Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (28 page)

Zwicker spent most of his talk bemoaning the fact that leading left thinker Noam Chomsky did not share his view. Of course that did not lead Zwicker to question it himself. Zwicker is a smart man — so was John Mack. With all their smarts maybe they should get together and argue that George Bush arranged for aliens to bring down the twin towers — coordinated of course by me, the Cigarette Smoking Man. It seems that the smarter a person is, the better they are at defending an absurd idea arrived at emotionally.

Could the same charge be levelled at the Cigarette Smoking Man himself? There is no denying he was a smart man. Why had he embarked on such a seemingly destructive path? By the end of season 3 it is apparent that CSM is part of a global conspiracy, in league with aliens who are bent on colonizing the planet. As a young man and a colleague of Bill Mulder, Fox’s father, he had made a decision that would determine his entire future and affect the lives of many others. While never completely clear, it seems that he had made a pact with the aliens so that some humans could survive the eventual alien invasion even though most humans would die or become slaves. Was this the thinking of Marshal Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government in France who collaborated with the occupying Germans in World War II? Confronted with two unpalatable choices, occupation or destruction in war, did he look for a third alternative, an opportunity to salvage something from the impending disaster? Will more Pétains and CSMs emerge as climate change forces humans to make compromises that they had previously abhorred?

Regardless, a backstory for me, the actor playing CSM, was emerging. I had made a deal, a deal I likely believed was in the best interests of some people at least, those of my tribe if you like, a deal that set me on a course that demanded more and more of me, that led me into further compromises, until I had no moral compass left. Just as the Vichy government in France was forced by the increasing pressure of the occupying Germans to acts of terrible cruelty, so the pressure on CSM to greater ruthlessness was relentless. Sure, he could have opted out, as Bill Mulder did, but we saw what happened to him. I imagine CSM gradually narrowed his horizons so that by the end he was moved by nothing other than the success of “The Project.”

Season 3 concluded with “Talitha Cumi,” still one of my favourite episodes. A story idea suggested by David Duchovny, the episode was inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel
The Brothers Karamazov
. In the novel Christ returns to Earth and begins working miracles, but a Cardinal of the Church demands that he leave, as he is upsetting all the Church’s good work. In the episode, a shape-shifting alien using the name Jeremiah, wonderfully played by Roy Thinnes, always appearing human but capable of appearing in any human guise, begins doing good works, healing humans who have been injured in a shooting incident. It appears that he is a rogue alien who has broken from his role in the pursuit of The Project and is going about on his own doing good deeds. Well, clearly, we can’t have that. CSM and his cronies capture him and lock him up with the extra security a magical alien requires and I confront him in his cell with his misdeeds. He trumps me with the information that I am dying of lung cancer and for a moment we see the human frailty of CSM underneath the arrogant veneer. While not always clear to the viewer, CSM and the alien make a deal — I would release him if he cured me. Another compromise, whether in self-interest or in the interest of The Project, who is to say?

But the appeal of the episode for me was more than the debates in the cell; it was my first scene with Mulder’s mother with whom CSM had once been intimate, leading to conjecture from the fans that perhaps CSM was Mulder’s father. In the scene I happen to boast that I was a better water skier than Bill Mulder, and better at other things too. . . .

Many years later I was contacted by a wealthy business man, Walter Sabo in New York City, who was planning a surprise anniversary present to his wife of several years. It turns out that he and his wife had fallen in love watching
The X-Files
in general and “Talitha Cumi” in particular. Would I come to New York for this event and perform the scene? What an odd idea, but why not? He was offering to pay first-class airfare for Barbara and me and to put us up in a first-class hotel and buy us some theatre tickets. But what form was this “performance” to take? By an odd coincidence we discovered that Roy Thinnes lives in upstate New York, and Walter undertook to find him and convince him to participate. And so it turned out that while Walter and his guests wined and dined, Roy and I were hidden behind a curtain madly rehearsing the scene we had done so many years before. At the appointed time the curtain was pulled back and we came onto the small stage and presented the scene to the bewildered, astonished, and wildly appreciative wife and their guests. While, yes, I guess we were celebrities, I couldn’t get it out my mind that perhaps we were more like the rude mechanicals in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
fortunate that our “play was preferred” and we were chosen to perform for the Court.

