I try to keep these newsletters pretty diverse, but at a certain point I sat down and realised that there’s just a huge amount of media that I barely know at all. At that moment I was gripped by the spirit of Content, and compelled by a firm resolution to go out and find people who could share why they love a bunch of cool stuff I don’t know anything about. Through thorough and dedicated interviews and investigation, maybe we’d be able to discover even more amazing media and deliver to you, the reader, still higher amounts of Content.
On the subject of pairs of people on missions to accumulate knowledge in service of higher aims and principles they can barely comprehend, the first interview in this new enterprise is about The X-Files. I’m joined in unpicking its mysteries by Mia (@miaportman), soon to get the acknowledgement she deserves as twitter’s foremost expert on Gillian Anderson’s facial expressions and responsible for what I can only assume is the premier - perhaps only - X-Files fan podcast out of context quotes account (I originally linked it here but Mia says “If readers of tiny mammal kingdom care that much they can dm me and ask for the handle”). To talk with Mia about Mulder and Scully’s exploits is to confront a bulk of knowledge I can hardly reckon with, and to marvel at the depth and acuity of her thinking about the show. I had a great time chatting with her; I hope you enjoy reading.
(Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. I’d like to be clear that images and captions were provided by Mia, and I bear no legal or moral responsibility.)
Ellie: Thanks so much for doing this. Without trying to pitch it, what do you think makes you love The X-Files so much?
Mia: Well, this might sound like a strange thing to say, what with [gestures broadly], but I am very compelled by TV about viruses, parasites, gross body stuff, quarantine, etc., and The X-Files is mostly a 'monster of the week' style show which does those sorts of episodes really well. But, then again (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another renowned example of this), the monster of the week is also kind of arbitrary, to an extent. It's a new cat toy, and Mulder and Scully are the cats, and you drop the ghost/hypnotic serial killer/sewer-dwelling genetic mutant/alien bounty hunter in front of them and see what they do. Of course you know what they're going to do, because they're cats — but therein lies the joy!
The other crucial thing to say is that the cats are actually two preternaturally attractive people who mean everything to each other and have unbelievable chemistry but never make out. I'm completely fascinated by fictional relationships that reside in the murky waters between ‘romance’ and ‘friendship’. And I want to see them presented as precious and sparkly and transcendent without the assumption that they'll become "something more". There's absolutely a way of watching The X-Files that does make that assumption (the word 'shipper' was literally coined by X-Files fans back in the mid-nineties). But by and large Mulder and Scully's relationship makes more sense to me when not consigned to an amatonormative lens.
Finally, I would be remiss not to mention Gillian Anderson, who basically carries the entire show on her shoulders with her acting and is... aesthetically important to me.
E: I'm interested in what you said about the 'monster of the week' format, and how you find the monsters compelling but essentially irrelevant. How do you think the show carries those two aspects together, so you can be invested in the episode-by-episode plots but know they don't really matter?
M: It's interesting! Most episodes are structured like any other procedural drama, so you'd expect to want to follow the plot so that you can appreciate it when the case is solved at the end — except they almost never solve the case! The X-files are ones that had been closed by the FBI (and filed under 'X') due to their basis in unexplained phenomena. So, despite the agents' limitless faith in "extreme possibilities" (Mulder), investigative rigour (Scully), and sharp intellect (both), they're rarely able to sufficiently evidence their theories. And I don't enjoy The X-Files in spite of that futility; I think the futility is the point. I should mention here that the show does also have an extremely opaque overarching mythology which sometimes emerges to top up Mulder's male saviour complex and the viewer's general sense that Something is Going On with the Military. My point being that even the mythology episodes reinforce the apparent hopelessness of Mulder and Scully's work. What's compelling is watching them grapple with their lack of progress and yet choose the same journey over and over again. Why?
Initially they do it because Mulder hopes his work on the X-files will lead him to his younger sister, Samantha, who was abducted when he was twelve. So he has That going on, he's very intense about it, he tells Scully in the pilot that "nothing else matters". But after a while, because of the limits of science, the corruption of various federal agencies, and Mulder's sources perpetually dying and/or proving traitorous, Mulder and Scully become completely reliant on their own judgement, with only each other to provide the checks and balances. Essentially, their bond is forged in the fire of epistemological crisis. This creates a positive feedback loop: the work provides no answers; they become more committed to each other; they become more committed to the work; and so on.
