The Most Unsuitable Suitor
Scully’s interest in Phillip Padgett should be professional only. That he is able to provide so much detail of Scully’s personal life is worrying and should at least arouse suspicions of his being a stalker. If for nothing else, she should arrest him for being such a creep!
So, why, instead, does she become fascinated by him? Certainly, as Padgett himself says, curious, but not quite so fascinated that she’d go sit with him on his bed.
Scully, as a woman, is a problem character. She is, to all intents and purposes the far more interesting of the two leads – and not just because Gillian Anderson is by far the better actor.
Mulder has been involved with the X Files and all things alien for the best part of his adult life. The only real change he undergoes is the temporary loss of faith in Season 5. Otherwise, he is as steady as a rock and right in 98.9% of cases, as he rather frustratingly reminds Scully before heading off on a ‘Field Trip’. Scully is the character who undergoes the greatest change throughout the series, because she is the one who must forever alter or adapt her world-view to allow for extreme possibilities. This journey of discovery is a far more interesting a character arc than the rather static arc of Mulder.
First and foremost, Scully is a human being with the same freedom to make her own choices as anyone else. Except she is also a female character created and written largely by men in a TV series in which she is played by an actor who, initially, was paid considerably less than her male counterpart for no reason other than her femaleness. Scully as a woman is a problem.
Let’s place her status as a character in a TV show to one side for a moment and treat her as a human being.
Human beings, being biological creatures, generally feel some imperative pressure to reproduce. The desire for offspring is clearly different for women than it is for men. Whatever the reason a man may want sons and daughters it cannot be qualitatively the same as a woman’s for she must go through nine months of carrying the child and the pain of giving birth. However biological the urge, the desire to have a child requires a far greater level of bravery from a woman than it does from a man.
Scully, it seems, has the entirely understandable need to have a child. It is her tragedy that this option has been denied her by callous men who treat women as play things for their own designs – much like the writers of the X Files, one might say. In giving herself to the X Files, Scully, without knowing it at the time, of course, sacrifices her ability to be a mother – until the series just went haywire and gave her one anyway, that is!
This outcome leaves Scully always seeking that which she knows she can never obtain. Mulder is limited in his quest by wanting only that evidence which he can finally hold in his hand. Knowing full well that she may never hold what she desires in her hand, Scully is still able to continue forward, seeking a Holy Grail that may remain forever beyond her grasp.
The male exploitation of Scully’s femaleness gives her a way to understand Mulder’s quest on a level far deeper than he will ever realise.
Unfortunately, the writers of the show never seem to make the most of Scully as a woman. Even the dimmest male recognizes that a woman has physical and emotional needs, yet Scully is never allowed free expression of her sexuality – unlike Mulder – the lucky bugger!
So, we get ‘Never Again’ where she somehow is allowed to get all smoochy with Edward Jerse only to wake up chastely sleeping on the sofa, and ‘Milagro’, in which a male character gets to fantasise about doing the ‘naked pretzel’ with Scully while she gets to sit sipping coffee on the foot of his bed – such a suggestive activity that it is necessary that Mulder break down the door and rush to her rescue just in the nick of time.
No wonder that Scully finds herself succumbing to a totally irrational attraction to a person who, under normal circumstances, she’d never give the time of day. The amount of male oppression that is exerted to keep her chaste is enough to push any female into the arms of the most unsuitable suitor.
So, why, instead, does she become fascinated by him? Certainly, as Padgett himself says, curious, but not quite so fascinated that she’d go sit with him on his bed.
Scully, as a woman, is a problem character. She is, to all intents and purposes the far more interesting of the two leads – and not just because Gillian Anderson is by far the better actor.
Mulder has been involved with the X Files and all things alien for the best part of his adult life. The only real change he undergoes is the temporary loss of faith in Season 5. Otherwise, he is as steady as a rock and right in 98.9% of cases, as he rather frustratingly reminds Scully before heading off on a ‘Field Trip’. Scully is the character who undergoes the greatest change throughout the series, because she is the one who must forever alter or adapt her world-view to allow for extreme possibilities. This journey of discovery is a far more interesting a character arc than the rather static arc of Mulder.
First and foremost, Scully is a human being with the same freedom to make her own choices as anyone else. Except she is also a female character created and written largely by men in a TV series in which she is played by an actor who, initially, was paid considerably less than her male counterpart for no reason other than her femaleness. Scully as a woman is a problem.
Let’s place her status as a character in a TV show to one side for a moment and treat her as a human being.
Human beings, being biological creatures, generally feel some imperative pressure to reproduce. The desire for offspring is clearly different for women than it is for men. Whatever the reason a man may want sons and daughters it cannot be qualitatively the same as a woman’s for she must go through nine months of carrying the child and the pain of giving birth. However biological the urge, the desire to have a child requires a far greater level of bravery from a woman than it does from a man.
Scully, it seems, has the entirely understandable need to have a child. It is her tragedy that this option has been denied her by callous men who treat women as play things for their own designs – much like the writers of the X Files, one might say. In giving herself to the X Files, Scully, without knowing it at the time, of course, sacrifices her ability to be a mother – until the series just went haywire and gave her one anyway, that is!
This outcome leaves Scully always seeking that which she knows she can never obtain. Mulder is limited in his quest by wanting only that evidence which he can finally hold in his hand. Knowing full well that she may never hold what she desires in her hand, Scully is still able to continue forward, seeking a Holy Grail that may remain forever beyond her grasp.
The male exploitation of Scully’s femaleness gives her a way to understand Mulder’s quest on a level far deeper than he will ever realise.
Unfortunately, the writers of the show never seem to make the most of Scully as a woman. Even the dimmest male recognizes that a woman has physical and emotional needs, yet Scully is never allowed free expression of her sexuality – unlike Mulder – the lucky bugger!
So, we get ‘Never Again’ where she somehow is allowed to get all smoochy with Edward Jerse only to wake up chastely sleeping on the sofa, and ‘Milagro’, in which a male character gets to fantasise about doing the ‘naked pretzel’ with Scully while she gets to sit sipping coffee on the foot of his bed – such a suggestive activity that it is necessary that Mulder break down the door and rush to her rescue just in the nick of time.
No wonder that Scully finds herself succumbing to a totally irrational attraction to a person who, under normal circumstances, she’d never give the time of day. The amount of male oppression that is exerted to keep her chaste is enough to push any female into the arms of the most unsuitable suitor.
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