Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose

See the future, laugh about it

My hero Jack Pendarvis isn’t on Substack anymore, which is a real shame. He’s one of the best writers around, with a rare and genius brain. He’s also a sweetheart. So this one’s for Jack.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Jack, myself, and our pals Bill, Ace, and Megan started an email thread that’s about 10,000 messages long by now. Mostly we talk about movies and books. At some point during the worst months, we did a movie club, where everybody got a pick (I think mine was The Vampire Doll, which was more or less a success.) I figured Jack would choose a Jerry Lewis movie, since he’s Jerry’s biggest ever fan.

But Jack threw us a curveball. He picked an episode of The X-Files. Specifically, season 3, episode 4: “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” I remembered this one from childhood, though I hadn’t seen it in something like twenty-five years. Turns out I could recall quite a bit about it even, right down to the stuff about the Big Bopper. I remembered asking my dad who the hell the Big Bopper was. We were at the kitchen table and I was eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. It’s funny what sticks with you.

Anyways, I watched the episode again, on Jack’s recommendation. I’m not an X-Files fanatic or anything, though I did love the show very much when I was a kid. Sure, I believed in aliens (I believed in everything), but the real draw was to be on a quest forever that I could never get to the end of, one that would take me around the world (the galaxy even), introducing me to strange people, witnessing all kinds of bizarre and wonderful phenomena. Turns out traveling for a living mostly means a regular repetition of interstate, Exxon, Taco Bell, dive bar, La Quinta. Maybe there’s an exotic version of the traveling life, but it has yet to reveal itself to me. Now I just sit in my apartment and make little marks on other people’s books.

To be honest, I don’t know why I’m even writing this. I got a little buzzed around Christmas and couldn’t stop thinking about sad psychic Clyde Bruckman (played by a transcendent Peter Boyle), and I had to queue up the episode again. Maybe it was because of my family’s annual rewatching of A Muppet Christmas Carol, Ebenezer wiping the snow off his own grave, who knows. But my brain went specifically this exchange:

CLYDE BRUCKMAN: How can I see the future if it didn't already exist?

MULDER: Then if the future is written, then why bother to do anything?

CLYDE BRUCKMAN: Now you're catching on.

He’s like the anti-Scrooge here. But despite (or because of?) his fatalism, there’s a delight to Clyde, one that only sparks to life when he meets Scully. By the way, this is one of Gillian Anderson’s best performances, deadpan, hilarious, and full of a kind of urgent warmth, a patience that is built from love. I think she’s one of the great characters in TV history, much better and stranger and more interesting than Mulder (that’s why she gets abducted first, duh, while Mulder has to wait until season 7), and Gillian Anderson gives her a depth and dignity few non-prestige TV characters ever achieve. It’s a rarity for the medium, one that’s already peaked. But I digress.

It’s a strange episode, inarguably one of the best. We get this beautiful surreal dream scene of Clyde imagining his own body decaying in a field of impossibly red roses, the sort of odd touch of beauty that you can only ever be grateful for. And the killer in the episode is almost non-existent. He’s a bug-eyed little weirdo, who cares? He’s just there to provide an opportunity for Clyde to do his thing.

Clyde spends his last few hours alive playing cards with Scully in a hotel room, big grin on his face, knowing good and well he’s about to die. He tells Scully he has a psychic vision that they’ll wind up in bed together. She takes it as a harmless old horndog joke, and kind of amused, brushes it off. But Clyde’s dead serious. He’s telling her how he’s going to die, that it will be soon, and how she’s going to try and comfort him, holding his hand in his last breaths. Again, he delivers it with a grin, she laughs, thinking it a half-assed come on. It’s heartbreaking.

In an odd grace note at the end, doubting Scully watches an infomercial for a sham television psychic, grabs the phone as she might dial the number, then hurls it at the tv in frustration. Scully, who can take in the whole mystery and let it work in her, at war with her own desire to believe. I’ll always love that about her.

I wanted to tie this up into a nice little bow, make it an actual essay. Wouldn’t that be nice? But then I remembered this is my newsletter and I can do whatever I want.

Happy new year, everybody!