Make Her Make Sense
After the nightmare of ‘Monday’ we have marriage!
We all know that the X Files didn’t go out in the order in which they were produced for various reasons. But there is a certain serendipity to the way each season unfolds. What more recurring nightmare is there than married life? Same routine day in and day out. Deviate at your peril. The husband decides to go for a beer and the wife suddenly has a whole shed full of plans that are upset by so minor an expression of free will. The wife goes for her hair done and eight hours later the husband is searching the hospitals and immigration in his worry for her whereabouts.
In ‘Arcadia’, Mulder and Scully get to play out the bliss of the newly married. They may as well have turned up at their new house with a trail of cans from the back of their SUV and ‘Just Married’ scrawled on the back window.
Though they know not its name, they do at least know that they are walking into a version of Hell. ‘The Falls at Arcadia’?
One assumes the FBI don’t send its agents undercover on a whim and, after all, the Klines have gone missing. So, Mulder and Scully know that they are not really going to Arcadia, the Greek version of the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. Adam and Eve lost the garden after their ‘fall’ from God’s graces. If you’re Mulder, who has a natural penchant for ‘extreme possibilities’, and you’re sent to a place called ‘The Falls at Arcadia’, your whiskers must be twitching.
In this paradise, the monster is garbage.
Most of what takes place in any routine is garbage. ‘Monday’ showed us the nightmare of mundane life, the same shit lived over and over again, As much as they can pretend normal life, Scully and Mulder will never experience it. They are fated to live lives of excitement and derring-do. Mulder cannot help himself, he must thrust the pink flamingo into his lawn and play b-ball at night – despite Duchovny’s peon to baseball in ‘The Unnatural’, Mulder always turns to basketball to relieve his stress. Any sport, though, is a game governed by rules, so what are we to make of Mulder’s dependency on such a structured, rule-bound regimen after a day of breaking every rule in the CC&Rs?
Not, for a moment, neglecting that it is Mulder who takes the undercover role of married couple as an opportunity to invite Scully into bed. While typical male behavior, it seems contrary to the character of one who lives beyond the rules of normal life.
What we have depicted here is the dichotomy that lies in the male heart. Like Wayne Weinsider in ‘Terms of Endearment’, however deviant from the norm a male may be, he longs for some idea of normalcy. It is merely a quirk of history and genetics that the norm is set by the female and is a goal the male never quite knows how to achieve. It is the puzzle that probably fated the male to dominance over the female – for how else could he hope to make her make sense?
We all know that the X Files didn’t go out in the order in which they were produced for various reasons. But there is a certain serendipity to the way each season unfolds. What more recurring nightmare is there than married life? Same routine day in and day out. Deviate at your peril. The husband decides to go for a beer and the wife suddenly has a whole shed full of plans that are upset by so minor an expression of free will. The wife goes for her hair done and eight hours later the husband is searching the hospitals and immigration in his worry for her whereabouts.
In ‘Arcadia’, Mulder and Scully get to play out the bliss of the newly married. They may as well have turned up at their new house with a trail of cans from the back of their SUV and ‘Just Married’ scrawled on the back window.
Though they know not its name, they do at least know that they are walking into a version of Hell. ‘The Falls at Arcadia’?
One assumes the FBI don’t send its agents undercover on a whim and, after all, the Klines have gone missing. So, Mulder and Scully know that they are not really going to Arcadia, the Greek version of the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. Adam and Eve lost the garden after their ‘fall’ from God’s graces. If you’re Mulder, who has a natural penchant for ‘extreme possibilities’, and you’re sent to a place called ‘The Falls at Arcadia’, your whiskers must be twitching.
In this paradise, the monster is garbage.
Most of what takes place in any routine is garbage. ‘Monday’ showed us the nightmare of mundane life, the same shit lived over and over again, As much as they can pretend normal life, Scully and Mulder will never experience it. They are fated to live lives of excitement and derring-do. Mulder cannot help himself, he must thrust the pink flamingo into his lawn and play b-ball at night – despite Duchovny’s peon to baseball in ‘The Unnatural’, Mulder always turns to basketball to relieve his stress. Any sport, though, is a game governed by rules, so what are we to make of Mulder’s dependency on such a structured, rule-bound regimen after a day of breaking every rule in the CC&Rs?
Not, for a moment, neglecting that it is Mulder who takes the undercover role of married couple as an opportunity to invite Scully into bed. While typical male behavior, it seems contrary to the character of one who lives beyond the rules of normal life.
What we have depicted here is the dichotomy that lies in the male heart. Like Wayne Weinsider in ‘Terms of Endearment’, however deviant from the norm a male may be, he longs for some idea of normalcy. It is merely a quirk of history and genetics that the norm is set by the female and is a goal the male never quite knows how to achieve. It is the puzzle that probably fated the male to dominance over the female – for how else could he hope to make her make sense?
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