Fox Mulder and Into the Wild: Monomania for "the Truth"
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices." Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods passage highlighted in one of the books found with Chris McCandless's remains. At the top of the page, the word "TRUTH" had been written in large block letters in McCandless's hand.
-Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
A fact I often overlook about Mulder is his obsessive, single-minded focus on one interest, one pursuit, at the cost of all others. It's a trait inherent to his personality, one that would have manifested regardless of Samantha's disappearance.
This thought came to the fore while reading through Jon Krakauer's account of Chris McCandless's untethered, tragically short life-- particularly, how striking I found Jon's assessment of his subject, others like him, and himself were to one FBI agent.
(**Note**: Do not take this post too seriously. I am simply studying fictional characteristics through the mirror of another man's legacy.)
DISILLUSIONMENT AND "THE TRUTH"
"Chris was fearless even when he was little," [Walt McCandless] says after a long pause. "He didn't think the odds applied to him. We were always trying to pull him back from the edge."
Studying Chris McCandless's upbringing-- a comfortable-bordering-on-affluent life, an inborn intelligence, a father that worked in pivotal government progress (Samuel Walter McCandless, Jr., became a rocket science consultant for NASA), a trove of buried secrets (and sexual indiscretions) involving his parents, and even a younger sister-- is not too dissimilar from penning down the Mulder family details. Tack on anarchists (as David Duchovny described his character) to authority, tenderness towards the downtrodden, and purposed monastic living and the parallels thicken further.
Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild, investigates McCandless's tendencies masterfully: the impulse that drove him to the wild with the heated fervor of the devotee was part nature and part dissolution-- in his parents' bickering and upheaval, in their secrecy, in the "lie" (as he put it) of his childhood.
Many aspects of Chris's personality baffled his parents. He could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.
Mulder's rebellion was of a different nature. At first, he mistakenly believed the Mulders were "torn apart" because Samantha vanished under his watch; but discovered, through the files, that his parents' marriage was already cracking under conspiracies and infidelity-- moreover, that they were associated with and complicit in his sister's abduction (Paper Clip, Demons, Travelers.) Still, he remained in loose contact with both (Colony and End Game) until their deaths (Anasazi and Sein Und Zeit), preferring to rage at the men who put both Bill and Teena Mulder in those positions.
Regardless, each man's disillusionment began young: due to their boundary-testing natures, they ran into the "should"s and "should not"s of society rather quickly. Two-year-old Chris broke into a neighbor's house to eat candy at midnight, grew up to feed the homeless, rail at the rich and their institutions, and seek out belief systems that already accorded with his own. After completing four years of law school, he left most of his earthly possessions behind and began living on the road pursuing what he called "the truth": a life away from the trap of civilization-- rugged realness, so to speak, free from human pretension. Mulder, similarly, left Oxford via FBI recruitment, defied the rules of the BSU, and settled into a dingy, solitary apartment in Alexandria (far from the affluence of Martha's Vineyard or his mother's home in Connecticut.) After his parents' passing, he likely inherited their homes and accrued wealth yet continued, canonically, to uphold a lifestyle apart from their assets. (Or, perhaps, used them utilitarianly.)
Mulder and McCandless chose to be, as Scully described in Tempus Fugit, "Men with spartan lives, simple in their creature comforts, if only to allow for the complexity of their passions."
That decision was not without struggle, despite their determination otherwise. Although Mulder wistfully yearned for a simpler life ("You know, my work demands that I live in a big city; but if I had to settle down, build a home, [it'd] be a place like this"), he didn't draw towards those hopes until late-Season 6. Even though McCandless persistently passed up various opportunities to stay with folks who welcomed him, he began (one might suspect) to yearn for something greater than the road:
"Everything had changed suddenly--the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute-- life or truth or beauty-- of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good." Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago passage highlighted in one of the books found with Chris McCandless's remains. "Need for a purpose" had been written in McCandless's hand in the margin above the passage.
The parallels continue: both were little understood. In the wake of McCandless's death, he was thought to be either suicidal or grossly self-confident and incompetent. Yet, underneath the speculation, Mulder and Chris were two men of similar natures propelled by the same belief: to escape (what they perceived to be) falsehood in order to find the truth.
