HOME IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
by Bryce Martin

I had watched it just once, my favorite episode of The X-Files. Actually, I should say the favorite of the ones I have watched. I am not a diehard fan of this or any other television show. While switching channels, I caught it right at the beginning. It is titled "Home." It is not so much as what it is about, a clan of murderous and wild as animals misfits as measured on any scale, deformed by inbreeding, the fictional Peacock family. It is about that, but also how the boys are stuck in some kind of early-Elvis pop culture era. The poignant ballads of the period streaming at just the right intervals in the background are perfect picks and the oblique camera angles bring out the iconic Cadillac in its long and angular tail-finned best. Mulder and Scully find the mother under a bed, lying on an auto mechanic's creeper. She has no arms or legs. Of her three misshapen boys, one is both brother and father to the other two. However, by looking at the mother, and of a picture of her and her now dead husband hanging on a wall, it is clear that the inbreeding started well before this current brood. What I like is the juxtaposition of the icons of the innocent and romantic late Fifties and early Sixties set against the strangely pathetic family, feral outcasts that they are, pitiable and defiant and led by a mother intent on preserving the bloodline. If "Home" is not art, it is more than a good stab at it.

TODAY'S FOLKSY EXPRESSION OVERHEARD: "Jumpin' up and down like one-egg puddin'."
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