The X-Files Week: "Sanguinarium"

“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?