AN ADDICTION TO "THE TRUTH" ASCENDANCE
After the death of her son, Billie McCandless protested her son's motivations "through tears:"
"I just don't understand why he had to take all those kind of chances. I just don't understand it at all."
As Krakauer explains, it's not the danger that draws but the irresistible reward-- the thrill of victory in defiance of the odds-- that keeps one's zeal alive.
In the final postcard he sent to Wayne Westerberg, McCandless had written, "If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk in to the wild." When the adventure did indeed prove fatal, this melodramatic declaration fueled considerable speculation that the boy had been bent on suicide from the beginning, that when he walked into the bush he had no intention or ever walking out again. I'm not so sure, however.
My suspicion that McCandless's death was unplanned, that it was a terrible accident, comes from reading those few documents left behind and from listening to the men and women who spent time with him over the final year of his life. But my sense of Chris McCandless's intentions comes, too, from a more personal perspective.
As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley or corked fury and hunger to please. If something capture my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing.
I devoted most of my waking hours to fantasizing about, and then undertaking, ascents of remote mountains in Alaska and Canada-- obscure spires, steep and frightening, that nobody in the world beyond a handful of climbing geeks had ever heard of. Some good actually came of this. By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick halogen glow that caused everything-- the sweep of the rock, the orange And yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds-- to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.
After reading that passage, it is nearly impossible not to connect it back to Mulder's proclivities. As Scully warned in E.B.E.,
"I have never met anyone so passionate and dedicated to a belief as you. It's so intense that sometimes it's blinding. But there are others who are watching you who know what I know; and whereas I can respect and admire your passion, they will use it against you. Mulder, the truth is out there. But so are lies."
WITHSTAND OR WITHDRAW
McCandless and Mulder chose to thumb their nose at societal expectations, without a doubt. Their methods, however, differed.
Chris cut all ties to his family-- even his beloved sister-- and took to the wild, keeping new friendships surface-level and always at arm's length. The ever-present instability of his youth became marked with simmering fury after secretly learning the truth of his parents' relationship. Instead of confrontation, he chose silence:
After Chris unearthed the particulars of Walt's divorce, two years passed before his anger began to leak to the surface, but leak it eventually did. The boy could not pardon the mistakes his father had made as a young man, and he was even less willing to pardon the attempt at concealment. He later declared to Carine [his sister] and others that the deception committed by Walt and Billie made his "entire childhood seem like a fiction." But he did not confront his parents with what he knew, then or ever. He chose instead to make a secret of his dark knowledge and express his rage obliquely, in silence and sullen withdrawal.
Mulder doesn't withdraw: he confronts.
In Squeeze and Fallen Angel and Tooms and The Erlenmeyer Flask and The Host and Ascension and Grotesque and Anasazi-Paper Clip (and etc.), he frequently defied and raged at authority who hid their intentions. We can infer his status of VCU "Golden Boy" softened earlier scuffles, but Mulder himself likely remained the same (before and after he claimed the files): interactions with Reggie Purdue ("Remember the day you walked into my office wet from Quantico? You [frustrated] me just looking at you but then I saw how your mind worked. How you were always three jumps ahead") and Bill Patterson ("After all this time, I thought you finally put your feet back on the ground. Clearly, I was mistaken") confirm it.
Despite these differences, similarities again swim to the surface: Chris McCandless overlooked and forgave the faults of his favorites (Jack London's alcoholism and Leo Tolstoy's sexual hypocrisy, for example) while Mulder was bogged down by loyalty to distrustful or manipulative people (i.e. Deep Throat, Jerry Lamana, and Diana Fowley.) Further, both have actively participated in "campaigns of misinformation"-- lies by omission meant to stymie outside interference or protect themselves (and others.)
And now I must confess: there is another man that Chris McCandless reminds me of.
THREE MEN WALK INTO THE WILDERNESS
Chris Carter has always attested that Mulder and Scully are both halves (or segments of) his whole:
November 1996:
Chris Carter: “Mulder and Scully are equal parts of me. David makes fun of me; he says that means Mulder is only half a character.”