On several occasions the X-files get shut down or Mulder and Scully are reallocated. The first time this happens, Mulder says, "I may not have the X-files, Scully. But I still have my work. And I've still got you. And I still have myself." [2x01: Little Green Men]. Does this indicate a horrible level of codependency? Yes. Is it nonetheless incredibly sweet how Scully spends quite a long time staring at his hand on the desk between them as if trying to make a decision, then tentatively grabs hold of it for a second or two before getting up to go home? Unfortunately for me and my terrible personality, also yes.
As The X-Files matures, it's Scully's perspective that keeps this dynamic interesting. On the one hand, she's always found the work meaningful. She knows it makes a difference to victims and families who aren't usually listened to. Plus, as much as her role is to provide resistance to Mulder's outlandish theories, her contributions are always made in good faith. She wants to know the truth as much as he does, and she relishes the challenge the X-files pose. Nevertheless, Scully eventually begins to worry that somewhere along the way she's made the wrong choice:
I feel like I've lost sight of myself, Mulder. It's hard to see, let alone find, in the darkness of covert locations. I mean, I wish I could say that we were going in circles, but we're not. We're going in an endless line, two steps forwards and three steps back. While my own life is standing still.
[4x13: Never Again]
Now, you can debate the feminist merit of Scully wanting to have a "normal life" [6x04: Dreamland] while Mulder chases his white whale, unburdened by societal expectation or, like, average human wants and needs. But the way Scully is denied any kind of normalcy becomes a much more compelling tragedy than any other aspect of the narrative. The decision she makes time and again to stay on the X-files turns out to have ramifications on her body, her health, that she could never have predicted. Like, for example, no-one expects to be literally fucking abducted by aliens. These ramifications just keep revealing more of themselves as the years go by like sadistic nesting dolls. It would be harrowing regardless, but it's particularly tragic because she loses so much to an endeavour that, as you put it, doesn't really matter.
E: So are they doing this for each other or for the X-files (tm)? What do you think is the point of the X-files for The X-Files - are they just something to try to hold onto, get meaning from, but really secondary to any narrative? And how does that interact with their actual real material consequences for (especially) Scully?
M: So, from Mulder's perspective your description would be exactly right: the files are something to cling on to — not quite arbitrarily, but in the hope that they'll help him save Samantha or, failing that, her proxies: kids who claim to have seen monsters under their beds, little girls who've gone missing, and, of course, Scully.
Ironically, although The Samantha Motive is sustained well into Season 7, Scully's ill-fatedness ultimately produces more (and better) reasons for both of them to keep working on the files.
At one point Mulder says, "Come on back [to the X-files]. The truth will save you, Scully. I think it'll save both of us." This is absurd: if we've learned anything so far it's that "the truth" is unobtainable. It's not exactly out of character for Mulder to say something this delusional and pigheaded, but it's hard as a viewer not to think to oneself, "Damn... I guess the writers of The X-Files better figure out what the truth is."
However, once I've taken some deep breaths, I can appreciate that this line is kind of a manifesto for the show. The larger point of the files is that Mulder believes, or wants to, that they're a trail of breadcrumbs to that elusive thing, The Truth. On this occasion, for example, Scully's seriously ill, the cause is unknown (but definitely X-files territory), and Mulder and Scully don't have a lot of options, so, they follow the trail. But their investigations, while sometimes putting off immediate peril, only ever seem to reveal greater unknowns — with regard to both themselves as individuals and the conspiracies that seem to have a hold on them.
In Never Again, right after Scully says that thing about losing sight of herself, she gets a tattoo of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
In light of her illness, she wants to exert agency over her own body and walk away with proof: the evidence of that agency emblazoned on her skin. But even as Scully means to assert her autonomy, she manages to brand herself with a symbol of the files, of the imperative to "come on back", of Mulder. This feels to me like a memo direct from the writers' room: these characters are driven by the interrelation of their imperilment and the absurdity of their quest. The two are bound together. Without either one, the logic of The X-Files would be broken.
