April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
Entertainment Column
'X Files' weird on Church
On a recent Sunday, having nothing better to do, I flipped to the Fox series about FBI agents who investigate such odd phenomena as flying saucers and vampires. This particular episode was written (poorly) and directed (badly) by David Duchovny, who stars as Agent Mulder. The segment concerned a corrupt cardinal engaged in everything from cover-up to murder, with suicide thrown in as an after-thought.
Other movies and TV shows have picked on the Church, but very rarely with such a tin ear for what's offensive -- or just plain idiotic. Take one small example: Mulder and his pal Agent Scully go to a cathedral to arrest the cardinal, who is shown celebrating Mass -- in a towering miter. It was so tall it should have had warning lights for passing jetliners.
Bones and corpses
Mulder and Scully had first gone to the cathedral to investigate why a bomb exploded in the undercroft. There, they found a corpse they identified as a long-missing activist from the '60s. They also heard about the hands of a skeleton trying to reassemble a pottery bowl. This does not astonish the duo, who are accustomed to weird behavior, even from bones.Nor does it faze Scully, while performing the autopsy on the corpse, to have the man sit up, demand his heart back, quote Jesus in Latin and then disappear.
As muddled as the plot got (and it made no sense whatsoever), Duchovny's script was clear as a church bell when it came to casting aspersions on Catholicism. For example, did you know that you can't get a good science education in a Catholic school? This was stated as a fact that everyone knows.
Vial conversation
Of course, women religious took it in the teeth again. Scully described a quack of a nun she had in school who used to show the class a piece of wood with a nail in it and claim it was from Jesus' cross. The same nun loved to display a vial of John the Baptist's blood. Sound like your grade school experience?The script implies you would have to be a ninny to believe the nun's nonsense. So how come Duchovny expected viewers to buy his own cracked premise: that the pottery bowl being glued together by the skeleton was an actual recording of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead?
That's right. It seems that a potter was at work and sound waves from Christ's voice were imprinted on the bowl like the grooves in an LP. The cardinal had the bowl in his basement, along with a Gospel According to Mary Magdalene in which she said she and Jesus were lovers. To suppress that scandal, the cardinal had purchased the manuscript from the activist, who had forged it.
The activist, by the way, was able to rise from the autopsy table because, in his research to forge the document, he had not only learned about Jesus but had become Him.
In the end, as a postscript, we learn that the cardinal (played by Harris Yulin, a distinguished actor who should not be so desperate for work) murdered the activist and then committed suicide. Probably by smacking himself with a very large crosier, but that's just a guess.
It was a mess of a story that even magical skeletons couldn't assemble into something worth seeing. It was also packed with some really cheap shots against religion, made all the more infuriating because Duchovny is starring in a theatrical film, "Return To Me," that I encourage everyone to see. Co-written by comedian Bonnie Hunt, "Return To Me" takes religion seriously.
If Duchovny wants to try his flesh-covered hand again, he should view "Return to Me" to learn precisely where -- and how far -- he went astray.
(06-15-00)
Comments:
You must login to comment.