On Wanting to Believe
I just watched an episode of the new season of The X-Files. I skipped to the third episode, the “monster of the week” episode, because I’d heard good things about it.
I really like the familiarity that Mulder and Scully now seem to have with each other. These characters know and understand each other so well. Sure, it strains believability that Scully would still be such a skeptic but who cares; what I do believe in is the connection and the affection between them. Mulder is going through a crisis, wondering if his whole life’s fascination with creatures and the paranormal has been a waste. He’s tossing pencils into the iconic I WANT TO BELIEVE poster. Scully is his friend. She knows that a case that “has a monster in it" might be just what he needs.

I played through Gone Home again recently, when it came out on console. I can’t see that poster now without thinking of Sam’s room, or seeing Sam and Lonnie cuddled on the couch watching The X-Files together on a stormy night.

I love that the current season uses the same intro sequence, right down to the cheap, grainy VHS letters at the end, THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE as storm clouds roll over the landscape. It still stirs something in me, that idea. It ties back into everything for me, all the road narratives, the Kentucky Route Zeros, the small town motels and lonely gas stations I love so much. I used to think that maybe the truth was some concrete thing that you look for and then you find and then once you’ve found it you can be done looking for it and get on with the rest of your life. Now I think that feeling it, living it, looking for it, is part of how to live and be a real person. Me sitting here writing this silly blog post is some attempt to understand some kind of truth. This is it right now.
As I’ve talked about before, Gone Home is not a simple game for me. It suggests experiences I wish I’d had, experiences I feel like I should have had, but didn’t get to have, and so my relationship to it is somewhat painful, though painful in a way that I think is cathartic and healing and that leaves me hopeful.
I doubt that Sam and Lonnie are still together, wherever they are, but I imagine them, living their separate lives, watching this new episode of The X-Files and remembering each other, remembering their first love, remembering kissing in Sam’s room with the I Want To Believe poster on the wall. In this episode, of course, Mulder’s crisis is resolved, his investment in the unexplained is validated. At one point, he says out loud, “I want to believe.”
And so do I, still.
Notes
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