, the presence of ghosts) is papered over by bureaucracy — one of the chief antagonists of The X-Files, and incidentally of the equally cosmically-minded Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, about which I promise to write more later, since the more I watch this show the more thematic paralells I see, and any excuse to write about Douglas Adams is a blessing.

Entheogens are a big deal on The X-Files, and they tie together the more-than-a-little-chaotic world of the High Weirdness, with its visionary burnouts and transcendent (as opposed to merely antagonistic) nonconformists and psychedelic seeing.

You don’t have to be a kook to catch on to the darkly hallucinatory understories of this series, and you don’t need to be a paranoiac to think there’s more to the conspiracist ‘fever swamp’ than mental illness and xenophobia (which, come to think of it, is itself a mental illness).

2x14: Die Hand die Verletzt

Satanists in Milford Haven! Possession and infernal contracts and Scully and Mulder finally (sort of) taking a shower together! Farewell to the Wongs!

Aaaah. A stronger episode than ‘Excelsis Dei,’ featuring a sly twist on the ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ panic that destroyed lives in the reactionary 80s, about which I think you have a moral obligation to know by now, and a couple of harrowing scenes involving a young abuse victim being driven to suicide by an actual servant of Satan. The scene where Shannon recounts her childhood torments to Scully and Mulder is horrible to watch, as are the two bits of pig-fetus-related nastiness carried out by the substitute teacher; but here we get a genuinely unexpected loop-de-loop at the end, as Shannon’s sexual-abuse story turns out to be a jumble of slightly less awful memories of evil cult shenanigans, and stuff she heard about on the fearmongering TV news. (One of the most emotionally intense scenes the show has given us, up ’til this point, turns out to be Just Fake. How charming.)

In other words: Shannon’s misremembered childhood abuse turns out to be a metaphor for…credulous yahoos who want power meddling with forces they can’t control, and letting in an occult/alien/paranormal entity that shows them what real power is.

In other other words: ‘Verletzt’ inverts the ‘mytharc’ formula, of metaphorizing systemic abuse through stories of alien abduction, precisely 180 degrees. Pretty neat, eh? You start to see a Plan, of sorts, to all the occult faffing-about. And even though bringing Actual Satanic Magic into an austere paranoid–70s conspiracy show might seem a little misguided, the opportunity to tell a story in which a little Satanist cabal (‘Do as thou wilt’ indeed!!) are the relatively innocent dupes must’ve been too delicious for Carter and the Wongs to pass up. (I still don’t know why they were called ‘the Wongs,’ but I will not stop.)

‘I was raised to believe Christianity was synonymous with hypocrisy.’

…aaaaaaaand we’re not gonna touch that line just yet, partly because it’s arguably Hollywood-liberal-confessional boilerplate, partly because the show’s relationship with the Christian mythos is complicated and there just isn’t time right now. Much work to do. But since the relationship between comfortable and uncomfortable hypocrisy and self-deception supplies much of the show’s voltage, I promise we’ll come back to the topic later. No choice, really.

Halfway through Season Two, the series goes from strength to strength. Heartening and not unprecedented. But things are about to get even better, I think.