The X-factor was British Columbia
By: Dan Brown

The commercials hyping Sunday's premiere of The X-Files have been airing for a few weeks now, and I admit I'm intrigued. I'll tune in not to see if the questions raised by the X-Files movie are answered (hey, how did Mulder escape Antarctica?), but to check out the show's new look. As every patriotic science-fiction fan knows, Fox shut down the X-Files' British Columbia production office in the spring in an attempt to forestall more public bitching by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson over being stranded so far from the centre of their universe, Los Angeles.

I'm betting the move will make a world of visual difference. In its first five seasons, much of the paranormal drama's moody atmosphere stemmed from its being shot on location in the Pacific province. There's something about the air there, or the way the trees and grass glow after a heavy rain, that made it the logical place to shoot a program about conspiracies and aliens.

The X-Files wasn't set in B.C., of course. The shadowy action took place everywhere but. In a typical episode Mulder and his platonic lover would go from FBI headquarters in D.C. to some remote location in the United States or beyond, all without ever leaving B.C. Chris Carter, the show's creator, even spray-painted a rock quarry bright red to simulate the New Mexican desert.

I don't know what the cultural nationalists make of the paradox, but B.C. was distinct enough to lend The X-Files a brooding vibe yet anonymous enough to stand in for any latitude. The same can't be said of Los Angeles because it's just too .... California. Try to picture Scully poking at a dead body or Mulder obsessing over UFOs in the city of Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Steve Martin's L.A. Story. Some of the eerie energy will be lost in the translation.

The larger question behind the flight of The X-Files south lies in the debate over how much of the national spirit, of the Canadian soul as expressed in its landscape, can be captured by means of a camera. When I recognize Toronto in a movie or on TV, my reaction is always: "Look -- it's the Big Smoke. But it's not the Big Smoke."

In Brain Candy, the feature debut of the Kids In The Hall, the megacity served as a cipher, as Everytown, North America. It was recognizable, but the transition to the silver screen gave the familiar streets and buildings an otherworldly sheen. The same transformation occurred each time the Kids shot a new opening for their CBC series, so it's no wonder Toronto doubles as New York or Chicago so often. It's all of those places, yet none of them.

When I see the Atlantic provinces or the North on television, on the other hand, I'm rarely surprised. Those places appear exactly as I expect, which is how I know that's not what they look like in real life. The moral is that if you want to gaze on the true face of Canada, it can't be found on a drama or a sitcom.

Readers are going to scream in disagreement, but I believe the program that came closest to recreating the spirit of our home and native land is a defunct one, David Lynch's Twin Peaks. I know what you're thinking -- Twin Peaks was filmed in Washington state, not Canada! -- and you're right. But, for this viewer at least, it reproduced the inherent mystery of our nation's countryside better than anything made here.

A drama that also centred on an FBI agent who puts his faith in non-linear thinking, Twin Peaks often featured slow panning shots of Douglas firs waving in the breeze to Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score. I recognized something familiar in those glimpses, a sense of menace and beauty unique to this land. That's my Canada.

It's the same Canada of Alice Munro's fiction, the one with meaning lying just below the surface of the land. And, on those occasions when the hero of Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper, ventured over the border, he invariably got caught up in metaphysical intrigue. Lynch knew Cooper wasn't crossing just a national boundary.

As a closing aside to X-philes, I am aware one scene in last spring's season-ender was set in B.C. If viewers hadn't been alerted to that fact, however, they wouldn't have known it was B.C., which underlines my point. Carter threw the scene in as a bone to the fans who protested the relocation so loudly. As indifferent to stars as they are, I wonder if Los Angelenos will even notice that The X-Files is in town.