My neighbor Fox Mulder

5/17/2001

Dear Scully:

Can I begin a letter to you with something so trite as "It's been a while"? Though I do not believe it captures the depths of our experiences together, the things we have witnessed, the lives we have lived, it is nevertheless true. It's been a while. I miss you.

I am well. I discovered that an old house in rural Japan was in my father's portfolio, right on the edge of the rice fields. With nothing else to do, I often spend long hours watching the farmers work the fields, chewing on sunflower seeds, pretending to read Finnegan's Wake. I think, often, of how we live in the middle of time, yet time also lives within us. It strikes me as a paradox, though I am sure you would say otherwise.

The family next door has two little girls, and they claim, semi-regularly, to be in contact with the spirits of the forest. They say these spirits are friendly beings who protect the trees. I have my doubts.

Already, I can hear you saying, "Mulder, children have active imaginations, and anyway, if there are forest spirits who protect the trees, what good would come of disrupting them?" I would make an argument against what you said. I always do. But for the moment, I miss you.

I trust all is well with William. Tomorrow, I go into the forest to meet these spirits.

Love,

Mulder

5/31/2001

Dear Scully:

You have likely heard the story of Henry Morton Stanley's search for Dr. David Livingstone in late 19th century Africa. Stanley was a journalist enlisted by the New York Herald to search for the missionary Livingstone, whose last dispatches from where he lived and worked indicated he was in ill health. We have a firmer grasp of the horrors of colonialism here in 2001 than Stanley and Livingstone bore in 1871, on their historic meeting, and yet "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" outlives both men and will surely outlive you and me, Scully. This, despite the fact that the phrase was likely never uttered! It makes a good tale, I suppose.

So, despite all the counterfactual implications, you can understand my indulgence when I greeted the massive, furry forest spirit with "Totoro, I presume?" (The two girls had told me this enormous being was known as Totoro, which is why I spoke that name.) You must believe me when I say, Scully, that this spirit dwarfed even a tall human man, such as myself, though the trees still loomed over him. He had dark fur all over himself, with a large patch of white fur covering his belly, rather like an owl. His hands and feet had claws like a dog's, but I sensed no animosity in him.

He is quite close to the children, who claim he has taken them on all sorts of adventures. I am told he can run through the trees and briefly levitate. I have also been reliably informed that he is friendly with a large cat that doubles as a form of public transportation.

I use the pronoun "he," though I do not know Totoro's gender. He has a calming, masculine presence, like a wonderful father, but he is frequently accompanied by a smaller blue version of himself and a much smaller white version of himself. I do not know if these smaller spirits are his children or if he is their mother. He may exist outside our human binaries and conceptions of time and space, being, after all, a forest spirit. Perhaps his gender is just "Totoro."

I hope to have more information for you soon. I am told I will get to view Totoro as he coaxes the trees to grow. I hope you are well, and I hope you will bring William to visit us soon. Totoro is exceptionally good with children.

Love,

Fox

6/21/2001

Dear Scully:

"Sumer is icumen in," as our forebears would have it. The weather here is gloriously warm, and the skies are hazy with mist. You would love it here. Consider taking a vacation for once. (I am aware that you are on maternity leave and, thus, not fit to travel. Forgive me my flights of fancy.)

Regarding the topics I was previously discussing with you: I have ridden on the catbus. I am forever changed.

I know that William does not yet understand English, but please tell him of the catbus. It is an enormous cat that serves as a bus for the spirits and those they trust. That I am trusted enough to ride on it is a wonderful honor.

Love,

Your Foxy

7/17/2001

Dear Scully:

In your recent communique, you expressed considerable skepticism at my new forest friends. I would not have it any other way, of course. I love you for your passionate mind. I can only speak what I have seen, and in so doing, hope to explain the worlds unseen to myself and others. I will only ever have the slimmest understanding of anything, and it is remarkably freeing to realize that after so long attempting to break down the doors that held me from the truth. Totoro and these neighbor girls have shown me that the only truth I need is the one hidden in a child's heart.

You are aware that one of the chief ironies of my character psychology is that I am not a religious man, despite believing in literally every other possible paranormal phenomenon. I am complicated, and I will remain so.

As I say all of this, I remain aware that the most likely explanation for Totoro is a religious one. His ability to make trees grow, his ability to apparate and disapparate at will, his seeming command of the forest — all are best explained by him being some sort of minor deity or spirit. The girls and their father will occasionally thank Totoro by visiting a small shrine, which lends credence to this hypothesis.

I find something comforting in this idea. Regardless of what I believe, Totoro exists, and he cares for this forest. If we learned to see these spirits living inside of everything, we might learn to also see the world not as raw material to construct our societies out of but as a breathing thing that we are tasked with living with in harmony.

It's just something I've been thinking about. I previously had similar thoughts when the bugs in those trees almost ate us. I dispelled my renewed relationship to the Earth quickly enough that time. I genuinely hope this epiphany lasts longer. I fear it will not.

