I guess I’ve come about as close to a heroin addiction as I will ever come. I’m rewatching all nine seasons of the X-Files. I am abandoning all obligations I have as a wife, mother, writer, daughter, friend and teacher to sit on my green couch in the dark (natural or curtain-created) and watch all 216 episodes. That’s 9,504 minutes of quality television for you math folks.
As mentioned before, I was a big fan of the show in the 90’s and only stopped watching because in 2000 the show suddenly had my demanding infant son for competition, plus David Duchovny left and really, for me, the whole appeal was the relationship between Mulder and Scully, not Scully and the guy from Terminator 2 and Annabeth Gish from Mystic Pizza.
For my birthday this year I asked for a boxed set of the entire show. What I got was a grainy pirated set with “X-Files – Season 1-9” written in my brother-in-law’s handwriting on the paper CD sleeves. Apparently quality recording doesn’t matter to me.
This show is beautifully conceived, written, filmed, acted – I do have standards. But people often assume that I have an alien fixation or a penchant for the paranormal, when really, I’m just a big fan of love. The love between these two characters takes nine years to build, and develops slowly and sweetly, as they tromp through old growth forests, search the sewers of New Jersey, save each others' lives numerable times, pursue bad guys, aliens, clones, nut cases. Their affection for each other is always restrained. We get brief glimpses: in Season 2 they hold hands for a second after a particularly emotional case, in Season 3 Scully cries on his chest after being held captive by an extra-disturbed serial killer, in Season 4 Mulder’s head falls to the steering wheel for a moment before he has to identify what he thinks is Scully’s body (it’s not!).
Last night, I found myself weeping at the closing scene of an episode where Mulder and Scully dance together to a Cher impersonator who sings “Walking in Memphis” for a deformed teenager who is obsessed with the movie Mask. You had to be there. Anyway, I had this feeling of being gypped, which I know is not a politically sensitive expression, my apologies to the Gypsy community, but something huge welled up inside of me, and I had all these very real emotions coursing through my body, altering my body chemistry for a moment, when it dawned on me: THIS IS ALL PRETEND. This is not my life – these are not my friends – this love is not real. It’s just script, actors, set, being beamed to me through some sort of technology which I will never understand. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson probably don’t even like each other much. Gypped, I tell you.
In my lifetime I could conceivably come to understand the technology of television; I will never understand the mechanism of fiction. I had been tricked into welling, coursing emotion by some form of magic. And now what? I know I have real love right here: Husband, Son, Friends, the whole deal. That’s real. However, I have 106 episodes left, so that will have to wait.
