Considering how little you ...
Question: Considering how little you liked
The X-Files: I Want to Believe (per your
column), you may be loathe to consider it any further, but I did not see any comment from you on what I took to be some of the most malicious, virulent and surprising homophobia I've seen in a movie in a while. (
Spoiler alert) The villains were two men "married in Massachusetts," as the agent played by Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner contemptuously sneered; they had been molested as children, playing into the false stereotype that people are gay because of abuse or trauma in their backgrounds; and the bodies they were stealing to attach to the one of them with cancer are female (on screen, at least), playing into another offensive stereotype that gay men really want to be women. The movie even seems to be saying, finally, that a pedophile priest is more worthy of redemption than the gay villains. As a former X-Phile, I was terribly disappointed by this mean-spirited, gratuitous and completely unnecessary slam against gays. What are your thoughts on that element of the movie?
Answer: I'm not of the overly p.c. mentality that says you can't make gays or any other sort of minority the villain of a piece, as long as you make them
interesting villains, credible and compelling. And that's where the
X-Files movie fails so miserably. I didn't really even pick up on some of these icky details, although I can see where they would set some people off for playing into clichés of gay characters always being damaged goods. But my biggest objection was primarily a creative one, about how unoriginal and unscary the adversaries were this time. As you'd expect, my taking such a strong stand against a movie like this has generated some passionate mail. A sampling follows.
