my little 10 year old brother asked if we could watch the x files…. the first episode he asks if they fall in love …. oh buddy…… my sweet baby…… my poor little baby boy….
“Okay, so we’ll have them send down another desk and there won’t be any room to move around her but we can put them really close together face to face, maybe we can play some Battleship.”
‘Never Again’, like all the best X-Files episodes, is both Scully-centric and intensely thoughtful. It begins with Scully wandering away from Mulder’s interrogation of a witness to a Vietnam War memorial, where she finds a faded rose petal. Life, we’re reminded, is brief. Scully is now in her 30s, and her dreams of a husband, child and conventional life seem to be fading with each passing year caught up in Mulder’s grand scheme of weirdness. As she points out, despite being a high-powered FBI agent she doesn’t even have her own desk.
So when Mulder is forced to take a holiday, Scully uses the time alone to go in search of the truth. But this time, she’s searching for the truth about herself. And she starts by getting a tattoo.
“Tattoo hurt at all?”
“It feels weird. I can’t see it, but I feel different.”
I have five tattoos. I got one every two years between the ages of 16 and 24. I meant to carry that on for the rest of my life, but when I turned 26 I realised I wasn’t ready for another. So I put it off, and I put it off, and I put it off. Now I’m 29 – almost 30 – and I don’t know if or when I’ll ever get another tattoo. I have other ways now of expressing myself, of reminding myself, of marking the stages of my life.
Each tattoo marks my need at a particular age. Wings on my back at 18, in the long and messy summer between school and university, to show that I was going to escape from the rain-damp streets of Glasgow. Four tiny parallel lines on my ribs at 20, for the partner and two children I wanted. A semicolon on my toe at 22, to show that although I had graduated university it was just a break in my learning, not an end. A burning heart on my left wrist and a book on my right wrist at 24, when I was a waitress and struggling writer, to remind me that if my daily worries weren’t about love or literature then they weren’t worth the worry.
Most of these reminders remain just that: good-luck totems for unneeded dreams. I don’t need wings, because I no longer feel the need to escape this city. I don’t need the book or burning heart, because my personal and professional lives now focus entirely on books and love.
But I don’t regret my ink. I don’t want to forget or deny the person I used to be. The thing about having a tattooed body is that you can never forget who you were.
“I feel like I’ve lost sight of myself, Mulder.”
The Dana Scully we see in 'Never Again’ both is and isn’t the Scully we know. Often she’s portrayed as an idealised mother/lover figure, the perfectly intellectual woman whose brain is as beautiful as her body – the former of which she uses a lot more than the latter. Here, she’s impulsive and knowingly reckless. She’s still smart, and she’s still sexy, but she’s more. She’s human.
This Scully gets drunk and hooks up with a stranger even though she knows he’s trouble. He tries to kill her because his tattoo, voiced by Jodie Foster, is terribly jealous (this is the X-Files, remember). But then it’s over, and the next day Scully wakes up and goes on with her life. She doesn’t need to deny the drunk-hookup part of herself, so she carries it with her: not just in her memory, but on her skin.
Tattoos remind us of who we were. But who you were then is not necessarily the same as who you are now.
We all change, every single day, and when we look back at ourselves two or five or ten years ago, we’re strangers. Some people can manage that: can carry the noisy multitudes of their past selves inside the fragile shell of their current identities. But some can’t, or won’t.
If you’re the type to burn old journals, throw away love letters from exes, to deny the you of yesterday – then don’t get a tattoo. It’s a journal on your skin, and you’ll never really burn it.
“All this, because I didn’t get you a desk?”
“Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.”
“Yes, but it's…”
'Never Again’ begins with Scully feeling unsteady with her place in life, wanting the grounding force of a desk, something that’s hers alone. By the end, she still doesn’t have a desk, and she still isn’t steady – but she’s a step closer. Unusually for the X-Files, the dialogue doesn’t end, it just tails off. The conversation remains unfinished: a partial, grasping reach towards meaning that never quite lands.
A tattooed body, too, remains always unfinished. However many mementoes and reminders we ink onto our skin, there will always be more. Tomorrow we will change again. The years will pass and those past versions will become strangers. Why did we make those choices? Why did we do/say/leave/buy/eat/fuck what we did? We’d never decide it that way now. We’d never do those things now. But we did it then, and if we were back there, we’d do it again. The future you is just as much of a stranger as the past you.
It’s up to us whether we deny those complex, mysterious previous selves – or carry them with us, in our minds and on our bodies.
When I was 17, I was obsessed with my best friend. I loved her open-heartedly and possessively, the way only a 17 year-old can love.
It is a feeling familiar to any teenage girl who has been in platonic love with another teenage girl. Together you create a tiny, obsessive world: in-jokes, coded words, frantically loving bands and films and books because they’re meant for you, they’re speaking to you – and not just you, singular, because there is no you, singular any more; there is only Us, Me and You, the pair of us so bright and vivid and glitteringly perfect that everyone else in the world feels like a grey shadow miming inanities.
My love for her was glorious – and then it wasn’t. She helped me see that you can’t obsessively love someone without obsessively hating them too.