... Says David Duchovny, “Chris is driven beyond all common sense, but at his core he’s just a really good, decent man. He’s loyal like a dog — but a little more intelligent.”
That "driven beyond all common sense" is a striking observation: it perfectly highlights the squalid office and small motel room Carter lived in for weeks, if not months, at a time away from his home to complete each season's work. It describes his curious nature, his affinity with the natural world (e.g. surfing.) It defines his ambition to turn over every leaf and incorporate those interests (be they Anasazi rituals or tapes of whale songs) into his work.
And it underscores his bone-deep distrust of everyone-- an instinct born from an unstable, harsh upbringing.
November 1996:
Chris’s company, Ten Thirteen Productions, takes its name from his birthday: October 13, 1956. Chris grew up in the L.A. suburb of Bellflower; his childhood was fairly normal, even if Chris’s construction worker father was a little on the strict side. After playing with the girl next door one night when he was eight, Chris came home late for dinner. This was forbidden in the Carter household. To emphasize the point, his father took Chris’s dinner plate out to the street, placed it on a manhole cover, and made his son eat off the pavement. Since the Carters lived on a dead end, Hegel Place, Chris was never in danger. But even when passing cars are going fifteen miles an hour, eating in the street is humiliating.
“My parents never broke rank,” says Chris. “Even when they were wrong, they would back each other up.” Confronted with an unassailable power that he knew was wrong sometimes, Chris lost faith in all authority figures. “Trust no one” is an X-Files slogan; it’s also Chris’s personal philosophy. He doesn’t trust anybody. With a dry chuckle he admits, “This is an issue between my wife and me.”
Like McCandless, like Mulder, Carter's parents' secrets were closed off from their children. Unlike Mulder, the Chrises were given a front-row seat to their parents' extreme behaviors from a young age:
January 3rd, 2001:
Conan: There’s a paranoia that emanates from “The X-Files” and it has made me think that maybe you are a paranoid person yourself. Do you think you are?
Chris: Basically.
Conan: Really. You tend to believe that there are forces out there trying to destroy you.
Chris: I know that there are forces out there–
Conan: It’s called the network. Yeah, yeah. They don’t really count. They’re not as bright as the aliens. The aliens can actually travel through time and space. These people can’t put their suits on. (Audience laughs) None of this will air. I’ll be replaced by a robot tomorrow. “Buy NBC goods! General Electric good!” Do you have any idea where that sense of paranoia would come from? Was there anything in your childhood? Do you think you had any experiences as a kid that would make you be paranoid?
Chris: I’ve told this story before and no one really believes it. When I was growing up I came home to dinner late one night and my dad actually made me sit in the street and eat my dinner on a manhole cover.
Conan: [forces a laugh] That’s a hard thing to laugh at! First of all, was this a pretty quiet street or were you on a highway? It’s pretty hard to eat your pudding when Mack trucks are passing you on either side.
Chris: You develop certain senses or sensibilities when you —
Conan: You really ate your dinner off a manhole cover?
Chris: It was in a cul-de-sac, so it wasn’t so dangerous.
Conan: Right.
Chris: But going for seconds was always a little risky.
Conan: Dodging traffic the whole way.
Chris: I was scrawny.
Conan: Well, then, you’re excused for creating “The X-Files” and having that paranoid vision, I would think.
A serious remark Walter McCandless makes after his son's death bears a striking resemblance to the many teasing or fawning remarks made over Carter's tight-lipped responses:
The summer after his freshman year of college, Chris [McCandless] returned to Annandale and worked for his parents' company, developing computer software. "The program he wrote for us that summer was flawless," says Walt. "We still use it today and have sold copies of the program to many clients. But when I asked Chris to show me how he wrote it, to explain why it worked the way it did, he refused. 'All you need to know is that it works,' he said. 'You don't need to know how or why.' Chris was just being Chris, but it infuriated me. He would have made a great CIA agent-I'm serious; I know guys who work for the CIA. He told us what he thought we needed to know and nothing more. He was that way about everything."
