Dana Scully: An Appreciation

Scully is my favorite TV heroine. She may very well be the only one. I admire her intensity, her sense of rigidity that is not quite unflexible but is rooted in something more than fleeting emotions and shallow aspirations. As they say, she’s a buzzkill - she is rarely amused, but when she is, finally, sparks fly.

I can attempt to write everything that I appreciated about this character Chris Carter created and Gillian Anderson so masterfully portrayed, despite the fact that her real-life persona will probably giggle over Scully’s repressed personality, but someone else have already done that for me.

Here’s a thoughtful article published on Salon, detailing why Dana Scully, THE “smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental,” became both the cerebral center and the heart of an otherwise formulaic science fiction narrative.

Dexter

My sister was urging me to watch this new TV series she bought a DVD of - Dexter. It’s another one of those wonderfully weird shows from Showtime (well, that’s only judging from Californication being from Showtime, too, and it’s quite weird. Good show, but in a very controversial way). I didn’t think I’m up for gruesome, crime stories, wherein the main character is the one perpetuating the crimes, albeit only against hardened criminals. But the first episode proved to be intriguing and I think I might stick around to watch the entire first season. Plus, Michael Hall (Dexter), David from Six Feet Under, is a really great actor. Here he plays a forensics expert by day who analyzes blood-splatter patterns, and a heartless killer by night, preying on those criminals who got away from law and justice.

There’s a reason why I stay away from crime shows, CSI, for example. I used to watch documentaries about real crime stories and they give me nightmares. But the whodunit scenarios are always compelling and the use of modern technology in investigations is quite interesting to learn about. The use of PCR, for example, to determine the identity of possible suspects and, in more extreme cases, it’s even curious how they use dental fragments to identify the victims. It must really pay to watch your oral health, if only to have dental records, then. No, really, a charlotte cosmetic dentist is maybe what you need while you’re well and hoping to do some oral reconstructions, but the former is a technology I fear we don’t have here in our country yet (or do we?).

Anyway, we’ll see if I’ll be able to go through season 1 without being squeamish about all those blood.

Classic MSR

I’m not trying to shove this movie down everyone’s throats. Well, maybe a little bit (reminder: August 13 is the opening day of The X-Files: I Want to Believe). General reception to the new X-Files movie has been lukewarm but from everything I’ve read, it’s apparent that the movie is a gift to fans (read: X-phile “shippers”). Granted, some who might have been expecting a grander cinematic offering like the first film, Fight the Future, were disappointed to see a smaller-scale thriller with underdeveloped plot. The X file, they say, took a backseat to character study and the exploration of Mulder and Scully’s relationship. It’s The X-Files at its core - the ever-precarious balance between faith and science. It’s a love story, although in the true X-Files sense (ambiguous and repressed). I’ve spoiled myself with the actual movie clips that fans have uploaded at YouTube and I realized that although the words and the looks that these two gave each other brought out the totally squealing fangirl in me, I don’t think anybody who’s not familiar with the show will understand why those seemingly typical scenes that depict two people in a relationship are pivotal in a decade-long wait for tying up loose ends.
MSR, the Mulder-Scully relationship as fans call it, has been nothing like anything depicted on TV before The X-Files and nothing ever since, partly owing to the actors’ much-raved-about chemistry and partly owing to Chris Carter’s (the series creator) initial insistence to keep the two characters’ relationship strictly platonic and professional. I am watching a season 3 episode as I am typing this post, The War of the Coprophages. Without getting into the plot that pretty much revolved around metallic killer cockroaches, I love this episode because Mulder gets to flirt with a scientist named Bambi while Scully acts jealous and territorial. As if to emphasize the silliness of this episode, my favorite (spooky) duo ended up both covered in dung and insulting each other. It was goofy and funny and reminded me of classic exchanges such as the phone conversation below.

Mulder (sitting in a car parked in nowhere land): Did you ever look up into a night sky and feel certain that not only was something up there, but it was looking down on you at that exact same moment and was just as curious about you as you are about it?

Scully (at home, cleaning her gun) : Mulder, I think the only thing more fortuitous than the emergence of life on this planet is that through purely random laws of biological evolution, an intelligence as complex as ours ever emanated from it. The very idea of intelligent alien life is not only astronomically improbable, but, at its most basic level, downright anti-Darwinian.

Mulder: Scully, what are you wearing?

Oh, the humanity! Have you ever seen a more geeky pair than these two?

The Therapist

This may be more of TPS’s turf but I must say that I’ve always had this fascination with psychology. Had I been born in another place or perhaps in another time, I probably would have made use of my Biology degree to pursue studies, if not a career, in psychotherapy. Had I not been feeling that I, too, need some fixing, I probably had turned into an obnoxious friend (or somebody) who lives to dissect the lives of others and explain to their faces why they behave the way they behave.

Once, during a period of personal turmoil, I turned to self-help books and found solace in 500-pages worth of psychobabble after psychobabble. I finished a book called Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart, and though it failed to turn me into a New Ager or a Buddhist, it did give a lot of insights that I learned to appreciate. It’s P700 worth of “therapy.”