E: I like X-files-as-Ourobouros: continually repeated and on the whole not the best place to be. Based on your description, I'd put Mulder as the mouth and Scully as the tail (I suppose also The Truth tm is the tail; the analogy does not work perfectly), as he's the one driving the search and she's the one who seems to motivate his desire for the truth. In that sense, would you say that Mulder is the villain of the show? Are the X-files a bad thing he's doing to Scully?
I really like your take on the ouroboros. It's way better than The Truth as tail, which is what I was going for.
The wording of your previous question ("the point of the X-files for The X-Files") has got me thinking about the show as a site of conflict between its creators and the fans, who seem at times to want and value different things. Obviously this is a super common phenomenon in fan culture, but it seems more pronounced in this community than any other I've been part of. One of these discrepancies is in how the show (as it were) sees Mulder and how the viewer may see him. For example, because Scully's peril is presented predominantly through the prism of Mulder's guilt and grief, it feels like "the show" prioritises his inner turmoil, even though Scully is literally half of The X-Files, and there's no reason fans wouldn't be interested in her trauma and recovery for its own sake. Thinking metatheatrically, the writers quickly become the villains of the piece. I'm not the first person to have said this — in fact, someone on tumblr has made a Maslow-esque pyramid diagram that illustrates it, saying, "[Mulder] is still a problematic daddy but on a blame and responsibility level, he stills [sic] falls below literal dads with political power, [X-Files creator] chris carter, and god."
Fascinatingly, though, all the 'real' villains, Chris Carter included, are kind of... dull. The central antagonist is a conspirator known as Cigarette-Smoking Man, an older white guy resembling a turtle — you know, in the same way Paul McCartney resembles a turtle — played by an actor who conspicuously seems never to inhale any smoke or indeed finish a cigarette; he just puts them out halfway through and lights another. He's a bit gross but not, like, shadowy and alluring.
Then there are the older men whom Dana Scully disappoints by not pursuing a career in medicine and, more broadly, not being exactly who they imagine her to be. These men cultivate their disappointment, clutch it to their chests, and inflict it on Scully while they purport to love her. This 'love' doesn't drive them to truly see Scully or understand her choices, yet they consider that loving her qualifies them as arbiters of her success. They're despicable and I want to burn them at the stake — but, like Cigarette-Smoking Man, they lack clout. Scully's father, Bill, literally dies halfway through the first season, the same episode he's introduced. He has maybe 3 lines total, including later flashbacks, and he's ginger (which is only hot on his daughter, sorry, I don't make the rules). Daniel Waterston, one of Scully's professors from medical school, has a certain charisma about him, but he only appears in one episode. Both generate sympathy for Scully, but neither is exactly a Machiavellian prince.
There are two ways to conceptualise Mulder in relation to these men. On the one hand, he's another "problematic daddy". Scully says it herself in Never Again: "I’ve always gone around in this, uh... this circle. It usually starts when an authoritative or controlling figure comes into my life. And part of me likes it, needs it, wants the approval." (Is this what the ouroboros means to her?) But Mulder is so much more effective as a "controlling figure" than the others because he's so appealing.
He's younger than Waterston (almost a contemporary), more... um... alive than Bill Scully and, unlike either, he's intensely present. He phones Scully in the middle of the night IN THE PILOT, when they've known each other about two days. He's dogged and passionate; tall, dark, and handsome; a recluse, but magnetic. The more I go on, the more he sounds like a great villain. Losing Samantha and the subsequent breakdown of his parents' marriage have left him broken, brooding, and obsessive. He's not queer-coded but many fans read Mulder as bisexual and he displays an alternative, nerdy masculinity that I'd guess was less common on television in the 90s than it is now. Look at the screaming ambiguity of the following exchange:
MULDER: [referring to his slide show] Take a good look, Scully.
SCULLY: What am I looking at?
MULDER: Thirty loggers working a clear-cutting contract in Washington State. Rugged, manly men in the full bloom of their manhood.
SCULLY: Right, but what am I looking for?
MULDER: Anything strange, unexplainable, unlikely... a boyfriend?