For season 4, my billing improved yet again to “Also Starring” though the size of my role was no greater. The season heralded a greater emphasis on the mythology story, a renewed energy from David Duchovny, and a yet more beautiful Gillian Anderson. I’m not sure how she got progressively lovelier during the series, but it certainly wasn’t my place to ask. By now the show had switched from its cozy time slot of Fridays at 9 p.m. to the blockbuster time of Sunday at 9 p.m., the time change accompanied by more money for pretty much everything. Finally I had my own trailer, admittedly a baby trailer, three or four of which could have fit in Gillian’s trailer, but a trailer nonetheless. In fairness, Gillian’s trailer now had to accommodate a child and a nanny as well. Opening credits expanded as well, now lasting sometimes until the twelfth minute of a forty-four minute show.

Season 4 also saw the return to the show of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the writing partners who had been very involved with the first two seasons. They missed most of season 3, engaged as they were in trying to get a show of their own established, but with the failure of that project they returned to
The X-Files
. Did they watch season 3? Did they just not know the direction the show had taken, or did they deliberately want to change that direction? Whatever the reasons, their first effort in season 4, “Home,” while well written and well directed by Kim Manners, was so gruesome that some fans wondered whether to continue watching the series. In hindsight, with the popularity of horror shows in the last decade, “Home” seems rather tame, but at the time it was quite disturbing. They followed that up with “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” written by Glen Morgan and directed by James Wong. And what was I to make of that?

I had been told by one of the producers that an episode was being developed about my character. Needless to say I was thrilled and waited in anticipation to see the script, but, oh my, when the script came I was shocked. “Cancerman,” as the script entitled my character instead of “Cigarette Smoking Man,” bore almost no relation to the character I had been playing for over three years either in style, status, or life history. The original title of the episode when I received it was “Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” suggesting that the events in the story should be taken as real, or at least so it seemed to my modern mind. Perhaps I needed to approach the script with a more postmodern referential lens, but still some of the events of the script would be inescapable, not least that in this first version of the script I killed Frohike, the lead Lone Gunman. I suppose James Wong having originally created Frohike and cast Tom Braidwood in the role felt he had the freedom to kill him off if he chose. The episode begins with my training a long-range rifle on the door of the Lone Gunmen’s pad, behind which Frohike is telling the incriminating story of my life to Mulder and Scully, and was to end with my shooting him as he enters the street. Fortunately for Tom, the show, and the spin-off series,
The Lone Gunmen,
Chris Carter intervened and insisted Frohike not be killed. What the relationship was like between Chris Carter and the Morgan/Wong team I have no idea, but I gather Chris went ballistic when he found that Wong had actually shot the footage of Frohike being killed. Chris ordered the film destroyed so there could be no danger of losing this favourite character.

Why was I shocked by the script? By the end of season 3 my character was a person of some distinction and authority involved in a complicated international conspiracy in league with a potential alien invasion; on a personal level we had learned that he was an excellent water skier and inferred that he was a pretty good lover as well — even Mrs. Mulder didn’t deny that. In “Memoirs,” which was changed to “Musings,” we learn that he fired the shots that killed Kennedy and Martin Luther King — the Canadian actor Chris Owens played the younger me in the episode and we see him actually doing the shooting. But we also learn that my real ambition is to write crime novels, that I have prevented the Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl, and that I had a hand in the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s famous victory on ice in 1980. I have a small staff whom I present with identical red ties for Christmas, and I’m childlike in my excitement when a story is published and driven to complain that life is like a box of chocolates à la Forest Gump when it’s edited badly. When an alien crashes and the secret of its presence might be revealed, Deep Throat and I flip a coin to see who will kill it. Does this sound anything like the character that I had been playing up to then or would continue to play for another few years? At the time I would have been happy if Chris Carter had decided to pull the script altogether.

Chris insisted on a few changes. Frohike was not to be killed. This entailed adding a line at the end of the episode. The line was a reprise of a new line that was added to CSM’s novel, “I can kill you anytime I want, but not today.” So now I spend the whole episode readying the gun, eavesdropping on the conversation, waiting for Frohike to exit the building and then changing my mind at the last moment and sparing his life. Has something softened inside me as I listen to the story of my life? Perhaps. It did rather play that way even though the real reason had to do with plotting the series, nothing to do with my inner life. Morgan and Wong, evidently not pleased with this change, had me complain about my story being ruined by saying, “That’s not the ending I wrote.” True or not, why would I say that to the news agent? Or why would I complain to a homeless person that life is like a box of chocolates? There was some juggling of lines also around whether I should kill the alien. Deep Throat says that I should since I am a killer — and in the Morgan/Wong version I am — whereas I say I have never killed anyone, an accurate statement in the Chris Carter story. The other change was to retitle the episode to “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” from “Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” Those of us with a modern — as opposed to a postmodern — idea of reality comforted ourselves by saying the episode reflected Frohike’s idea of the character rather than the true story of the character.

