Actors vs. Directors (X-Files Revival, MSR Leaks/rumors/spoilers)
There’s an old lawyers’ saying I’ve been thinking of a lot this morning about writing new laws. “I’ll let you write the substance,” says the lawyer, “and I’ll write the procedure…and I’ll screw you every time.”
The point is: it doesn’t matter what, in theory, you want your law to do, if the guy who’s in charge of determining how it will be implemented day-to-day wants it to do something else. Procedure wins, every time.
I bring this up because it occurred to me that this is how the Mulder/Scully relationship has always worked. Chris Carter wrote the substance, and Duchovny and Anderson wrote the procedure. And he got screwed every time.
For the first 7 years Carter was deliberately trying NOT to make that relationship a romance. The substance was: two respectful but antagonistic sparring partners needle each other while also working together to solve weird mysteries. The procedure was: what you see in that image. Two people in love. The actors built that, day by day, with stuff that was mostly unscripted and not intended or necessarily even desired by Carter. The kiss on the lips at the end of “Existence” was scripted as a forehead kiss. The dance at the end of “Postmodern Prometheus” was unscripted. All that gazing was just shit that happened when you put these two people in a room together. There was nothing Carter could do about that; and it’s lucky for him, because it’s what created the fandom.
If I had to name one problem that I think male showrunners have when they try to handle an onscreen relationship, it’s the assumption that everything has to be BIG. Big emotions, big danger, big sacrifices, big anger, big jealousy, big man-pain. Partly this is about being the showrunner: you have to see the big picture, that’s your job. But it’s partly about men and romance. I think fundamentally they just believe that two people in love with each other is not, in and of itself, interesting or attractive as a story line. There has to be STRUGGLE. There has to be HEROISM. There has to be PAIN. Because I think a lot of men, or at least a lot of men who write sci-fi, really do believe that sex is some all-consuming thing over which they have no control, and which has to be FOUGHT or else it will totally overrun you and make you do stupid/dangerous/degrading things.
Whereas when you let the actors write the MSR, we get “The Unnatural” and “All Things,” in which the drama comes from somewhere else, and the relationship is visible in the tiny day-to-day interactions that it’s their job, as actors, to put into the show in order to make the people and the relationships real. In ‘All Things,’ Anderson actually explicitly calls attention to this difference by making it part of the plot: when you SLOW DOWN, when you pay attention to the ordinary million tiny decisions you make every day, that’s when the important things happen. Anderson wrote the first episode in which we get a clear indication that M&S are sleeping together and she did it WITHOUT an on-screen kiss, without a declaration of love, without anything but a few subtle shifts in the way Mulder and Scully look at and talk to and touch each other (and, of course, her inversion of the postcoital-dressing cliche we’ve seen a million times with the genders reversed). This is romance writ small. And it’s…just so much more convincing than all that shit that happened on this show once Carter started Trying To Write The Romance.
So my point is, I guess, the revival is what it is, and the substance will be written by Chris Carter. And the procedure will still be written by Anderson and Duchovny. And I at least am still interested to see whether procedure’s going to win again this time.
Reblogging in honor of the revelation that David Duchovny suggested the “open the door and there’s a smiling Mulder behind it” ending to “Plus One.”