[1x19: Darkness Falls]
Mulder is contemptuous of "rugged" masculinity, implying a certain degree of personal alienation from it. But is he really mocking these men or is his appraisal on some level sincere? And if he is mocking them, is it just to disguise or suppress his own attraction to them? Is this possible exhibition of gay panic brought on by the loggers' archetypally bearish appearances? When he says "Anything strange, unexplainable, unlikely... a boyfriend?" is he pulling Scully's ponytail (the obvious heteronormative reading) or is he suggesting that the loggers wouldn't be interested in dating women?
So, OK, Mulder fulfils some bad guy archetypes. But in some ways he's an antidote to Bill Scully and his surrogates. Mulder is the first person we see affirm Scully's ambitions instead of questioning her choice to work for the FBI:
MULDER: If we don't get him right now, the next chance is in...
SCULLY: 2023.
MULDER: And you're gonna be head of the Bureau by then.
[1x03: Squeeze]
Duchovny delivers that last line such that we know it isn't empty flattery: so quick and matter-of-fact that he has to be sincere. Who can blame Scully for being drawn to Mulder when we're led to believe he's the only man she's ever been close to who is remotely capable of taking her at face value, and not viewing her roots in medicine as a missed opportunity?
Moreover, because Mulder only understands glimpses has very little knowledge of the larger conspiracy at play, he has very little power. He does rove intermittently into ‘chosen one’ territory, but this notion always seems to come out of nowhere, be drastically underexplained, and fade again just as quickly. (The women of The seX-Files podcast discuss this far better than I could in their most recent episode.) It's often implied that Cigarette-Smoking Man is fascinated by Mulder, even loves him, but is ultimately using him. And so, with a "problematic daddy" all of his own, Mulder is more an instrument of destruction than an agent.
So why does Mulder behave more like a villain than the actual villains? I'm going to apply the Hierarchy of Problematic Daddies, swapping out Chris Carter for the conglomerate of male creatives behind The X-Files. This includes David Duchovny, who boasts 5 story credits (mostly on mythology episodes), 3 writing credits, and 3 directorial credits on the show. (Anderson wrote and directed one episode. To my mind it's one of the best things to come out of The X-Files in all its 25 years. But whatever.) The way I see it, everyone in the daddy hierarchy is metonymically linked to everyone else. So, the conglomerate of male creatives may be represented by any combination of their fictional counterparts at any given point. We end up with a split projection of said creatives onto the fictional men who drive the plot to varying degrees. Attractive characteristics are funnelled into Mulder. He's an outcast, but he's risen above other people's opinions; handsome, but doesn't use his looks to seduce women. Incidentally, there are two (2) unrelated instances of men shapeshifting into Mulder and the first thing they BOTH think to do is try to sleep with Scully. These men are presented as 'baddies' but it still seems, I don't know… interesting… that the writers couldn't come up with anything more creative the second time around.
The active agents of the plot — the big daddies, if you will — are dry and dusty so that we might view Mulder as their foil. In always drawing Scully back to the X-files, he embodies the writers' cruel intentions (as well as Chris Carter's personal interest in alien abductions). But in monopolising the show's supply of male charisma, he serves as a kind of apology for the plot. Meanwhile, the bulk of the blame is sublimated onto Cigarette-Smoking Turtle and his nameless co-conspirators, whom we pay little mind because they're so uninteresting.
So the Mulder-as-villain paradigm is a very productive way to read the text! But insofar as he's a pawn in Cigarette-Smoking Man's game, the files aren't really a bad thing he's doing to Scully. In any case, to say so paints her as completely passive, which she isn't. In some ways Scully's just as strong-willed as Mulder, and there are many occasions when he urges her to call it quits or stay off of a case and she refuses.
The files are, however, a bad thing Mulder's doing to himself because he failed to protect Samantha/Scully in the first place — and because no number of Oxford degrees could make his mother love him. Thus, like all the best tragic heroes, Mulder is for sure his own worst enemy. Like, for example, at the start of Season 7 he almost lets himself be lobotomised?
In Season 1, in fact, Mulder is the one who needs saving ~85% of the time. I imagine at some point the writers decided that his impulsive, self-destructive behaviour wouldn't garner limitless sympathy, so they switched things up... a lot. It's difficult to say whether this was a good instinct. I'd probably watch 11 seasons of Scully holding criminals and government men at gunpoint in various quests to rescue her himbo boyfriend, but that's just me.
