Despertar

you can't always go back

Yesterday before work, I stopped at the liquor store and bought a TV Guide magazine boasting "Secrets from the new X-Files movie!" Of which there were none, of course. Instead, there was an article about how everyone involved with the project is being so tight-lipped about it, the author couldn't actually wheedle any secrets out of anyone.

Anyway, that article gave me an almost pathetically emotional walk to the train station, my nose buried in the magazine, gasping and giggling and exclaiming to myself over little trademark words and images on the pages. One of the screenwriters says the most surreal, most poignant moment for him, once the project got rolling, was the day they did their first readthrough, in Chris Carter's living room. In walked Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in full makeup and with their hair appropriately cut and colored, and for this screenwriter, who hadn't seen them that way since the final taping six years ago, it was like the resurrection of two lost loved ones.

Which is how I know characters are all but real people, just from that quote and from the way I felt, seeing them posed together on the cover the way they always were in the mid-nineties. When the show was in its heyday, when it was the center of my obsessive-compulsive little world, Mulder and Scully were as familiar to me, as three-dimensional, as my own parents. Their joys and tragedies were more real to me than my own. I noticed every adjustment, however slight, to Scully's exact shade of Titian red.

It both soothed and frustrated me that their entire selves and relationship were encapsulated in nine compact years. In a way, I was glad when it was over, simply because the strain of living three lives was getting exhausting. (Also because, let's be honest, the ninth season sucked.) So my feelings about the upcoming movie, which I'm going to see regardless, probably four times, are bittersweet, at best.

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It's like the way I feel sometimes when I spend the night at my parents' house. Everything there seems so small, suddenly. So close together. The same neighbors who used to discipline us from their porches, cutting such a strong, authoritative image, are all gray and spend the bulk of their time roaming their gardens, hunched over with watering cans.

I mean, you can go back, because I do. It just isn't the same.