The truth is out there
No cinema visits this week. It’s almost like I’ve stopped watching movies for two months, but what’s really happened is that June was Euro 2008 and the first half of July has turned into database work involving all nine series of The X-Files, which HMV had very generously made available in its sale for £75. Result.
The X-Files (1998)
For the record, this was the movie, not any episodes from the TV series. One of the mysteries around the film is why it isn’t called The X-Files: Fight the Future, because this is a) a way better title than just The X-Files, and b) the title is spoken on screen by not just one but two characters at entirely separate moments. Baffling.
I’ve steadfastly resisted getting involved in X-Files boxsets over the years. I remained untempted by VHS sets (and am now jolly glad I did), and stayed away during the initial release on DVD. I was more of a casual X-Files watcher than a true fan who had to watch every episode. So there are a whole bunch of episodes towards the beginning and the end that I haven’t seen at all. Back in the days before DVD, when TV programmes were at the mercy of the schedulers, Sky kept The X-Files pretty much as exclusive as they could, and when it finally turned up on the BBC, they would move it round the schedules and cut things from it and all sorts of craziness.
It would appear that the DVD box set has now become the best way to watch serial television with reasonably finite beginnings and ends. I remember trying to watch the first series of Russell Davies’ revamp of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and it was tremendously difficult trying to organise my life around a television programme after 98% of my viewing had become movies on DVD. I found it irritating. I wanted to watch Doctor Who when I wanted to watch it, and not necessarily when the schedulers wanted to. And so the BBC’s iPlayer. And so the slow, painful death of network television around the world. The spooky thing is that I don’t think enough people who actually work in TV realise that they are presiding over its demise, or at the very least the demise of TV as we now know it.
I don’t know how incomprehensible the movie might have been if you hadn’t been a slightly more than casual viewer of the TV show, since I was that slightly more than casual viewer. The one thing I remember being impressed by was how naturally great Gillian Anderson and to a lesser extent David Duchovny looked on the big screen, and how much more effectively a larger canvas coped with the onscreen darkness and gloom that is so much part of the show, and why I’m so glad I never bothered with X-Files TV sets on VHS, where the gloom can’t have worked at such low resolution.