I'm sure he's not the first in history, but for me definitely, the reason Fox Mulder was such a revelation is that I'd never seen a character before who seemed totally conscious of masculinity as a performance, while also being pretty good at that performance.
Like, we kid, but Mulder is doing pretty well, as a man! He's got a badge and a gun, prestigious credentials and a bunch of sharp-ass suits. He's smart, he's funny, he's hot, he's not primarily a fighter, but he can fight when he has to. If there's a fairly straightforward, down-the-line Socially Acceptable way to be a (rich white) man in the 1990s, Mulder is basically ticking all the boxes correctly.
What's cool about him -- and I personally think this is what Duchovny specifically, a known weirdo, brings to the character -- is that Mulder's subjective internal experience of the world is that he's a weirdo. He knows that. In his head, he's preoccupied with this wild psychodrama of his guilt and his paranoia. He lives kind of like a weirdo, when he's not on the clock. He seems to like and trust weirdos. He's pretty introverted and he has a weird, bleak sense of humor.
The feeling I always got about Mulder is that he knows he's ticking boxes. He wakes up every day conscious of the fact that he has a job to keep and he has to Act Normal, so he does things like get his suits tailored and work out and he's clearly playing a role, and he's only as invested in that role as he judges he'll benefit from. He doesn't actually give a shit personally, except that he needs people to tolerate him to a certain degree in order to be functional in the world.
I think he's so appealing to me because he was the first character I ever saw who seemed to be self-consciously participating in the game of Being a High-Value Man (before that specific lingo was coined), while clearly viewing the game as a useful absurdity. He's literally putting on and taking off his Patriarchal Authority Figure drag, for his own purposes, and that's a big chunk of what I've always loved about him.
sleepyscully