June 19, 1995:
But when Fox hired him in 1992 to develop a new prime-time series, Carter immediately pitched a scary show inspired by an old favorite: Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which an investigative reporter (played by Darren McGavin) tracked down vampires and werewolves. Even Dori, his wife since 1987, was surprised. “I didn’t know those stories existed in his head,” she says.
November 3, 2000:
The X-Files has a lot to answer for, and, as usual, Carter is coy about what’s going to happen.
Even Carter's pull towards the unknown has a flavor of the explorer to him (which David Duchovny, again, rightfully pinpoints.)
August 9, 1998:
And what about the extraterrestrials? Carter shakes his head. He does not believe in aliens, even if he says that he would like to. “I am a s[k]eptic. But when my parents died six years ago I wanted to see their spirits very badly. I tried to conjure up a ghost at the foot end of my bed.” It did not work. But he thinks that everyone share this longing for the beyond. “We all want to drive through the desert at night and see something that our school-learning cannot explain. A UFO maybe. We all want to make that experience, that there is something out there that is bigger than us. For that reason the Greeks and Romans invented their gods. We want to know that we are not alone in the universe. Wouldn’t you like to cross the border to something unimaginable? I would. Anytime.”
June 3, 2025:
Duchovny: Why do you walk home alone on the train tracks?
Carter: [Laughs, stalls.] Uh, my wife told David a story. We were sitting, uh, at lunch, I think; and she told him that I, um, always have adventures. Which is true. I just, uh, I kind of put myself out there. I had been walking home-- I was supposed to take an Uber; and I decided, 'No, I'll just walk a little bit.' And then I thought, 'I'll take the bus-- no, I'll keep walking a little bit. Oh, I'll walk up by the train tracks!' And I go walk on the train tracks; and I'm walking on the middle of the train tracks on the railroad ties and I'm thinking, "Eh, probably not a great idea to walk on the-- but I'll walk on the side of the tracks, on the ties.' And I'm walking along lost in my thoughts, and whoosh! Without a sound, this train goes by me at whatever, 65 miles an hour? I don't know. I mean, it was less than a yard away from me. And it was terrifying. But one of the most exhilarating moments of my life.
Duchovny: I think you got a bit of Huck Finn in you. I think you're out there throwing rocks and looking for adventures. And I think that's curiosity.
Carter: See, that's what producing is-- you get the kids to paint the fence, and....
I think Mulder's similarity to McCandless is really a similarity between his creator and the open road.
LOVE IS THE GREATEST TRUTH WE WILL EVER KNOW
Chris McCandless was a real person, not a fictional character. However, one of his sister's remarks after his passing stood out from the page and stuck in my mind:
"Lying on the floor at Carine's feet is Buckley, the Shetland sheepdog Chris had been so attached to. Now thirteen years old, he's gone white in the muzzle and hobbles around with an arthritic limp. When Max, Carine's eighteen-month-old Rottweiler, intrudes on Buckley's turf, however, the ailing little dog thinks nothing of confronting the much bigger animal with a loud bark and a flurry of well-placed nips, sending the 130-pound beast scurrying for safety.
"Chris was crazy about Buck," Carine says. "That summer he disappeared he'd wanted to take Buck with him. After he graduated from Emory, he asked Mom and Dad if he could come get Buck, but they said no, because Buckley had just been hit by a car and was still recovering. Now, of course, they second-guess the decision, even though Buck was really badly hurt; the vet said he'd never walk again after that accident. My parents can't help wondering-- and I admit that I can't, either-- how things might have turned out different if Chris had taken Buck with him. Chris didn't think twice about risking his own life, but he never would have put Buckley in any kind of danger. There's no way he would have taken the same kind of chances if Buck had been with him."
It's impossible to know, of course.
I do find it interesting that that question and it answer was, in a way, raised by the writers of The X-Files.
For all its purported mystery around "the truth," the show made its stance clear quite a few times: Mulder found his answers-- what co-writer Frank Spotnitz deems, "You can't get the truth. You can't. There's a larger truth, though: that you can't harness the forces of the cosmos, but you may find somebody else. You may find another human being"-- through a relationship with Scully.
