fleurdeleo and I are planning to see the X-Files movie tomorrow afternoon.

I remember when X-Files premiered. It was on Friday nights, which, at that time, was the night of our weekly family poker game, which took place at my sister's apartment. She and her husband, my parents, his mother and usually one of his sisters, his Uncle Charlie, and I would gather to play. I gave up my seat pretty early on - I wasn't fond of the U-game or Elevator, or any of the games where your hand depends on the cards in the middle of the table, especially not when betting was progressive (even if it was all nickel/dime/quarter, you could still walk out of there down twenty or twenty-five bucks, which is not an unappreciable sum).

It was my job to babysit Alyssa, who was about three at the time, while everybody else played. I used to give her a bath - man, I still remember kneeling next to the tub and blowing bubbles and teaching her how to catch them on her wet hands so that they would stay.

My dad was like, "Hey, I read about this show about this FBI agent who investigates the supernatural. I'm going to tape it." And I was like, "Oh yeah, that'll last."

But one Friday night after getting Alyssa into bed around 8:45, I was flipping through the channels and came upon this show. The guy was hot, the woman was awesome, and they were chasing something that turned out to be the Jersey Devil. I was hooked. I was like, "You have to watch this show!" and my parents were like, "Yeah, we've been taping it but we haven't had time to catch up." So I suggested they do so ASAP.

It's funny, because X-Files is a first fandom for many people I know, and a first online fandom for many others, but I always had people in my life to discuss it with, so I didn't need to turn to fandom, as I did later wth Homicide. When I moved out a few months later, my dad would call me after every episode so we could dissect what had happened. I would go into work and talk about it with my friends there - one guy and I were convinced we had the whole conspiracy figured out. Of course, that was fairly early on, before it collapsed under its own weight and nonsensicalness.

It's because of X-Files that I learned about online fandom - articles about fansites for Mulder and Scully, for Duchovny and Anderson - were all over the NY Daily News, and they included discussion of newsgroups and fanfiction, and it was because of that that when I got into Homicide in the fall of 1997 - a show nobody I knew watched nor was interested in watching - that I turned to the internet and discovered alt.tv.homicide.

I was - am, really - a hardcore Mulder/Scully shipper, though most of the time I want to beat Mulder's head in with a bat for how obtuse he is. I might have wanted to fuck Mulder on occasion, but I always wanted to be Scully. Scully was awesome. It's unfortunate that so much of her storyline ended up revolving around her reproductive organs, though I stopped watching the show regularly in season 6, after the first movie (and also, I believe, when The Sopranos began), so I missed what I've been told is the devolution of her character into someone lacking agency.

And while in some ways the entire show was about how we all lack agency, that larger forces are always working against us, one of the things I always loved about Scully was that she was her own woman - she evaluated the evidence and came to her own conclusions. I always hated that they never let her be right about anything. I felt that was a major flaw of the show, actually, that her skepticism was always disproved by Mulder's belief (except when it came to religion, where she had faith and he was a non-believer). I love that she was open to belief, but that she needed more than just a hot guy's word for it, and that she never abandoned science or reason, even in the face of the inexplicable. She struggled to make them coexist with faith and possibility.

This is an awesome essay about Scully, written in anticipation of the movie: Scully have I loved by Rebecca Traister:

The very fact that her character was such a hard sell made her repeated brushes with the supernatural all the more powerful. Mulder's desire to believe was so expansive, his credulity so flexible, that it's not as though he was ever going to have either shaken from him. But Scully's surety was solid, stable, rigid; every time she saw something she thought she'd never see, we saw it crack, sparks fly from it. She was forced to question herself, grow, change. In short, she got the better arc, and her journeys were always, by dint of the setup, more intricate and moving.

[...]

In an entertainment world where women are disappearing from multiplexes, where men bulk up as superheroes while women don't eat but sip pink drinks, we need to remember that there was once a very short heroine who hunted monsters and talked about Einstein, who kicked ass and questioned her faith, who went to work with a man she loved but didn't rip his shirt off over lunch, who didn't want to believe, but opened herself nonetheless to possibility. We need Scully back, even for a moment.

Yes. This.

So I'm actually kind of excited about the movie, though I haven't watched an episode of the show in years - I don't even own any of it on dvd (I think I have one box set of tapes I got as a gift many years ago) - and it wasn't a fannish experience for me, in the way it would be now when I get involved in a tv show.

Because Scully was awesome, and I wish there were more characters like her on television right now.

***