Category: Groovy

I reasoned that, if Gillian Anderson was twenty-five when she started playing Dana Scully, then twenty-five would be when I’d uncover my inner Scully-ness: resilience, intelligence, grace under fire, and the ability to look sexy in a trench coat bit enough for Christo to wrap a coast with. I didn’t aspire to become, at twenty-five, a doctor/FBI agent/Duchovny babe, but Gillian Anderson wasn’t any of those things either: she just knew how to emulate the qualities that made such a role possible. If she could do it, then I could do it. This was what twenty-five started to mean to me.

(I should note here that, after doing some research today, I realized that Gillian Anderson actually filmed the pilot episode of “The X-Files” when she was twenty-four-and-a-half, but we will just ignore that and move on.)

And, for better or for worse, I have settled on Scully as my role model for this year. If I could do better, I don’t really see how. Scully is a pragmatist, and not just because she has to keep Spooky Mulder from going off half-cocked. She focuses on what she knows to be true, and it’s her grunt work that usually ends up saving Mulder’s ass. Even if she doesn’t know what the hell’s going on, she can convince herself she does—except when the time comes for her to open herself up to the impossible, and then she does. She knows how to keep a clear head and make use of the facts, but she also accepts that what’s really going on is often outside her comprehension. She knows that the truth is out there. And she gets to kiss Mulder at the end.