DEFINING MULDER
I don't buy into the self-loathing that some people seem to see in Mulder. Self-hate is emphatically destructive, and leads toward self-destruction. You would be more likely, I think, to find a genuine self-hater as an alcoholic or a drug addict than a person doing what Mulder does--as someone with no ambitions rather than as a man with grand (even if not realistic-seeming) ambitions. The goal of finding the truth or finding a sister or bringing to light a conspiracy hidden from the American people is not the ambition of a true self-hater. Yes, Mulder may find himself inadequate to his own ideals (unable to save his sister from abduction, unable to protect Scully from being drawn into the danger of his quest), but this is a whole different degree of things. I think self-hate would blind you to your own positive aspects, but Mulder does have positive traits--even ones that have been honed by his negative experiences, such as his compassion for victims--and he uses them in his work: an eagerness to engage the new and unexplained, compassion, tenacity, an analytical ability unfettered by conventional limitations, tenacity, tenacity... So  many strengths.

Even DD characterizes Mulder as full of guilt, and yet Mulder has turned the guilt into a springboard rather than using it to hit himself over the head. Let's face it: Mulder hasn't had an average life. He's been subjected to a lot of trauma of one sort or another--both as a child when Samantha was taken and since he and Scully have been working together--and this inevitably imprints you. As Sting so aptly observed in a line of a song, "A lesson once learned is so hard to forget." The question is, what do you do once you are imprinted? 

One common response is to try to forget what happened and get on with some kind of societally acceptable life (though some might interpret this as avoidance.) Another common option is to blame your tragedy on someone or something else (transfer the guilt). In either case, you're off the hook, and in consequence you don't have to do anything about it. But Mulder is a doer. He can't just sit around and be content to soak in his sorrows. You may call it 'obsessive' or 'driven', but it's also heroic. It's the only way of changing the situation, of turning things around for the better. Would Mulder be a character worthy of this story if he had simply accepted the fact of his sister's disappearance and gone on to work his way up the ranks of the FBI so he could afford a comfortable house and a Porsche and ski vacations and a cushy retirement? Not likely.

Yes, Mulder is motivated by guilt, though I think guilt is distinctly in the doghouse in this day and age. It's not socially acceptable to feel guilty because guilt has such distressing, disquieting personal effects on you. So you're supposed to get rid of it, like shedding unsightly pounds, so nobody will have to look at it. But this shedding does not often include actual resolution; a lot of times it's more like sweeping dirt under the rug.

I don't believe guilt is necessarily a bad thing. If it destroys you and others, obviously that's not acceptable, but to take it and twist it into a propeller rather than sit on it and drown is not something I'd fault someone for. And Mulder is running with it. He's searching for resolution. But to say he's saddled himself with this guilt would be like telling a war veteran that he's chosen to be traumatized by his experiences. And what is guilt in the end analysis? It's the human mind's attempt to make sense of the unexplainable: the cat was run over because you weren't quick enough to hit the brakes, or you were distracted when you should have been paying attention, or if only you'd decided to stop by the video store on the way home, you wouldn't have been on this street when the cat ran across. (Of course, there are plenty of other factors that might be involved in this situation, but the one your mind finds most convenient is that you were the pivot point.) Seeing the blame as yours quiets the mind's natural --and incredibly insistent--need to have an explanation for what has happened, to have it all make sense. (It's not that your mind necessarily finds you to have weak character; it just wants things to make sense, and you're the most convenient explanation for what has happened. Guilt is, in other words, a confusion-killing drug naturally produced by the human mind, although one not without side effects.) 

IS HE DRAGGING SCULLY DOWN ALONG WITH HIM?
I don't think down is the direction they're going. It may be a very long, linear thing, but there have been triumphs along the way. They have found out something about Samantha, about the clones and the colonists and the syndicate and what the general plan is. The X-files have been closed, but this has happened in the past and it turned out to be temporary. They have been taken off the X-files, but do you think this is going to stop Mulder? (Um, how well do we know this guy?)

Scully has had her reputation as a good FBI soldier and tow-the-line recruit tarnished. Yes, she's with Mulder and the reputation is contagious, but the damage to her reputation this season (where most of the damage has occurred) is due to her own conscious decision to invest herself in the quest, which she has done not because she has been dazzled or hypnotized or brainwashed by her partner, but because she has been made acutely aware of government actions designed to suppress information at her personal expense. She has found something to pursue in Mulder's quest, but for her own reasons. (At the beginning of Season 3, in Paper Clip, Scully tells Mulder, "We are operating so far outside of the law right now, we've given up on the very notion of justice. We've turned ourselves into outsiders. We have lost our access and our protection." Two years later--in Redux--her attitude has changed a great deal: "That would mean that for 4 years we've been nothing more than pawns in a game, that it was a lie from the beginning. Mulder, these men! You give them your faith and you're supposed to trust them with your life.") 