“We are but visitors, hurtling through time and space at 66,000 miles an hour. Tethered to a burning sphere by an invisible force in an unfathomable universe. This most of us take for granted, while refusing to believe these forces have any more effect on us than a butterfly beating its wings halfway around the world. Or that two girls, born on the same day, at the same time and the same place, might not find themselves the unfortunate focus of similar unseen forces. Converging like the planets themselves, into burning pinpoints of cosmic energy, whose absolute gravity would threaten to swallow and consume everything in its path.”
In ‘Syzygy’, Scully and Mulder are called to the town of Comity to investigate the mysterious deaths of high-school boys, for which the townspeople blame a satanic cult. The agents soon notice that all the murderous happenings seem to involve two teenage girls, Margi and Terri. The deaths, clearly, are grabbing everyone’s attention – but look beneath the surface and everyone in the town is acting a little crazy. Mulder and Scully are caricatures of themselves: Mulder flirtatious and coldly sarcastic, getting tipsy on vodka in his hotel room; Scully irritable and jealous, stalking the corridors and sucking on a cigarette.
As the town astrologer points out, it’s all about the planets. It’s horoscopes and astral alignments and doomed birthdates, but at the heart of it is this: only the bright burn of teenage girls’ passion is intense enough to make a town implode.
“Hate her, wouldn’t want to date her.”
My best friend was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I wanted to be her, and I wanted to have her. I wanted to fold her up tiny and keep her in my pocket forever.
She was small-boned and fine-haired with a row of silver rings up the ridge of her right ear. She ate only toasted white pitta bread with butter. She fell asleep every night to Silverchair’s Frogstomp. She spoke Portuguese after three years in Brazil with her missionary stepfather, who hit her mother and walked with a stick. Although I spent entire weekends in her house, I don’t remember ever meeting her mother; I don’t know what she did for a living or why she spent so much time out of the house or who cooked my best friend’s meals – if, indeed, anyone did. Considering the depths of my obsession, I knew very little about her. I clung to the small details of her as if they meant something.
She didn’t love me back, but it almost seemed like she did. We couldn’t be together but we couldn’t be apart, so we worked through a cycle of declarations and stay-close rejections that left me alternately ecstatic and despairing. Once she told me she was going on holiday for a week, and I genuinely could not imagine an entire seven days away from her. How would I fill the hours? What was the point of waking up? How would I breathe without her?
Even at the time, I would have been hard-pressed to explain just what it was I liked about her. She was self-absorbed, manipulative and dull. But still I loved her.
And honestly, I hated her. She went out with the guy I liked, even though she knew I liked him – possibly only because I liked him. She was prettier than me and thinner than me, and she made sure I knew it. She didn’t want me to have anything that she couldn’t have, or do anything that didn’t focus on her. We would happily have torn one another’s eyes out, and then built walls around the two of us to keep everyone else out.
We were awful to one another because we both allowed it. Together we obsessed a world into creation, our days stitched together with jealousy and need.
Oh, how I loved her. Oh, how I hated her.
“I’m driving. Why do you always have to drive? Because you’re the guy? Because you’re the big, macho man?”
“No. I was just never sure your little feet could reach the pedals.”
Margi and Terri aren’t the only ones in 'Syzygy’ with a claustrophobic friendship. Mulder and Scully’s world is constantly spinning with conspiracies and monsters and black oil seeping from people’s eyes – but the only constant, the still point in a hectic world, is their relationship.
As a fan, I love the episodes where the agents act out of character: Season 4’s 'Never Again’, where Scully has a one night stand with a murderous tattooed man; Season 5’s 'Bad Blood’, where the story is told from each agents’ perspective, Mulder’s version showing Scully gooey-eyed and stroppy, Scully’s version showing Mulder gullible and demanding; Season 6’s 'Arcadia’, where Mulder and Scully go undercover as suburban married couple Rob and Laura Petrie, complete with conjugal bickering and unfortunate nightwear. And then there’s 'Syzygy’, in which the agents bicker and bite and make snippy comments about one another’s belief in the paranormal.
Do Mulder and Scully hate each other as much as they love one another? It makes sense. Scully should hate Mulder: before she met him, her career was blossoming; now she’s so firmly entrenched in that basement office that she can never leave. And Mulder should hate Scully: without her, he would be free to run straight into the danger where the truth lies; with her, he has a reason to hold himself back.
We tell ourselves that Mulder and Scully’s snipping and sniping is caused by the influence of the cosmos, and not the build-up of long-suppressed grudges. But it’s not as simple as that. The episodes that exaggerate their characters work because we know that there’s a spark of truth.
It’s only the third season, but already the agents’ world has shrunk to just the pair of them. Who else could ever understand all the things they’ve seen? What would be the point of either of them carrying on the X-Files alone? How could they breathe without one another?
“Happy birthday, bitch!”
Slowly but surely, the walls of our world started to fall. She got a boyfriend – a scrawny, adorable, Kurt Cobain-esque scrap of a boy. I got a girlfriend – a pussycat-sweet girl who was as obsessed with me as I was with my best friend. We both left school. I heard she got pregnant and took out all her piercings and got a job for an insurance company.
That should be the end of the story, but there’s a postscript. Years later, I bumped into her at a rock show. I smiled awkwardly and said hi, and she punched me in the jaw. I still don’t know why. It was the first and (so far) last time anyone has ever hit me.
I loved her, and I hated her, and all of it faded to nothing. Finally, at that rock show, she love-hated me enough to want to hurt me. But by then, I didn’t feel anything for her at all.
