Mark with an X

Fox Mulder comes from a broken home. Approaching this scenario from a rational perspective, we can accept that some kind of traumatic event happened when Fox Mulder was twelve years old. This event involved the disappearance of his eight-year-old sister. This, in itself, is enough to tear a family apart. Mulder, at some point, came to believe that this disappearance was due to her being abducted by aliens, beings from another world, who have plans for invading (or ‘colonising’) planet Earth. We must ask if Mulder is prone to delusion, whether he has a propensity towards outlandish explanations for mundane events. Certainly, accepting the disappearance of a young sister must be difficult to process, almost impossible for a boy of Fox’s age. It is at times like this that we must find ways to deal with our life on an existential level. Belief in aliens clearly gave Mulder’s life meaning, an essential element if we are to come to terms, to cope, with the harsh reality of life.

Identifying that which gives meaning to life is the overriding motive for all human beings. It matters not whether we find it in God, political allegiance, celebrity, drugs or Saturday night football, all are just means of making me feel good about myself.

It is the nature of human belief systems that they are either all true or none of them are true. We can say this with confidence because there is precisely the same amount of evidence for each – and that is precisely none whatsoever. The book of Genesis provides no more evidence for the existence of God than does Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ for a theory of everything. We fight for what we believe in order to convince ourselves that whatever it may be is worth the time and effort we have put into it. The tragic irony is that the very thing that makes it all worthwhile is the very thing that we seem eager to throw away in some meaningless cause.

My life of three score and ten is the only time with which I need to be concerned. However, that incredibly brief amount of time only has any significance in terms of how it came from all the time that has gone before and all the time to come. And this is really the crux of our problem, that we don’t know how to live up to those who have gone before or how we will impact those to come.

None of us are really very happy with accepting the idea that our own individual life is without purpose. Of course, truth be told, not many of us today actually even think about this, being far too busy watching the Kardashians or imbibing copious amounts of wine or drugs or football. The people do need their opiates!

And Mulder’s opiate is his belief in the existence of aliens and their nefarious machinations of human life.

To get back to the question asked earlier, whether Mulder is delusional, we can say only that he found a story that sustained his reason for living and this is really all we can do. This is precisely why so many are so keen to keep up with the Kardashians, they live a story and we need nothing so much as we need a good story.

In fact, to go even further, each of us is our own author, the writer of our own lives, our own stories. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t very good writers!

We are now at the very core of what makes life so confusing, that we are the writers of stories that we ourselves are the main characters of, while being writers of the quality of Dan Brown – crazy plot lines, a million irrelevant questions and very little description. Your life is grey and depressing not because you have no meaning, no purpose, but because you can’t write the description that would give it colour and aroma and depth.

Mulder is an Oxford-educated psychologist, very much aware of how we work as human beings. In ‘The Pilot’, he deliberately manipulates Peggy O’Dell, causing her to tantrum so he can check her for the marks that would give weight to his theory. It isn’t exactly what his training as a psychologist would have him do, it is what his character in the story he writes of his own life would have him do. The problem is, like the rest of us, he doesn’t really know what story he is writing. Is he a psychologist, an FBI agent, the brother of an abducted sister, a lover, a fighter, a giver or a taker? He has no more insight into his own character than any of us for he is no more self-aware than any one of us. There are plenty of examples throughout the nine seasons (of the original series) in which Mulder frustrates the audience by apparently contradicting what we would expect of him. This is, of course, bound to happen in an episodic TV series written by a large group of writers over nine years. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies of Mulder’s character are consistent with what it is to be human. It is these inconsistencies, as much as the drama of combatting an alien conspiracy, that makes the character typical of who we are as human beings.

To fully understand Mulder, and ourselves, we need to learn how to read him as both writer and character.