In Fight the Future, Carter and the writers crack Mulder open to reveal his tightly-kept secret: utter devotion, appreciation, and true respect. "You've kept me honest... you've made me a whole person. I owe you everything, Scully, and you owe me nothing. I don't know if I wanna do this alone... I don't even know if I can."
The Unnatural's tale (courtesy of David Duchovny) revolutionized Mulder's mired thinking: “It was very important that there be something like an old-fashioned moral. The whole story is about how it affects Mulder and Scully. What did we learn? It was really important to me that Mulder and Scully have communication on this issue, but that it not be literal and that the audience realize Mulder has called Scully up to the ballfield because he’s learned something about life. I wanted him to impart it to Scully without telling her what it is. At first he’s going to tell her, but the last line belongs to Scully, who says, ‘Shut up, I’m playing baseball.’ As usual, Scully gets it, and tells him to shut up. Here’s Mulder, he’s learned this big lesson, he’s going to tell Scully all about it, and she just intuitively grasps it and tells him to shut up because she’s playing. What he’s supposed to have learned is the value of just loving the game.”
And lastly, both lessons laid the bedrock for Amor Fati, where Mulder is forced to dwell on his own wants and desires-- when his conscience, Scully, pulls him back to Earth: "Scully, I was like you once-- I didn't know who to trust. Then I chose another path, another life, another fate where I found my sister. The end of my world was unrecognizable and upside down. There was one thing that remained the same. You were my friend, and you told me the truth. Even when the world was falling apart, you were my constant, my touchstone."
The X-Files agents were (as previously mentioned) two halves of one whole: perfectly designed to balance each other. Dana Scully was an observer of Mulder's life before she became his friend, ferreting out his faults and weak points because she respected him. When he ditched his partner for certain ruin, she found him (or sent someone else to find him); when he fell, she caught him; when she stumbled, he caught her. They were there for each other in every way that counted, and many more. She kept him honest, made him a whole person.
This dynamic does seem to have basis in Chris Carter's life, as well:
June 19, 1995:
But the adult world caught up with him in 1983, when he began dating screenwriter Dori Pierson (Big Business), who encouraged him to finish his first movie script. It was his second that attracted Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dori’s boss at Disney, who signed Carter to a three-picture deal. But after one screenplay, Carter decided to write for TV instead.
February 13, 1996:
A stickler for details, Carter works hard, spending 16 to 18 hours a day overseeing the writing, editing and music cues for each show. He even recently visited an FBI field office in Seattle to learn how agents operate, and he partook of peyote on a Navajo reservation in Arizona to acquaint himself with peyote rituals portrayed in this year’s season opener.
But the demands of his work wear on his private life. “This is the first time Chris has seen me vertical in a few weeks,” said his wife, Dori, an elegant former screenwriter who flew up from Los Angeles to squeeze in a little private time with her husband.
August 2, 1998:
I work until at least 9.30 and I always work weekends. My wife’s staying in Santa Barbara is nothing to do with any kind of marital break-up. We’ve been together 16 years. It’s more that she’d rather be there and not see me than here and not see me. We speak all the time and its actually very romantic: I’d suggest it to anybody as a way of creating connection and desire.
She would like it if I were home more often, but she knows that I tend to feel a little obsessive and understands that I would probably be miserable if I had to live my life any differently right now. I’m not a workaholic, but when something hits and it’s good, you have to obey its demands.
April 2001:
“The truth is, there’s not a whole lot I want in life,” he says. “I’d love to go surfing when I want to go surfing, where I want to go surfing. I’d like to make sure my wife [screen-writer-novelist Dori Peterson] [sic] has everything she wants in life. That’s very important to me. Beyond that, it is just insurance.
(Bonus: Carter also shares an awareness of and disdain for modern society that McCandless would probably have found kinship with: "You’re forced to be motivated by money in Hollywood because they make it about money. The deal is dishonest and everyone knows that. You are working with a [studio] partner and, in success down the line, there’s going to be a problem because this is a business of not just manufacturing, but a business of accounting.”)
And that, I suppose, is that.
CONCLUSION
In honor of the Chris McCandlesses of this world, flaws and all.
Thanks for reading~
Enjoy!
