Now, maybe this is important. There is a shot, deeper into the show’s run, of Mulder and Scully in a field with tall grass, the kind you know would itch if you walked in with your ankles bare. The backs of their dark jackets say FBI. She is following him and they are following something outside the frame. I always think of it.
Or another. Mulder and Scully before a wall of trees, grasping at a dark sky. You can’t see the top. There is a fire, an orange spark in this green place, and they are unimaginably small before it. He’s curled against her lap. If there was sound, you can hear her singing. The sparks go up, up, up. She looks down. You can’t see the sky.
Or maybe this: Mulder and Scully and a flat expanse of dust, hot sand, wind. Their suits are fitted, newer, dark. The dust clings to their shoes but never their jackets.
Or even: Mulder and Scully on the highway. The pass of green, grey, brown. The thrum of an engine you can’t hear.
Or go back to the pilot. Mulder and Scully in the rain, in a graveyard. Shivering in the cold. Laughing in the very, very quiet.
Maybe this should be obvious, but through it all, in standard definition, black coated, real and dirty and ephemeral and monolithic all at the same time, they are Mulder and Scully. Scully and Mulder.
And do you get it, even a little? That the point is not that they fit but that they somehow apply?
Put them in Alabama, in a bunker in Alaska, in your childhood bedroom, in a space you know like the taste of flat Coke on hot pool days and suddenly you don’t know it anymore, just because of their presence. But at the same time, you do. You know them. They are easy to read, like a picture book story, told and re-told. It’s always them, peripheral.
It is like this: You can change the background but never the scene.
The show still lives in unexpected corners of rooms and experience. To this day, highways at night have a rhythm that conjures up The X-Files like a smoke screen, a projection, an invisible cloak. It had an incidental style, a scuzzy 90s methodology and all the scape and gape of rainy Vancouver setpieces. I’d never before wanted to go to Oregon. The show always pronounced it like Ore-gone, and I sometimes, in a romantic, curious way, I wanted to be there, wherever gone was.
It worked because it was rarely slick, the show, often stumbling. It served Mulder and Scully watery diner coffee. Put them in too big coats and neon-lit motels. Taught them to drive in crowded rental cars. Shoved their hands in their pockets and across diner tables. Let them bleed on starched pillows and dark suits alike. Dwarfed them by tall, cleaving trees in unimaginable forests. Cowed them by nature, by bodies of water, by white, inhuman, expanses of nothing, nowhere. Stranded them against skies of stars and stained glass in churches. Made them whisper in the dimmed light of TVs and the blue glow of fish tanks, between library carrels and behind their hands.
It dusted them up and then off. Set them out against the unknown, linked their hands, turned their chins up and said, Look, look, but never find.
Maybe it’s about a feeling, a laid out space, a quality of time. All of this, somehow, is familiar.
In a famous episode, a country-county sheriff brushes off a creeping sense of local danger. This is my home, he says, like that’s the only protection he could ever need, like its clipped into his gun.
And when it kills him, that familiarity, you get the sense that he wouldn’t have it any other way. You get the sense that, in some slapdash, sincere way, The X-Files wouldn’t have it any other way either.
You get the sense that it allows for this kind of love. Knows it. Knows that the familiar, the comfortable, the safe, will kill you if you let it. And you will let it. But it won’t be so wrong when you do.
The familiar is strange and lethal. The unknown is romantic and sweet to reach for but only if it stays that way. It’s not that any of this means anything outside some sort of philosophical thesis on the unnecessary tautology of spaces.
Except. Except. I have memories that hinge on X-Files episodes. It’s not just the pilot. There is the night there were lightning storms, heavy July air and the ripples of light across the backyard. Me alone on the couch, with monsters and Mulder on TV, coming in and out of light and shadow.
There is a candle lit in my childhood bedroom, with all the black and white pictures I cut out and put up on the walls, and I am watching Mulder and Scully pas-de-deux through a haunted houses, and the thunder outside is so loud that I can’t tell if it’s coming from the show or from the world outside it.
It’s not that it makes it easier to remember. That I wouldn’t feel summer the same way if it weren’t for the lulling omnipresence of two fictional archetypes and their heady aesthetics. It’s not.
It is, maybe, that it makes it a little harder to forget.
Because it was never about the defining the indefinable, but about undefining the supposed definite. Suburbs hid chimeras, broken glass windows, inexplicable death. Anger. Quiet towns are only silent to account for their secret-keeping. Home is never where you think it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s nowhere at all.
Scully writes to Mulder. She wants to capture something nameless, to pin it down without killing it. She talks about a “memory and experience that belong to you. That are you.”
That’s the secret then. My house at sixteen, myself at sixteen, is that June viewing of the pilot. Is the July lightning storm and the whining surge of electricity, monsters on the screen. They’re gone - wherever that is - but I keep them in me just the same.
In the pilot Scully is wrong: Time is not, in fact, a universal invariant. Mulder’s wrong, too: We can’t ever really lose it.
To lose something, definitionally, means it is something you once had. In the same fashion, The X-Files says that everything you love you possess, or everything you love possesses you. But in over 200 episodes about the unnatural and the strange, there has never been an exorcism.
And in that way everything is always over. And in that way, it never ends.
— Excerpts from Conspiracy Summer (Or: a piece of a piece of a piece I’m hopefully publishing on The X-Files and nostalgia and me)
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