Love,

Mulder

8/23/2001

Dearest Scully,

I write this from Dededo in Guam, overlooking the blue Pacific. My sojourn in Japan is at an end, for as so often happens, my bliss was interrupted by the massive global conspiracy that seems to have my misery as its sole object. (Okay, it also wants to prepare our planet for a massive alien invasion, but that goal intersects with my misery regularly.)

When the nameless and faceless men from the Syndicate arrived in my small house — for they, too, had checked my father's holdings — they had only one aim: to kill me. I was fortunate that I had been in the forest, attempting to catalog their many mysteries. Those who would see me dead instead opened fire on some soot gremlins, which I assure you accomplished nothing.

They saw me as I escaped back into the woods, and they gave chase. I managed to stay a few steps ahead of them, but I realized I had only one hope: that my friendship with my neighbor Totoro would lead him to rescue me and thus spare my life.

As I am writing this to you from Guam, I clearly escaped, so I need not elaborate that much. But after I made it known to the forest that my life was in Totoro's hands, he appeared before me and pulled me onto his majestic flying top. We soared above the tree cover, where he called on the catbus to take me to safety. I have yet to learn Japanese, so I did not catch what the destination placard on the cat's front read. But the next thing I knew, the catbus had delivered me to Guam, where I am told my next contact will meet me and deliver me to safety.

I do not know why this mysterious new friend took such an interest in me, but I feel blessed that he did. I do not know what I learned from my time with him, but I surely learned something. Please, someday, let me bring William to this small house. I believe he and Totoro would have much to say to each other.

Until then,

Fox

Errata: Yes, My Neighbor Totoro in the 1950s, but I also never specifically said the little girls Mulder meets are Satsuki and Mei. So there!

Also, this was inspired by how much Tim Daly's performance of the Dad in the English-language dub of this sounds like him trying to do an impression of David Duchovny as a chill dad. Check it out sometime. It's great.

What I've been up to: My recent work at Vox includes this piece on why TV is slowly losing interest in the mystery box show. It, too, is obsessed with the legacy of The X-Files. Check it out!

The rise of TV discussion online closely paralleled the rise of the mystery-box show. One of the earliest shows to inspire wide conversation and debate online was The X-Files, which ran (in its initial incarnation) from 1993 to 2002. That show’s massive alien conspiracy plotline all but begged audience members to sit down and try to connect the dots among its many elements. And the ultimate resolution of that conspiracy led to a common pattern for mystery-box shows: If you really want to do the work, you can figure out exactly what the conspiracy was up to, but it’s so complicated and obscured that you’re unlikely to do the work. I’ve watched The X-Files many times (I literally wrote a book on it), and I can more or less tell you what the conspiracy was up to. But if I did this, I guarantee you your eyes would glaze over. It’s so needlessly complicated that you’ll simply bounce off it at some point.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: It's taken me a few weeks of getting my feet under me, but the freelancer newsletters have returned with Dana Aklilu's fantastic dissection of Tony and Livia Soprano's final confrontation in the Sopranos episode "Proshai, Livushka."

A separate sequence in “Proshai” achieves a similar effect: the final interaction between Tony’s mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) and Tony. Marchand had passed away before filming on season three began, after a battle with lung cancer. Livia was supposed to have a season-long arc where she would testify against Tony with the stolen plane tickets given to her in the second season finale used as evidence. That storyline no longer being possible, David Chase decided to wrap up the characters’ on-screen relationship in one final interaction. It’s a short sequence whose structure is indistinguishable from their first on-screen interaction in the pilot, though it has been routinely mocked and ridiculed for that very reason. That ridicule misses the mark. Like the sequence in “From Where to Eternity,” there’s a sense of the theatrical at work here. This sequence, too, summons a spirit.

Read me: Kathryn Schulz is always worth reading, but I especially love that she turned her eye toward the super grim novel Bambi by Felix Salter. Yes, that Bambi. The cute lil deer.

The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation. Stephen King called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic for this magazine, claimed that she had never known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.”

Watch me: At this point, I likely don't need to tell you to watch Dan Olsen's Line Goes Up: The Problem with NFTs, but you should anyway. It's fantastic, and it finally helped me understand how a bunch of dense topics intersect with each other.

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And another thing... I'm, like, 500 years late to this, but some friends and I played the game Wingspan the other night, and it's great. I'm in awe of how its design makes an incredibly complex experience intuitive and straightforward to understand. I can't wait to play it again.

Opening credits sequence of the week: I've become obsessed with the show Empty Nest, which I loved as a tween for reasons that are more or less unfathomable. Anyway, the show had a surprisingly large number of different, minute variations on the same opening sequence, and you should watch all 10 minutes worth of them.

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A thing I had to look up: I tried to double-check all Totoro and all X-Files references, and I am always surprised to learn that the catbus really is just called "catbus."

This week's reading music: "My Neighbor Totoro ending theme" by Joe Hisaishi

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.