“You start to
understand why a man becomes a conservative.
He has something to conserve.”
-The X-Files: “Sanguinarium.”
The
fourth season episode of The X-Files titled “Sanguinarium”
concerns nothing less than the things we as a society collectively
worship. And importantly it also
revolves around how we choose to
worship those values or virtues.
One
shadowy character in the episode -- in the spirit of the ethnic grandmother seen
in “The Calusari” -- uses the powers of the so-called “occult” to protect
people from danger.
Meanwhile,
another far more malevolent character worships youth and beauty, and commits
murder to be certain that his visage will remain beautiful and youthful for
eternity. This character commits his atrocities in a contemporary American
temple to man’s worship of youth: a plastic surgery center in a modern
metropolitan hospital. That plastic surgery center, we are told, accounts for
fifty percent of the hospital’s profits…
Meanwhile,
Mulder and Scully, the archetypal investigators, thus must determine which
character is a danger to society, and which virtue (religious belief or narcissism)
poses a greater risk to the community at large.
This task is made infinitely more complicated by 1990s racial/sex/class politics. To wit: one character is ethnic, female, and
a nurse. The other character is a white
male, and an accomplished surgeon functioning in a high-powered corporate
setting.
Guess
where suspicion falls first?
An
extraordinarily clever and even caustic tale, “Sanguinarium” also boasts the distinction
of being perhaps the goriest episode yet of this Chris Carter series, even
more-so than “Home.”
Here,
the series returns to its “sausage-making”
approach of excavating unpleasant facets of our modern technological society,
and reveals the disgusting nitty-gritty behind cosmetic surgery
procedures. In short order, one
character is impaled with a vacuum-like device, and has his body fat -- as well
as his bloody innards -- are sucked out.
Another
character, looking to get some injections to firm up her facial features, sees
her skin (and nose…) melted away by huge doses of a corrosive chemical.
Yet
another patient gets a laser beam seared through his face.
Then
the witch – with magic working against her – coughs up a mouthful of bloody
needles.
Finally,
in the episode’s climactic moment, the “evil” narcissist cuts away his old,
unattractive face with a scalpel and reveals a new, youthful one beneath. He throws off his old face like a mask, and
it’s a gruesome sight indeed.
This
one definitely isn’t for the faint of heart (or stomach).
A
plastic surgeon for the wealthy named Dr. Jack Franklin (Richard Beymer) claims
he was demonically-possessed when he murdered a patient in the operating
theater. Scully (Gillian Anderson) and
Mulder (David Duchovny) investigate the doctor and his clinic and Mulder
reluctantly comes to the conclusion that witchcraft is somehow involved in this
and other recent deaths.
When
a kindly nurse, Rebecca Waite (O-Lan Jones) -- the primary suspect in the case
-- dies violently via occult means, Mulder and Scully realize they need to
re-think their assumptions about her. They
know she was a witch, but was she actually protecting patients, not attempting
to harm them?
First
and foremost, “Sanguinarium” concerns the pursuit of beauty at all costs.
When
even modern medicine can’t get that job done, it’s time to call on a higher (or
lower) power: blood sacrifice.
All
the murders in the episode occur so that one man, a cosmetic surgeon, can continue
to appear young beyond his natural years.
And why does he place so high a value on youth and good-looks? Well, young, attractive people get better
jobs, make more money, and succeed more easily in our culture, don’t they?
Once made young, this doctor certainly finds a
good job quickly enough, as we see in “Sanguinarium’s” coda.
Intriguingly,
this episode also features several moments in which Mulder -- contending with the
same brand of vanity that infects the episode’s antagonist -- gazes at his own
reflection in the mirror and mentally tweaks his appearance. Does he need a nose job?
By
allowing our hero, the likable Mulder to fall prey to such vanity, an important
point is broached. We all want to be young and beautiful for as long as
possible. Not one of us is immune to
this desire.
But
what happens when that narcissism is so powerful that it overwhelms reason, or
the very laws of nature itself? This was
an idea roiling in the 1990s pop culture at the time of “Sanguinarium” and it
also played an important role in John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996). There Bruce Campbell portrayed a sadistic
Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, one bent on recreating the city’s denizens to
his twisted liking. The culture was
starting to recognize, in other words, that the quest for youth and beauty
could go too far, and that when mis-handled or over-applied, plastic surgery is
actually…creepy as hell.
But
this episode of The X-Files impresses to the degree it does in part because it
suggests that beauty is in the eye of -- if not the beholder -- cultural norms. The nurse who protects the patients on the
cosmetic ward is a witch, and witches are stereotypically considered ugly by
our culture. Mulder spots a broom on
Waite’s front porch when attempting to enter her house and jokingly calls it “probable cause” necessitating entry. So pretty clearly we possess all kinds of
ingrained prejudices against those who practice a non-majority religion or
belief system. Importantly, the nurse
here is named Rebecca Waite after a woman who was executed at the Salem Witch
Trials, also, presumably, unjustly.
What
this character represents is the idea that in our culture, we jump to the
conclusion that people who are different
from us boast some ugly secret, or are dangerous.
Meanwhile,
the rich white surgeon -- the one who admits to drug addiction and lives in a
million dollar house -- never comes up as a suspect until the end of the
episode. Dr. Franklin is actually the one committing the murders, and the one
who gets away. His “ugliness” hides in
plain sight, however, and so we don’t recognize or see it. In other
words, it is not the derided outsider who poses a threat to our society, rather the invisible but powerful insider.
All
of this material is handled well, and “Sanguinarium” evokes nervous laughter
and groans of disgust as well with its intense gore. But even the gore seems to serve its
purpose. If you want to make a (beautiful)
omelet you have to crack a few eggs, right?
Like "Home," this is another episode I cannot watch again. :-P
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