‘I Want to Believe’ is one of the greatest and most memorable phrases Chris Carter ever came up with. This one idea explains so much about the success of the X Files, and sums up something important about each one of us.
I think we all want to believe. We live in a changing world, where the pace of change is always speeding up and nothing seems constant. Many of us feel lost in it all.
There are lots of different ways to react to this.
Some people embrace the changes, rushing out after the new and improved and always moving on to the next new thing before they are settled with the last. They make change a constant in their lives.
Others reach back into the past, the more distant the better. They find something that has been held to be true since the most ancient of days, and hold this tightly as something that has always been constant and always will be, building their lives around it.
Really both sorts are reacting in the same way. Everyone searches for something to believe in, one constant thing to cling to. Whether we find this in religion, science or relationships the quest is something we all have in common.
The show also often illustrates how many people want to believe that their little corner of the world is somehow inviolate. Like in ‘Home’, where the sheriff assumes that evil must somehow come from outside of his little town. Like the whole philosophy that all the terrible evil things that have been done this century can somehow be traced back to a conspiracy of faceless men doing the bidding of aliens. People would rather believe in alien abduction than in everyday human evil. Like a child saying their teddy bear is afraid, we project our shadow side onto some ‘other’, something outside and away from us so we can feel our own corner of the world is all sweetness and light. But as the X Files also shows regularly, the most terrible and disgusting things are done by the most seemingly ordinary people, as in ‘Unruhe’ and ‘Irresistable’.
Myself, I guess I am looking for underlying truths to hold on to, but I don’t usually say I want to believe. Things are either real and can be experienced, like tables, chairs, the goddess, or aliens and UFOs in the X files, or they are not real. The problems come when you do not know if you should believe what you and others have experienced. Even with Mulder being ‘cursed’ with a photographic memory, all the most extraordinary things in his life are difficult to remember. He only recalls his sisters abduction in dreams or through hypnosis, and it keeps on coming out different the more times he looks at it. For all the physical evidence he and Scully have seen and touched, none of it endures. Everything dies, everything is taken from them, until they must even doubt themselves. So what they and most of us want most is to believe in themselves, to know that they and their memories are right, and that they haven’t just been seeing little green men. All too often that is difficult, as everyone has their own perspective and their own truth, and no two accounts of it quite agree.
I say that everything is true, from a certain point of view. But that my point of view is ‘right’ is very much something I want to believe.