It is true that she is sucked into danger by the mere fact of caring for her partner and trying to protect him. But nobody is holding a gun to her head. If it was really more important to her to protect her reputation/life/career than to continue on with this seemingly reckless and obsessed man, he could have followed her into the hallway in FTF, pleaded his case as he did, and she could have stood there quietly and told him this was something she needed to do for herself, that she couldn't afford to risk her health or life anymore to find this illusive thing he was searching for. But she didn't. She felt for him here, of course--that was blatantly obvious in her eyes and her facial expression. But to say that she only stayed with him because she was a prisoner of her own emotions is to paint her as a very weak character indeed. Scully deserves more credit than this; there's a lot more to her than a heartsick woman following a man she can't bear to see hurt.

Of course, in following Mulder her life is definitely put in jeopardy (though not all this jeopardy is due directly to Mulder. She has joined the FBI knowing the work can be fatal. The danger to her in following men like Donnie Pfaster or Luther Boggs or Jerry Schnauz has nothing to do with Mulder's quest. She joined the Bureau "to make a difference", and she has consciously decided to take this step even though there is a risk to her life in doing so.) Of course, finding out that you've been given a fatal disease to make your partner believe a hoax is not the kind of risk she agreed to. Is it fair? No. But here we return to a place I've mentioned above: once you are imprinted, what are you going to do about it?

If we're presuming here that everyone is entitled to a pleasant, fulfilling, stress-free life, then we can only feel cheated at the hand Dana Scully has been dealt. But life on this planet comes with no guarantees. Scully has seen this in the sudden death of her father, in her own abduction, in Mulder's torn childhood. And in keeping with her desire to make a difference (shown both in her choosing to study medicine and at the end of FTF--"How many people can we save?"), she makes the hard decision rather than the easy one. She decides to stay and fight rather than retreat into the everyday and have an easier personal existence. If what we're looking for is a nice life for Scully, then it could appear to us that she's been 'sucked into' this quest by her partner--the borderline crazy, the Don Quixote tilting at windmills--and that she's being pulled crazily behind, bouncing and careening like a tin can tied to the back of a newlywed's car. But Scully, like Mulder, is not your everyday person. She is heroic; she has vision. She is not content to sit back in a suburb somewhere with a nice condo and a new dog (poor Queequeg!) and her awards framed in nice plaques on the wall to decorate her life and speak for her choices. Perhaps we see her decision as reckless or not her own because we ourselves would not be willing or able to make the decision she has. But she has made this choice herself. Her words testify to that. 

IS ALL THIS FAIR TO SCULLY?
Are we upset not because Scully is along on this quest, but because she is being dragged along behind Mulder? Is it fair for her to be in this position? Does she deserve more say in the direction of the quest? Where is the justice in all this--a headlong, dangerous pursuit where she seems destined to be continually bruised and jostled, and all to what end?

The answer, though we may not want to hear it, Scully spoke herself at the end of Paper Clip: "You were right, Mulder. There is no justice." The physical/human world as we know it is not a fair place. To quote a common truism: life isn't fair. Those of you who are younger may protest, Mulder-like, "But I refuse to believe that!"  Just let me try to play interpreter here for a minute. Admittedly, 'life isn't fair" is a phrase often used by worn-out people who have succumbed to the blows of life, who want a justification not to struggle anymore. But it is also what you actually find through experience. Nothing you can probe or measure with scientific instruments contains even a scantly measurable quantity of things such as justice or fairness. These are philosophical constructs--ideals--born in the mental realm, but they have no relationship to the purely physical universe. (Notice I did not say they have no place or value, but simply that they are not a component of physical reality.) And the longer you hang around this planet, the more you bump up against this unfairness. It happens, so you may as well be warned. But the important question becomes (again), what are you going to do about it? 

You can curl up into a fetal position and hope it all goes away, or merely try to defend yourself against the blows. You can throw up your hands and say, "This problem is too big. One person is never going to be able to make any noticeable difference. If I stop buying Nikes, the company isn't going to go belly up, and the lives of all those chemically-affected Third World factory workers isn't going to be changed"... which sounds a lot like, "One man alone cannot fight the future," doesn't it? Or you can pick up your sword and shield, make a plan, and charge on out there regardless of the odds. And history, my friends, is made of the names and lives of the few who were reckless enough to disregard the odds and do something regardless of the perceived futility of it.