As an actor I was presented with huge challenges in this episode. Not only was the episode inconsistent with the backstory that had served the show up until now, elements in the episode itself were inconsistent with each other. How do you say to someone who knows you have killed people that you have never killed anyone? Some lines and moments in individual scenes contradicted earlier moments in the same scene. How does an actor deal with this stuff? Well, on stage it would be impossible. On stage an actor must have a consistent through-line or he will not be able to do all his actions or say all his lines truthfully. But I made a significant discovery about film acting doing this episode. All that matters is that each shot is truthful. One shot does not have to connect with another. Create the story you need for the shot you are doing, live that moment truthfully, and make up a different story for the next shot if you have to. What was the result? One of my best performances — and who knew that it didn’t fit together?

Pretending the episode never happened, that the events in the story were some figment of Frohike’s fevered imagination, we continued on with the series and the stories of conspiracy, alien abduction, black oil, and impending alien invasion. It was a few months before I realized that, typical of the show as a whole, what we thought and what the fans thought diverged. Many fans believed this was the true story of the Cigarette Smoking Man. But more confusing, they didn’t seem bothered by the episode being so at odds with the rest of the series. Indeed, many fans reported to me it was their favourite episode. Now I was really confused.

And so in 2010 I watched the episode again. It’s brilliant. James Wong won an Emmy for his direction of the episode, the only directing Emmy ever won by an
X-Files
director in nine seasons. At the time I was astonished by the award. With all the wonderful work of Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, and David Nutter, how on earth is this the only directing Emmy? Jon Joffin, the replacement for DOP John Bartley, brought a haunting light to the episode just as he had in the aforementioned “Home.” Chris Owens and I are pretty darn good if I say so myself. Was the show simply ahead of its time? Or was I just behind the times, wedded as I was, still am mostly, to things like truth, observable reality, internal consistency, narrative? But viewed through a postmodern or post-postmodern lens, where truth is subjective, images are chaotic, and nothing is predictable, the show is spectacularly successful.

But the evanescent style of the episode was as fleeting as its inherent lack of substance. Perhaps the irony of
The X-Files
is that it explored issues of reality and cognition through the very lens that would expose those notions to ridicule from serious scientists. For from the ‘modern’ perspective, as opposed to a ‘postmodern’ one, there is an objective reality and that reality is available for concrete scientific investigation. And most of the concepts of the show have been studied and found wanting, despite Mulder’s blind insistence to the contrary. But were the lens more fanciful, more ironic, more fluid, the show might have challenged more deep-seated epistemological assumptions, leaving the viewer more questioning and challenged about issues of knowledge itself. And Dawkins might seem a dinosaur to be challenging the show as he did. Or conversely, was it all a question of how much dope one smoked?

In any event, after “Musings” the show returned to its tried and true path, setting up unexplained mysteries that could, with Mulder’s help and a belief in the paranormal, be ultimately explained. And yet some of the fans may have been ahead of the curve; they drove the writers batty. They wanted answers, but when the writers finally gave them answers they didn’t believe them. Give us answers, they cried. When the writers gave them answers, they continued to cry, No, give us the answers.

As for me, in “Memento Mori” we get the first suggestion that CSM might be the Devil incarnate. Ironic, of course, as it is a reference from Skinner, and yet as the series progressed Chris Carter drew the allusion frequently. The evil intent, the constant smoke and even fire from cigarette lighters, and the shadowy presence certainly suggested a unique villain. In fact I was voted by the writers of U.S.
TV Guide
as Television’s Favorite Villain and comparisons started to be made with Darth Vader. (I guess I should watch that show sometime.) And in “Zero Sum” it appears that I have access to unusual powers, as I am able to blackmail Skinner with my promise to cure Scully’s cancer.

The publicity for me was all the more remarkable since I was in so few episodes, seldom more than a third of a given season and usually less than that. More embarrassing was the notion, based on the popularity of the series and the known fees for David and Gillian, that I must be getting filthy rich. One of my acting colleagues in Vancouver keeps referring to me as the richest actor in Vancouver. Ah, would it were true. The unknown actors who do voice work are the richest actors in Vancouver. I did make a few dollars of course, and I have a small pension from the Screen Actors Guild, but the truth is what material comfort I do have mostly stems back to the Davis Leather Tannery in Newmarket, Ontario, and its successful exploitation of the working classes in the first half of the last century.