rms triple ennui

Haha, I should probably stop doing that and make actual posts. I used to write X-Files reviews when I was a teenager, with the intention of reviewing every single episode. I didn't finish, but it was a fun exercise, although I'm sure if I read them now I'd die of embarrassment. Darin Morgan is my favorite X-Files writer so I love talking about his work. I also enjoy that his short time on X-Files is basically the highest-profile work he's ever done. He managed to make a huge impact with not a lot of episodes and has gone on to do basically nothing else. He's just the Guy Who Wrote Those Six Really Weird But Good X-Files Episodes and I honestly think that's an incredible legacy. Not everyone has to go on to be a Vince Gilligan! Sometimes you're just the guy who wrote "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" and that's enough.

Re: Mulder and Scully being losers, I know we like to joke about it on here, but in some ways I mean it seriously. I always try to remind people that this is a show about outcasts and in a broader sense marginalization, and so its leads need to kind of be outcasts themselves. What I think makes it all the more compelling, and what "Humbug" tries to get at, is that on paper Mulder and Scully don't seem like outcasts at all. They're white, conventionally attractive, intelligent, work in freaking law enforcement, come from varying degrees of privilege (Mulder has a rich-ass New England family with like three houses, Scully's father was a Navy captain), are (at least at the beginning) physically non-disabled, educated, etc. But their work takes them to the margins, so they too adopt a life of social alienation. (To quote Eddie Van Blundht: "I was born a loser, but you're one by choice.") This is the primary reason when people ask me what genre The X-Files belongs to I'm tempted to say horror before anything else. Horror is largely a genre about alienation and otherness. There's a quote from Robin Wood's 1979 essay "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" which I think sums it up well:

(The X-Files draws a lot from 1970s horror in particular, so this essay is very apt to me; it's also just a fascinating read in general if you're into this sort of thing.)

Sci-fi looks forward, fantasy looks backward, but horror looks outward, and that's why so many of Mulder and Scully's cases involve marginalized characters or communities, why the X-Files themselves are cases that have essentially been discarded.

You sound a little frustrated, friend, and part of me gets it. It may not come across with how much I hornypost on here, but I’m actually asexual, and have had very few romantic/sexual relationships in my life. The vast majority of my relationships are familial and/or platonic. So, lest you think I value platonic relationships less than romantic, I assure you that could not be further from the truth.

Mulder and Scully are a weird case, and there’s no one-size-fits-all reading. Are they platonic? Yes. Are they romantic? Also yes. Are they sexual? After a certain point, yes. Are they familial? Definitely. Are they coworkers? That too. That’s the issue with people who are so wrapped up in each other that they become everything to each other. It’s a concept I wish the revival would have explored in the context of their breakup. When you become so entwined with another person, what does that do to your sense of self? But I digress.

That being said, even as an asexual person, I do read Mulder and Scully’s relationship, though it may be functionally platonic, as primarily romantic in nature, and it has nothing to do with me valuing one type of relationship over the other. As someone who is really into classic film, I find Mulder and Scully’s relationship and how it’s characterized as akin to a Hays Code-era duo, where anything sexual had to be subtly implied to fool the MPPDA censors. (Think Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or the like.) I personally think there’s way too much romantic/sexual subtext to read Mulder and Scully as completely platonic, even from the beginning. It’s a fun thing the show can play around with, it’s great for drama, and it’s undoubtedly one of the elements that keeps fans coming back. And like I always say, if you want your characters to be platonic, you don’t cast the two horniest people alive to play them. 🤷🏻

One of the things I’ve noticed on Tumblr is this tendency for people to desperately cling to neoliberal identity politics in fandom the same very serious way they do in real life. Discussions of labels and identities are not fun thought experiments meant to understand the story or characters better but are borne instead from a desire for personal validation. Every character discussed on here is given a smorgasbord of labels that, more often than not, have little to do with the characters or text itself and more to do with the identity of the poster. It’s great to see yourself in characters, and it’s natural to pick up on characteristics that you yourself are familiar with—I myself am guilty of doing that with Mulder in particular; as a depressed autistic it’s unsurprising that I also see Mulder as a depressed autistic. Do I think this is a valid reading that can reasonably be concluded from the text? Yes, insofar as the show is vague enough that many different characteristics could be attributed to the characters, depending on what perspective or frame of reference the viewer has. But I’m kidding myself if I claim that as an unshakable truth.

This conversation reminds me of a question George RR Martin often poses in interviews: how many children did Scarlett O’Hara have? In the movie she has one; in the book she has three, so which is the truth? The answer is…none. Scarlett O’Hara has no children, because she’s not a real person. She’s a character. On this site, we tend to forget that. And it is not a personal affront to you, me, or anyone else if someone has a different reading of a character than you do.