So we have Mulder on his quest, relentlessly pursuing truth and meaning. He is very conscious of the fact that he is farther out onto that non-standard limb than most people, that the quest is something he must pursue at all costs. He is willing to pursue it at the cost of his life (he has gone after anybody and everybody who even hints that they might be able to lead him to the information he seeks, regardless of the danger involved. He nearly made a deal with CSM in Redux II, though he resists spelling this out to Scully.) But he is also unwilling to treat his partner's life as his own, in terms of risk. Sometimes this takes the form of running off without her in order to spare her the danger. Sometimes his need to pursue a lead is beyond anything that would make sense to her scientific perspective, and he must simply go before reason overwhelms his choice (her voice, in this case, is simply something that covers the music he is straining to hear.) 

But now that Scully has actually bought into this quest, why not a little more equal division of labor/input/direction? As has been stated already, Scully's investment in the quest is for a different reason than Mulder's. She wants to verify what is going on with scientific proof in order to save lives and spare the innocent. But in order to do this, the evidence must be gotten, and the evidence Mulder pursues is not found within context of Scully's investigational methods. (He goes searching for a lost British ship in the Bermuda Triangle, and what reaction does he get from her?) Mulder is, in this case, a torch that burns brightly enough to expose what other lights have not revealed. He is a torch that will not be doused, that burns highly and erratically at times. He is a torch often carried by his partner, and this subjects her to the common danger of carrying a torch, that of being burned if the torch is not held properly, or if the wind should shift suddenly and blow the shooting flames into her face. 

The fact remains that Mulder is the one--not because he is a man, but because of who he is as an individual--who casts the light by which they find the evidence that Scully will be able to legitimize through her science. This evidence is not easily detected; it is certainly not coming to them unsolicited. It must be searched out, and only Mulder has the lack of conventional restrictions (as well as the persistence and need) to find it where it hides. This would seem to put Scully in a secondary position, but on the other hand, the evidence they find will never be legitimized to the world until it is passed through the lens of her scientific analysis. The torch, to continue the analogy, is useless if not held high, or if not protected from the elements. The torch seems to burn brighter than the one who holds it, and we might argue that this is unfair, but it is also merely THE WAY IT IS. Each does his job, and neither will succeed without the other. Brightness of flame is not the only indicator of value here. 

We seem to have arrived at a cultural point in today's society where so many elements of life can be controlled by human intervention, that we feel entitled to guarantees: guarantees of success, a pleasant life, a certain number of years in which to experience all this. Schools have also fostered a belief in unqualified self-esteem, that everyone should be regarded as a winner regardless of effort or achievement. Viewed through the filter of these assumptions, it can appear unfair that Scully is the one in the 'lesser' position. Everyone deserves to be a star, popular psychology intones, but real life is not fabricated from psychological models. It is random. Everyone has a gift--a talent--and each gift is different and unique. Mulder's and Scully's combine to form a powerful tool to pierce the darkness and bring the truth to light.

Mulder is, so to speak, the soldier who has caught sight of the target, so he is the one who must climb out of the trench and race toward it. Scully is left behind to lay down covering fire. Without this fire, her partner may be shot full of holes before he has crossed the open space, but by firing she also gives away her own position and becomes a target herself. (Is this fair? People in the actual circumstances don't often pause to contemplate this one, because doing so instead of acting will likely have fatal consequences; it becomes very much a non-issue.) She could lay low, protect herself, and let Mulder take his chances, but we know she would never do this. Even if ordered to retreat she would venture out into the open to drag back her partner's bleeding body. We know--we have seen--that Mulder would do the same for her. But this is HIS battle, you may protest. Yes, but Scully has voluntarily enlisted. She affirms this enlistment as early as Gethsemane, where her brother Bill confronts her after she has been pushed down the stairs. "We have a responsibility. Not just to ourselves, but to the people in our lives," Bill tells her. (It occurs to me at this point that Bill may have meant more than just a responsibility to be there, to stay alive. He may also have meant a responsibility to be something your family can be proud of.) But Scully comes right back with, "Hey, look, just because I haven't bared my soul to you, or to Father McCue, or to God, it doesn't mean that I'm not responsible to what's important to me." (emphasis mine) 

So here she is, enlisted and under enemy fire. Is it fair? I don't see it as a relevant question. Is she crucial to the success of the mission? Absolutely. Could Mulder succeed without her? No way. He's the advance and she's the gunner; he's the believer and she's the scientist. Both different, both necessary. And the only way their mission will succeed is if each of them continues to do what they do best.

 

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