In the just-ended season of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith Grey’s conversations with her therapist has been the one reason why I got back into watching the series. I caught these lines and I was again hooked:

You know people run away from this line between life and death. You seem to stand on it and wait for a strong wind to sway you one way or the other. You’re careless with your life. You’re not slitting your wrists but you’re careless. Probably because your mother told you you were a waste of space on this planet. The problem is you believed her. And if you don’t want out one of these days you’re going to die because of it.

- Dr. Katharine Wyatt to Meredith Grey

To have the power to say something like that. To break a person further so you can start building the puzzle. (I wonder how they sleep at night.) When Meredith finally admitted that she does need help, I wanted to join her in chorus when she said “So you think I’m broken? Fix me. Let’s go!.”

The Nonmetaphor

I wasted much of the long weekend that passed watching the last episodes of House M.D. season 4. I’ve taken notes in my head of some quotes I’d most likely want to expatiate, but then I got struck by this recurring condition called “aversion to banality” that the only line that seems clear to me now is “Hope is for sissies.” Ah, and I just watched Kung Fu Panda yesterday and actually had a great time!

Times like these, I usually come up with big metaphors to paint the even bigger picture that actually only translates into something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Because my love affair with metaphors started with my 1st year high school English class, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. But for now, here’s my big House quote :

Evan Greer: I just wanna do something…that matters.

Dr. House: Nothing matters, we’re all just cockroaches, wild beasts dying in the riverbank, nothing we do has any lasting meaning.

Evan Greer: And you think I’m miserable.

Dr. House: You’re unhappy on the plane, jump out of it.

Evan Greer: I want to but…I can’t.

Dr. House: Hmm…that’s the problem with metaphors, they need interpretation. Jumping out of the plane is stupid.

Evan Greer: What if I’m not in a plane? What if I’m just in a place I don’t want to be?

Dr. House: That’s the other problem with metaphors. Yes, what if you’re really in an ice cream truck, and outside are candy and flowers and virgins? You’re on a plane! We’re all on planes. Life is dangerous and complicated, and…it’s a long way down.

I’ll probably regret saying this, but I think I might be in a place I don’t want to be. And that’s as straightforward as I can put something I don’t want to admit, even to myself. A few times when I’m stressed out, I get this overwhelming feeling of wanting to have a smoke or buy myself a couple of bottles of vodka. Once while in line waiting for a cab, the lady in front of me lit a cigarette and I didn’t even attempt to turn away from the fumes coming out of that thing she kept holding almost right next to my face. Most times, I’d be repulsed, but I was feeling miserable then. Then I saw her toddler standing right next to her, inside the trolley, looking at her mother’s face with awe and the fascination of the truly innocent, and I came to my senses. I don’t know if always coming to my senses is doing me any good. But reason tells me I should just be glad I still have some to spare.

SciFi, Really?

Somebody asked me once, “So you like SciFi?” I was about to shake my head and vehemently say “No!” I’m not a StarTrek fan. I don’t even like Star Wars. I then did a little mind inventory:

Favorite TV show: X-Files, Taken

Favorite movie: Contact

Must be the aliens.

Truth is, I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of extraterrestrial life. It’s not necessarily about the little green men, or gray ones, or their supposed powers and advanced technologies that we exploit for entertainment. Contact summed it up the best for me when Ellie Arroway said, “The universe is a pretty big place. It’s bigger than anything that anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.”

When you look at the sky, what do you see? How do you feel about the vastness of the space beyond this planet? It always humbles me, in the most lucid moments, how small and insignificant we are against the grander scheme of things. Let’s skip religion, but are we not to agree that we, as a race, are part of something greater than ourselves? But people can be self-possessed and egotistical, lusting over the power of gods, even when we can’t even agree where we really came from. That may very well be how we survived. And if you’ve watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” that’s also what will spell our doom.

It’s easier to think that “the world is what we make of it.” It’s easier not to look for answers, because that’s what humankind has been doing since the beginning of time. Looking and failing mightily. Are we not in a better position now to enjoy our lives and accept that it’s all there is to it?

I don’t think I have an answer to that. I even think that Occam’s Razor (”All things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one”) is a very complicated principle.

People will always look at things differently anyway. Consider these different viewpoints from the movie Contact:

Ironically, the thing that people are most hungry for — meaning– is the one thing that science hasn’t been able to give them … Is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the Web… at the same time, we feel emptier, lonelier and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history. - Palmer Joss (a spiritual leader)

You’re an interesting species, an interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. - Alien from Vega

So it turns out there’s life on other planets. Boy, this is really going to change the Miss Universe contest, you know what I mean? - Jay Leno in his TV show

Gad, I love the movies! I love how they mirror real life even when they’re trying to be grand and fantastic and out of this world.

All Things

Time passes in moments… moments which, rushing past, define the path of a life just as surely as they lead towards its end. How rarely do we stop to examine that path, to see the reasons why all things happen, to consider whether the path we take in life is our own making or simply one into which we drift with eyes closed.

But what if we could stop, pause to take stock of each precious moment before it passes? Might we then see the endless forks in the road that have shaped a life? And, seeing those choices, choose another path?

- Scully (All Things, The X-Files 7×17)

You may ponder on that for now.

However, for fans of the show, there’s a treat waiting for you here. Read more

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