E: So if the X-files are, to an extent, something Mulder's doing to himself, where does Scully enter into this? How does she fit inside the narrative other than as a part of the force which keeps driving Mulder through the endless loop of the search for the truth? Put another way: who's the protagonist of The X-Files? If Scully started off saving Mulder and then Mulder started saving her, did she stop being the protagonist at some point?
M: OK, wow, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak at length about Special Agent Dr Dana Katherine Scully.
No, she never stops being the protagonist. She's just a protagonist hounded by misogynistic writing. There continue to be occasions when Scully comes to Mulder's aid, but when Scully's in danger, it often goes back to her abduction and medical rape in the early seasons, and/or sees her as a sexual or reproductive object, if not Mulder's prized possession:
WELL-MANICURED MAN: Kill Mulder, we take the risk of turning one man's quest into a crusade.
STRUGHOLD: Then you must take away what he holds most valuable. That with which he can't live without.
[Cut to Scully, looking out across a vast desert]
This is from the first feature length X-Files movie, The X-Files: Fight The Future (1998), the remainder of which is constituted by Mulder's trek to Antarctica to find and rescue Scully. It's like, I did a Classics degree! If I wanted to hear about women being raped and men withstanding long journeys I would dip back into Homer. On my first watch-through I remember thinking we'd seen Scully bound and gagged an absurd number of times in the first two seasons alone.
The thing is, whenever Scully's tied up (!) off-screen you just want her back. Time stretches in her absence. Even when Scully is confined to a desk or a lab due to Gillian Anderson's real-life pregnancy, you can't take your eyes off of her. Often on the end of a phone line and knowingly unwatched, her affection, curiosity, amusement radiate from her features. There's a reason it took me five seasons to notice that David Duchovny is, in fact, attractive.
It's this formula of Anderson's looks, performances, and the way Scully throws her critical faculties full force into everything, that makes her a mesmerising protagonist even when the narrative feels stale and glaringly gendered.
Season 2 opens with a dramatic voiceover from Mulder, casting him as both narrator and hero of the story. But as far as I can remember, this is an anomaly. Scully's voiceovers are far more common — at first because she's writing up case reports for her superiors, but eventually for her own reasons: when she's hospitalised with an apparently terminal illness; when conducting research on the ivory coast that she hopes will save Mulder's life; and so on. Scully's voiceovers are usually epistolary or diaristic, as if to insert themselves into a distinctly female narrative tradition. Perhaps because of this, it feels like she's telling her own story, not Mulder's — she's a Jane Eyre rather than a Nick Carraway. Even when she gets to waxing philosophical in Anderson's episode, All Things, though her subject matter is universal, the script isn't trying to speak to the wider human story or justify the episode with some epic narrative; Scully's own individual life is enough.
You could even read The X-Files as Scully's bildungsroman. In a recent interview on TheSouthbank Show, Gillian Anderson was shown a clip of herself in the X-Files pilot. Anderson noted an "arrogance" in Scully that she said was partly her own. She'd come onto The X-Files at 24 (she'd said she was 27 to get the part) with no prior experience in television. On the ID10Tpodcast in 2015, Anderson lamented, "I am so green simultaneous to her being so green that it's a different [level] [...] I'm a child! I'm a child in the pilot pretending to be an adult — it's so obvious!" But Anderson's naivety and arrogance work perfectly on baby Scully, marching into Mulder's office absolutely certain that it'll only take a qualified medical doctor such as herself to solve all these unexplained cases:
SCULLY: ...What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.
Gradually Scully learns that the answers aren't within her grasp — at least not answers that'll satisfy the FBI or the law courts. The version of Scully we meet in 1993 worships science because she believes it's irrefutable — that it has her back, that she can't be shouted down or dismissed as long as she sticks to it. Later in that first season Mulder asks Scully why she refuses to "believe" despite her own experiences of the paranormal. She replies, simply, "I'm afraid. I'm afraid to believe." She doesn't elaborate, so we don't know whether she's afraid of appearing foolish, or afraid of everything she thought she knew falling apart. Either way, it's only as she walks the "endless line" of her life — as both science and the justice system prove utterly inadequate time and again — that she finds an essential faith in herself.
