X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

The first thing we lay eyes on is… an eyeball! No enveloping head. Just an eyeball attached to an optic nerve, floating in a beaker, a precious organ isolated, helpless. What has it seen? A crown jewel in the teeming oeuvre of cult-cinema titan Roger Corman, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes warns from the get-go that we are at the mercy of our senses, that, in anticipation of the lessons of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, in anticipation of David Cronenberg’s McLuhan-infused masterpiece Videodrome, vision affects cognition. What we see changes how we think. Look out.

X is also something very familiar: a cautionary tale of scientific hubris. Determined to usher our species beyond its woefully limited ocular abilities, Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland) invents drops designed to help the human eye see ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. Impatient with animal testing—a monkey collapses and dies after being administered a dose—and weary of adhering to the protocols required to secure funding, Xavier opts to conduct a test on his own eyes. The drops work instantly, granting Xavier X-ray vision. “It’s like a splitting of the world,” he says. Then the dopamine rush gets the best of him: he takes more, overdoses, and falls unconscious. Upon recovery, he discovers that the effects linger and confirms that his new power can revolutionize medicine: he peers into the chest of a young patient and declares her misdiagnosed. He also peers through fabric at the chests of shapely women at a cocktail party. As this briskly paced sci-fi melodrama proceeds, Xavier saves a life, then, in a bizarre accident, takes a life, then becomes a fugitive, a sideshow act, a mystic, and a casino hustler. He is exploited by a carnival barker in a Hawaiian shirt (the one and only Don Rickles), supported by a hopelessly enamored and generously aerosoled fellow scientist (Diana Van der Vlis), and offered a chance to be healed in the eyes of the Lord by an evangelical preacher. In the end, Xavier is defeated by all that he, and only he, has seen.

Written by Robert Dillon and short-story author Ray Russell, the screenplay is a paragon of mid-century existentialist pulp: the Corman special. In his 50s and elegantly slumming, Oscar-winner Milland is captivating as the antihero succumbing to the pitfalls of his own genius. His Xavier is upstaged only by his visions: frequently flooding the screen with POV grids, spirals, and eerily colored irises, X was photographed in Spectarama by Floyd Crosby, displaying a flair for the psychedelic (something he apparently passed on to his son, singer-songwriter and infamous narcotic gobbler David Crosby). Yet the film is just as remarkable for its visual restraint, with virtually every interior so sparingly decorated as to resemble abstractions or modernist theater sets. An excellent example of budget constraints yielding aesthetic innovation, X is a film about the perils of looking that seems to take nothing visual for granted, its protagonist tormented by an excess of light until he longs only for the mercy of blindness.