Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (25 page)

Meantime,
X-Files
was cranking up its second season. While I did not share front billing with Mitch, my credit at the end had been upgraded from featuring to costarring. Of course you still had to pause your VCR — yes, VCR — if you wanted to actually read the credit. And in the first episode, “Little Green Men,” I had another line, this time to Mulder, “Your time is over.” I was still hanging around Skinner’s office, smoking, and it was still no clearer who I might be. My ranking was further puzzling when Skinner, who appears to be speaking to Mulder, says, “Get out of here,” and it turns out he is speaking to me. And I do. I leave, though taking my sweet time about it and lighting another cigarette before going. Perhaps even if I was a big cheese, Skinner had the right to order me out of his office. Needless to say, no one explained any of this to the mere actor. But John Bartley’s lighting continued to draw attention to me and the mysterious smoking.

John got really carried away lighting my next appearance in the fourth episode of season 2, “Sleepless.” In the final scene of the episode, my only scene, I am seated at the head of a long table, flanked by two flunkies, interrogating a new character in the series, Alex Krycek, played by Nicholas Lea. My face is so surrounded in smoke and shadow that my identity is barely revealed until the final shot as I butt yet another cigarette into a smouldering ashtray. It now seemed that Krycek was actually working for me to undermine Mulder. But who am I? We have yet to find out.

I had never met Nick Lea prior to shooting this scene. Did I intimidate him? Who knows? But he could hardly remember a line. We had to do many takes before we finally got the scene, directed by Rob Bowman. Who is this guy, I thought. I can see that he is good-looking, but don’t you have to have some skills to be hired as a lead actor on a series? Well, when I finally saw the episode it was clear that he has lots of skills. He gives a wonderful performance. Maybe he was so into the character that he was properly terrified of the Smoking Man.

Speaking of smoking, it was ironic that after going through my personal hell to quit smoking I was about to become the most famous smoker on television. When I shot the pilot I was given the choice of smoking real tobacco cigarettes or herbal ones. Confident that I had beaten smoking and wishing to be a real actor I opted to smoke real cigarettes. And so I did for the pilot episode. And then again for my next episode. But when I found myself sitting at home anxiously hoping I would get another call for that
X-Files
show, I knew the risk was too great. From then on I smoked the foul-smelling herbal cigarettes.

I pity the cast and crew when I was on set. You could smell the cigarettes as soon as you came anywhere near the action. Herbal cigarettes are dreadful. While they smell a little like marijuana, the only good thing that can be said for them is that they are not addictive. No, to be honest, a second good thing is that they make a better prop than a real cigarette. They burn more reliably and consistently. But after every day of shooting I stank of the stuff and had to hit the shower as soon as possible. It wasn’t until the third or fourth season that I realized that I was punishing myself unnecessarily. I was doing a low budget feature in Montreal in which I had to smoke a cigar. The ingenious props person on the set had invented a clever rig that would light the cigar mechanically. So for each shot he would cut the cigar to the appropriate length — that was always an issue, making sure the cigarette was the right length to match the related shots — he would then hand me the lit cigar before the shot. Not till then did I realize that what was really overwhelming my clothes and hair, to say nothing of my lungs, was lighting the cigarettes before each take. Subsequently I demanded in my contract that the cigarette would always be mechanically lit by the props department. After that I could almost live with myself for a few hours after a day of shooting.

For all I hated the herbal cigarette, I still loved the act of smoking. Maybe it brought back all the arrogance of my youth, all those feelings that I was a special young man. After all, one did start smoking at age fourteen in order to be more grown-up. That was in the days when almost all grown-ups smoked. Fans of the show will remember that as CSM I often held the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, a characteristic that became a trademark of the character. Where did that come from? Years later I was sorting through some old family photographs and I came across a snapshot of my father holding a cigarette in exactly that way.

Meanwhile, my private life took a distinct turn for the better. True, the divorce was festering along, but I was now out of it and while I suppose I should have been scarred and desolate, I was enjoying being free and autonomous, being able to “come and go as I pleased.” Francine’s lawyer had attacked me with that phrase, confronting me with my wish to come and go as I pleased with the same relish as if she were accusing me of wanting to rape all the children in my daughter’s Grade 4 class. Yes, I have to admit it: I like to come and go as I please. Send me to hell.

I remember sitting in class one day — I don’t know what I was supposed to be attending to — but I found myself thinking, if I were to arrange a marriage for me who would it be with? If I could stand outside myself and choose the right partner for me, who would it be? It took a nanosecond to decide it would be Barbara Ellison who happened to be in the class at the time. So one day, after my usual hesitation and shyness, I asked Barbara if she would like to go for a drink later. She seemed remarkably enthused about the idea. Well, we drank and we talked when suddenly she blurted out that she was in love with me and had been for some time. Well, this dating thing turned out to be easier than I thought and our relationship began — and thrived for eighteen years.

The divorce and the separation from Francine were draining my financial resources. I had sold the large condo in Whistler that was no longer being used by the family. Francine and the children had stopped coming to Whistler some years earlier — dance classes on Saturdays you understand. I bought a tiny one-bedroom condo on Whistler Creekside so I could ski, a season pass, rented a basement apartment in Barbara’s house, and happily began my new life. At the time I had no idea that
X-Files
would play any significant role in that new life.