Eventually, Scully has to be the one to make big deductive leaps and be the driving force in their investigations because in Season 8, Mulder goes missing. Scully takes on a new partner, Agent Doggett, whose close-mindedness and lack of imagination become a running joke. She doesn't find it easy by any means. In fact, she thinks she's doing a terrible job — never considers herself equal to the task, and seems at times to resent herself as much as the fact of Mulder's disappearance. But so much of her self-doubt stems from the fact that she's comparing herself to the person she knew better and loved more deeply than anyone. In reality, Scully does well! She takes on some of Mulder's stubborn determination because she has to, but she also inhabits an open-mindedness that's her own, and an intuition that's always been there, but which it's taken her years to trust.
I'm not saying this is what a real protagonist looks like or anything. I'm simply suggesting that she discovers as much about herself as she does about alien conspiracies, and maybe that makes her even more a protagonist than Mulder. I mean, look at these phone calls, made roughly 2 years apart:
MULDER: ...Look, Scully, I know it's not your inclination but... did you ever look up into the night sky and feel certain that... not only was something up there but... it was looking down on you at that exact same moment and was just as curious about you as you are about it.
[Cut to SCULLY, who unscrews a screwdriver and looks at it.]
SCULLY: Mulder, I think the only thing more fortuitous than the emergence of life on this planet is that, through purely random laws of biological evolution, an intelligence as complex as ours ever emanated from it. [She screws the screwdriver together.] Uh, the— the very idea of intelligent alien life is not only astronomically improbable but, at its most basic level, downright anti-Darwinian.
MULDER: Scully... what are you wearing?
[She laughs.]
MULDER: Maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for.
SCULLY: Like evidence of conjury or the black arts, or shamanism, divination, Wicca, or any kind of pagan or neo-Pagan practice? Charms, cards…
[MULDER is listening, spellbound.]
SCULLY: …familiars, bloodstones, or hex signs, or any of the ritual tableaux associated with the occult, Santeria, Voudoun, Macumba, or any high or low magic?
MULDER: Scully?
SCULLY: Yes?
MULDER: Marry me.
SCULLY: I was hoping for something a little more helpful.
So, yeah, the key points here: 1. Mulder is all of us. 2. Scully is learning to entertain extreme possibilities. 3. In War of the Coprophages, every subsequent phone call Mulder makes to Scully (this is the first of several, until eventually she drives out to meet him) provides him with new insight, and she ends up being right about everything, whereas in Chinga, Scully solves her case with no help from Mulder even when she wants it. In a way it's quite sinister that this light humour can presage such unremitting hardship in the final seasons, but it's also an assurance that she's capable, even though greatness is somewhat thrust upon her.
E: There seems to be something important in here about trust: Mulder and Scully's trust in one another and Scully's in herself - and, obviously, in the Truth and its being Out There. How important do you think trust is to The X-Files? Is there anything which gets in its way?
M: Trust is *so* important: conflict is created by there being either too much or too little of it — or both!
In 1x16, E.B.E., Mulder and Scully discuss Mulder's mysterious source, who goes by the code name Deep Throat (yes, really), and sum up a recurring problem in their partnership:
MULDER: He’s never lied to me. I won’t break that confidence. I trust him.
SCULLY: Mulder, you’re the only one I trust.
MULDER: Then you’re gonna have to trust me.
This paradox — 'I don't trust anyone except you... but you trust others' — ought to create an impasse. Luckily, Mulder is great at barrelling straight ahead when people tell him 'no' (Duchovny has cited this as the most difficult part of getting into character). And there’s only so much breath we can expect Scully to expend talking Mulder down from his thousand and one bad decisions. Thus the trust paradox is circumvented without compromising Scully's integrity, which I think is kind of neat.
SCULLY: Our friend from the C.I.A. is about as unbelievable as his story... as is everything about this case. I mean, whatever happened to "trust no one", Mulder?
MULDER: Oh, I changed it to "trust everyone". I didn't tell you?
[2x16 Colony]
So that's Mulder’s trust in excess, but on the flip side, he rarely lets local pathologists perform autopsies because Scully is the only person he can rely on not to omit or conceal information. The challenge for Mulder and Scully, therefore, and the show's central tension, is in pursuing the truth without stirring up so much trouble that the Bureau separates them. Furthermore, that scarcity of trust beyond their partnership motivates them to keep seeing one another (professionally...) even during the periods when one or both of them are reassigned. Attempts to keep Mulder and Scully apart only intensify what Anderson has called the "frisson" between them.
