I agree that there is nothing wrong with Scully showing emotions. That's
part of what makes the show attractive (as does the sexual tension
between Scully and Mulder). I even think that if Mulder and Scully did
not care that much about what they were doing (to the point of life and
death) we wouldn't either. It would be something like Psi-Factor, which
can be curious, but no one would put it on a T-shirt (at least I
would not).
What is interesting is that when you say that Scully is more "scientific",
it is often understood "opposite to emotional". What I meant was the fact
that women (Scully in this case) are always portrayed as -- well --
dogmatic. Be it totally rational dogma, like science, or purely
faith-based, like religion (which is also emotional, so in that matter
Scully is pretty balanced). Either one extreme, or the other, or both,
but never something in between. It seem never occur to the TV people that
a woman can be simply curious about strange and irrational things, no
matter where they might turn out to be coming from: aliens, government,
international conspiracy, Satan, or "unknown forces of nature". Whatever the
heck they are, it does not make them any less exciting. As it is for
Mulder, kind of.
I truly believe that his quest for a lost sister was in a way just an
excuse to get into all this interesting stuff. Otherwise, he would go and
kill himself when he finally found her and she refused to have anything
to do with him. Not when someone told him the aliens were fake.
I would really like to see a female character, who is not simply either
scientific or emotional. (By the way, the tradition of "more matirialistic
nature of women" is just as old as the one that makes them "more emotional".
Think of all the women characters who "do not understand" the spiritual
quest of their artistic/poetic husband/boyfriend, bugging him to "grow up and
get a real job"). It would be nice to see a woman who is
open-minded and adventurous, and explores the world without clinging to
ready-made explanations of science or church. Someone who comes up with her
own theories and proves them.
Marina
"Femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society
happens to be selling at the time."
Naomi Wolf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:30 PDT