Two things would have to happen if
X-Files
were to become important to me. First of all, the series would have to be successful, and second, my role would have to grow. Neither of these possibilities were assured at this time or, it could be argued, even likely. It is sometimes said that if
The X-Files
were launched now it would never have survived. These days shows need to succeed instantly or they are summarily dropped.
X-Files
did not succeed instantly; it trucked along with modest numbers on the Fox Network, which at the time was still in the shadow of the Big Three (CBS, NBC, ABC). Fox could tolerate a relatively small show with a cult audience and, indeed, it was that cult audience that drove the show forward and sustained it for two or three years before it became mainstream. In the early years it had a backwater time slot, Fridays at 9 p.m. Ironically the time slot worked in its favour as the show became popular with families watching it together. It also became popular with internet geeks who liked to get together to watch the show. And Friday night at nine was a good time for these young adults. The internet, which was just beginning to come into general use at the time, was a unique handmaid to the series. It was through the internet that the cult fans communicated, spread their enthusiasm, indulged in fan fiction, and generally bonded to the show and to each other.

But it may be the internet made an even greater contribution. Gradually, no, to be truthful, suddenly in the early nineties, large numbers of people started reading pixels instead of print. Should this make a difference? I know the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan has fallen out of favour, but his famous dictum, “the medium is the message,” still resonates. McLuhan argued convincingly, to me at least, that the medium of information affects how we think about the world, regardless of the content of the medium. So the printing press ushered in the modern world, the separation in perception of the person from their environment, the ability to manipulate the environment technologically, and the development of the scientific method, among other things. It did this, not by the content that was printed, but by the very fact of absorbing content by means of print, a “hot” medium that is complete in itself, the perception of which does not need to be enhanced or filled in by the perceiver. We all know that reading handwriting is another matter altogether, sometimes a guessing game at best. McLuhan argued that with the advent of television and the need for the viewer to literally connect the dots that were flashing across the screen in order to “see” an image, the viewer became an active participant in the process of perception where s/he had been passive in absorbing print. Remarkable changes in world views can be correlated to this period, though causation is more difficult to infer. But it might be argued that the relativism of postmodernism, or the view that your truth is your own, or even that students should run the schools, might all have been influenced by this change in the manner of perception. McLuhan was no longer with us when pixels on a screen began to replace the scanning dots of television, but perhaps further effects were emerging.

We speak often now of “the virtual world,” the world that exists on computers in reality but in perception exists in our minds. We play virtual games, we have virtual sex, virtual friends. Now we are used to this world. But in the early nineties it was new, and the line between solid and soft, real and virtual, true and false, was becoming blurred. Somehow prior to the nineties, books gave us a sense of assurance; if it were published in solid print it must represent something solid. But in the nineties we were looking at pixels, and if you remember back then there was nothing solid about them; they were quite likely to suddenly disappear from your screen for no apparent reason. The time was ripe for a show that dealt with these uncertainties, this vanishing line between the real and the unreal. The time was ripe for
The
X-Files
.

Reviewing those early seasons now, I am surprised by how slow-moving the episodes sometimes are, how sentimental — I don’t want to say how boring, they are not that, but they don’t grab one’s attention the way they once did. Was the success of the show simply a lucky chance, the right idea at the right time? Not to diminish Chris Carter’s talent, but none of his other television ventures had similar success and the latest
X-Files
film was pretty much a disaster. What is also interesting is that the popularity of the show in the nineties was huge; it was a global phenomenon. But as time went on, while continuing to be successful television, its impact certainly receded. Some thought this was because of the move of production to L.A. after the fifth season; some thought it was because David Duchovny withdrew from the series; some — I like to think — thought it was because William B. Davis was not in the last two seasons. But maybe it was because times had moved on and the show no longer spoke to the zeitgeist.

Two themes resonate throughout all nine seasons of the show: paranormal activity and conspiracy. While other shows dealt with the paranormal,
Touched by an Angel
for instance,
X-Files
was the only show that lived in the world of uncertainty about paranormal events, always posing the question — were they real or unreal? It was almost as if a seal of permeability built around the printed word had been breached and it was now open season on beliefs of all kinds. Lovely for the show perhaps, lovely for the career of William B. Davis, but was it — is it — lovely for the world?

My character rose to prominence in the series with the development of the conspiracy theory underlying many of the key elements of the show. Fans of the show will know that as the series developed the conspiracy became increasingly elaborate, involving Mulder’s father, a syndicate, and John Neville’s character, the Well-Manicured Man. During the nineties I would give talks to fans of the show and I would often ask for a straw vote on how many believed there were aliens among us. Generally about half the hands would go up. Then I would ask how many believed in government conspiracies and every hand would go up. This would astonish me and I told them so. This was the Clinton/Lewinski era, and I suggested to them that if the president couldn’t keep eleven private meetings with an intern secret, how did they expect he could achieve global secrecy about anything at all? Of course, my argument had no effect.

And so what did this pixel world portend, this world that the
X-Files
embodied, and what did it lead to? Causality, of course, is fiendishly difficult to determine. But how did the nineties and what followed differ from what came before? While Thatcherism and Reaganism began in the eighties, the principles of the free market, of individualism, of the deconstruction of the welfare state all accelerated dramatically in the nineties. Even caring Canada under a Liberal government dramatically slashed its social programs in this decade. The collective gave way to the individual, and tough on you if you couldn’t handle it. Believe it or not there were almost no homeless people before the nineties. But not only was the individual on his own economically, his was on his own epistemologically. It’s up to you what you believe; science is relative or, just as likely, wrong. Develop your own belief system; the internet is there to help you. The word “theory,” which should mean an underlying explanatory principle, now means a guess or just someone’s idea, one that is likely wrong. So huge swaths of scientific evidence on such things as evolution and climate change are dismissed as merely theories. One can say they don’t believe in climate change the way one might say they don’t believe in Santa Claus. And as for conspiracy theory, intelligent people actually believe and argue that 9/11 was an inside job. I have little truck with George W. Bush, but I don’t believe even he would deliberately kill 3,000 innocent Americans.