As for what limits or challenges that trust… There are versions of Scully that don’t trust Mulder with her vulnerability because she worries he'll become overly protective. Effectively this means her shouldering Mulder's fears on top of her own, and it's frustrating to watch. On my first viewing I remember directing that frustration at Scully, but now I’m torn as to whether that was a misdirected response. In an ideal world, rather than always saying “I’m fine”, Scully would be able to say, “These are the things I find difficult/painful/untenable and these are the things I can manage.” But the truth is she doesn’t trust Mulder to listen. This has really stuck with me, I think because one grows accustomed to Mulder and Scully’s earnestness with each other. I’d revelled in their ability to convey, whether in words or body language, what they mean to one another. So when they came up against roadblocks, it stung.
It also doesn't seem totally consistent with Scully’s ability to initiate a difficult conversation with Mulder as early as 1x03:
SCULLY: It seems like you were acting very territorial... I don't know, forget it.
[SCULLY goes to turn away but MULDER stops her by tugging gently at her necklace.]
But maybe the lack of baggage at this point makes such a conversation possible. Maybe the more you go through with a person, the more habits of communication are formed, the harder it is to say something new or unexpected. The risk of not being heard feels greater — like it will shatter some illusion.
E: I think I just have one final question - though it's kinda a big one. What do you think The X-Files means to you? And what do you think you've learnt from it?
Ahh you had me worried for a second, but in a way this is the easiest question: I can let go of all pretence to objective analysis and talk about my ~feelings~.
I’m reading the love letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf at the moment — the edition just published by Vintage. On 24th May 1931 Woolf writes,
Could Bloomsbury be grafted onto Mayfair: but no: we’re too ugly and they’re too stupid. And so the world goes to rack and ruin.
On a superficial level, The X-Files executes some version of this grafting, which makes it an inviting world to escape into. I don’t want to manufacture some deep unifying significance; at the end of the day I just want to be ensconced in my duvet and suspend my disbelief that the man who graduated top of his year from Oxford is also hot and proficient in all these sports:
I want to see Scully be kind and gentle with children! Be strong for them. It’s a whole Miss Honey/Maria Von Trapp vibe and I am soft for it! What can I say????
Like, what if there were an FBI agent/medical doctor who seemed to remember every known medical condition off the top of her head, and had a face and a voice Like That? What if she spent her Friday nights in soft cardigans of duck egg blue with her hair in a crocodile clip eating ice cream out of the tub and working on her monograph?? If she were real I would simply Die. But luckily Scully and I are separated by the fourth wall, so I can sit back, hug my hot water bottle, and ~escape~. And like, goodness knows we’ve all needed good places to escape to over the last year.
Some things I’ve learned:
That sci-fi on telly is Good, Actually! I’d never watched Star Trek or anything and went into The X-Files kind of humouring it? So I’m glad I pushed through that feeling
That Gillian Anderson was just as beautiful at 25 as at 50 (I saw her in Sex Education first, like the Gen Z scum I am)
That a lot of things could pass for “feminism” in the ‘90s
That stan twitter is horrifying
But fanfiction can be — once again — Good, Actually!!
That I love stories about women being mesmerised by authority figures and then outgrowing them (maybe one for a therapist rather than this newsletter)
To watch television iteratively! I've already started rewatching individual episodes and getting more out of them now that I have a basic familiarity with the whole 'text'.
It's just a good show, man, and also The Worst, and I love it.
You may have noticed a substantial gap in newsletters, for which I can only apologise: a combination of work and mental health and practical issues conspired to keep me from getting a new post sorted until now. Posts will resume from now, on the Monday/Friday/Wednesday schedule laid out previously.
I’m always extremely interested in interviewing new people for this feature, and if you think you’d enjoy giving your thoughts on a piece of media you love - across whatever format and on whatever scale you want - get in touch at tinymammalkingdom@gmail.com; interviews will take place over email. Just give me an idea of what you want to talk about, what angle you might want to take, and a bit of info about you, and I’ll try to get back as soon as possible.
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