Written on the Body: Real Life and the Character of Dana Scully

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Title:	Written on the Body: Real Life and the Character of Dana Scully
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	1998
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	Written on the Body - Fialka, Archived version
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Written on the Body: Real Life and the Character of Dana Scully is by Fialka.

It was part of a series. The author comments that: "Many of these essays first appeared as discussions on OBSSE, Scullyfic and/or ATXA."

The essay was first posted to The Annotated X-Files Study Guide and is at Fialka's Candybox.

Later, it was reposted:

Sadly, when the old NBCI server went the way of so many really cool, free things on the net, I never could find another free site with enough space to house the whole Study Guide, and it didn't get enough traffic to warrant paying for 250mb on a server somewhere. Not to mention, I no longer have as much time on my hands as I did back then, so like the UFOs...well, it is another UFO. Some of it still appears to be here, if you can wade your way through all the advertising on FortuneCity. I sure won't be insulted if you don't. These essays are from the original site, and appear here unchanged. Unlinked titles got abducted by aliens somewhere along the way. If you find them wandering dazed by the side of the road, could you be so kind as to send them home?

Excerpts

When discussing the mythology of the X-Files, the first credit must undoubtedly go to Piper Maru Anderson, currently aged four. Chris Carter himself has admitted (Inside the X-Files) that it was Piper's unplanned appearance well into the second season, that inspired 1013 to come up with the abduction storyline, not only allowing Gillian Anderson time to have her baby, but completely changing the direction of the show. Anderson's body - and the need to avoid showing it - prompted an overall arc whereby the very stage upon which the mythology would be played would be the body of Dana Scully. That reproductive function, genetics, and the right to create life were on the minds of the writers seems patently obvious. According to producer Frank Spotnitz, 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' was the first true Conspiracy episode, i.e. a conspiracy fabricated within the minds of 1013 and not borrowed from popular American mythology. Created to begin setting up for Piper's real life appearance (and her mother's necessary disappearance), EF contains many of the elements we would later recognise as symptomatic of the mythology: viruses, genetic experiments on human guinea pigs, and reproductive manipulation. In a grotesque parody of real life, EF ends with a noticeably pregnant Anderson as Dr. Scully, holding up a live alien fetus with a look of absolute horror on her face. Though Anderson's pregnancy needed to be hidden, it did not escape the hands of the writers when it came to explaining her brief absence from the show. In a dream/vision sequence (used first in Ascension, but seen again later), Scully is shown lying on a table, her belly inflated to grotesque proportions. In reality of course it was the eight and half months pregnant Anderson's real body (and by extension young Piper's first cameo role). The implication is that at least one of 'The Tests' performed on Scully during her abduction consisted of forced impregnation - an implication which has since been dropped.

How these various immaculate conceptions actually come about is still an unanswered question. We have seen clones of varying ages, from eight to elderly. One wonders if the clones are 'born' at some point and then age naturally or if they are simply grown until they are old enough to be useful. The appearance of the Kurt Juniors lying in tanks (Memento Mori) would lead one to believe the latter, yet in Emily we see the Conspiracy is using the post-menopausal wombs of hormonally-hyped grandmothers to incubate the fetal Scullys. And what did happen to Scully in that forgotten blow-up stomach sequence? We hear of a process inducing super-ovulation, so why not a process of super-gestation? Since Emily was 'born' just after her abduction, why is the idea that Scully herself conceived Emily (however artificially) never floated? Whatever the process, the issue seems to be control; like their counterparts in the Consortium, the men of 1013 seek to control first the material, then the created being. No creature created by the Consortium's methods seems to have any but the most limited autonomy, nor does Dana Scully (witness what happens to her every time she tries to exercise her sexuality). She is fated ever to be the Consortium's version of remote control over Mulder, while the questions asked and answered about her purpose in the Project are carefully dictated by 1013. All of this speaks to some kind of archetypal fear of reproduction and the birth process on the part of the men who create the X-Files, those I collectively refer to as 1013. What is a natural and necessary universal event has here been corrupted to a torturous degree, and it all seems to lead back to Anderson and her unplanned, uncontrollable, real life pregnancy.

And so we come to the truth written within. With the cancer arc Scully's own body finally became her murder weapon. Cancer, the ultimate turning of our selves upon ourselves, is - in this age - a very real and present fear. That the cancer can be traced back to the process by which her ova were removed only further reinforces the idea that the reproductive organs are a treacherous place. I suppose one should be grateful that the far more logical choice of ovarian cancer was rejected in favour of attacking Scully's most treasured organ: her brain. One might also say that in giving us the picture of Scully's body being invaded (the word she uses over and over to describe her cancer in Gethsemane and the Reduxes), 1013 did not want us to picture the site of that invasion to be her sexual organs. Perhaps they - correctly - felt it to be too much of an analogy to rape. However, when defining the kind of damage wrought upon Mulder and Scully in their quest for the truth, the inescapable reality becomes this: Mulder's Truth is Out There, Scully's is In Here. Sadly, while the men of 1013 did suceed in creating a genderbending female character, their own societal conditioning has proved inescapable. Men act, women are acted upon. The woman's body has become the page upon which the mytharc in its many forms is written. As control of human reproduction has been an underlying theme of the Mythology since the 'mythology' itself began, what then does the X-Files unwittingly tell us about male fear of this very female process? Clearly their Consortium equates control of reproduction with control of humanity. Perhaps in the most Reverse!Freudian way, Carter and his Boy's Club are suffering from womb envy.