The first step in understanding how this process works is accepting that all characters, whether they be real human beings or fictional character in TV series, are authored – we are all products of another’s pen. There are many who will say that the author is dead, that his or her intentions have no bearing upon the meaning of the text. So many of us are all too willing to accept that our authors, our parents, have no bearing in our lives, that they are what hinder us rather than what aids us. It is true that the author is not the determining factor in the meaning of a character’s life, but they remain a powerful influence. We each of us are, after all, made up of borrowed genes. I might decide to bleach my hair blonde but, that it was auburn to begin with is a sign of my Celtic heritage, passed to me from those who constructed me as text. I am the already-written text which writes itself.

That which I am, I am because I was constructed by others. These others, these authors, formed and shaped me physically and, to a very large extent, psychologically.  As I become more and more the author of myself, I find that I am inscribing on pages that have already existing text. Try as I might, I cannot erase this already existing text, I can only use an ink more indelible.

It must be said, however, that the vast majority of us, choose not to write the text of myself. Rather than being the creative authors of a whole other text, they accept what has already been written. Even the act of rebellion, of simply refusing the text already written, is little more than an inverse acceptance of that text.

We find this time and time again in Literature. The prime example, and one which makes an appearance in Season 5 of the X Files, is Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus’. In this novel, Victor Frankenstein appears to create a whole new text, upon which he could have inscribed whatever story he wished to tell. This, of course, isn’t actually the case, for there is no creating ex nihilo. The creature is made up of bits and pieces of other texts. Nevertheless, the creature does have the opportunity to write his own story. Precisely because he is abandoned by his creator, he is free to be his own author. And what does he choose to do? Seek out his author and have his meaning inscribed for him. This, inevitably, leads to tragedy. My life is a tragedy to the extent I refuse the responsibility of writing my own story, to the extent I live constrained by the already written.

In the pilot episode of The X Files, we find Fox Mulder apparently choosing to write his own text. Section Chief Blevins informs Scully that Mulder has “developed a consuming devotion to an unassigned project outside the bureau mainstream”. The overriding element of any definition of “mainstream” is that it is the norm, having ideas and beliefs that are common to most people. Mulder, then, accepts that he is not “most people”, that he is not bound by the rules of life by which most people blindly live. He has chosen to step outside the norm, giving himself the opportunity to write his own text. Unfortunately, Clarice Starling’s question to Hannibal Lecter could just as well have been aimed at Mulder: “You see a lot, doctor. But can you point that high-powered perception at yourself?” That Mulder allows his work on the X Files to become a “consuming devotion” implies that, rather than being a sign of a text freely writing itself, he has opted for avoidance, that which will enable him to ignore what is actually necessary. His devotion to the X Files is “consuming”, eating away at his text of self and his need to confront what really happened at home that night in 1973, when his parents left him in charge, though his dedication to the X Files can be seen as an attempt, however unfocused, to deal with that night. After all, it was, or so Mulder implies, the night that tore the family apart (although, Mrs Mulder’s extramarital affair with CSM might have had something to do with that!), the night that provided “No note, no phone calls, no evidence of anything.” What is his dedication to the X Files but a way of searching for that something, the evidence that would explain all?

However, in our reading of Mulder, we must be careful not to fall into the trap that lies at our feet. The idea of Mulder’s “consuming devotion” to the X Files is Blevin’s and the FBI’s attempt to overwrite Mulder’s own text. The more we struggle to compose our own epic, the more the “mainstream” will struggle to write us into their narrative, fix us in the plot they would have us play out. So, while we can see that Mulder is passionate in his personal quest, we must accept his word that he is not crazy, that he has the same doubts Scully does.

Mulder, just like any one of us, lives between the lines; constantly feeling the pressure to live according to the intentions of the author who would have his life mean whatever is needed in order to keep the narrative going, to retain authorial control over the script. This, in itself, is a constant struggle; writers will speak of characters who take on lives of their own. This is life; nature will, to quote Dr Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park (1993), find a way. This is what Mulder struggles to do, though, again like any one of us, he oftentimes simply loses the plot that he is trying to construct.