Why we love Dana Scully
This, from Rebecca Traister in Salon, is just the latest in a series of articles reminding us why what it was about the wonderful Dana Scully that made us all get in touch with our sceptical side. And with the X-Files movie upcoming, we’re about to get her back, even if it’s just for a brief couple of hours:
Scully have I loved
Duchovny’s Fox Mulder was, after all, the centerpiece of the narrative: the brilliant, wounded, lonely man, who spends his life trying to sort through the trauma of his sister’s disappearance and prove that he isn’t crazy for believing in aliens, ghosts and El Chupacabra (the Mexican goat sucker). And it didn’t hurt that Duchovny was basically a walking pheromone, all languid eyes and long-necked eroticism.
Sure, Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend.
But the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for was Scully. Patient, long-suffering, geeky forensic pathologist Scully, so short and tucked and tailored. Given such a tough role – as the woman brought in by the FBI to be the minder and schoolmarm, as Mulder correctly says in the first episode, to spy on him – Scully was supposed to be able take away his toys and crush his dreams of ghouls and goblins.
Who wants to be the skeptic, the killjoy, the buzzkill? Gillian Anderson, plucked from obscurity in her early 20s to play Scully, should have initially petitioned for a special Emmy category that rewards excellence in the field of lip biting, sideways casting of the eyes and exasperated bowing of the head.
But as the show matured, it was Scully – the cerebral head of the X-Files, torn between her Catholic faith, her scientific impulse to explain away the inexplicable and her affection for her partner – who was destined to become the (still cerebral) heart of the show. Read full story here…
(Apologies: you might have to go through Salon’s Site Pass routine to get to this – but it’s there in the end, just keep clicking…)