Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir

by William B. Davis

  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.

  Conspiracy and Compromise

  In the fall of 1994, the Cigarette Smoking Man was gaining some prominence. Whether it was because they needed some filler to replace Scully during Gillian’s pregnancy, or because they decided they liked the character, or because the discussions in the producers’ offices about whether Bill Davis can act were finally settled in my favour, I have no idea. But clearly CSM was taking a leading role in the conspiracy in the episode “Ascension,” and in the episode “One Breath” I had my first major scene and first front billing.

  “One Breath,” written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, introduced the nickname “Cancer Man,” a nickname that caught on with the fans, even more than Mulder’s later epithet, “Black-lunged son of a bitch.” But for me personally, I guess the episode was a test. Let’s give him a big scene and see what he does with it. Well, I guess I did fine with it as there were many more scenes to come. In the scene I am held at gunpoint by Mulder, but talk him down. It is a good scene if I say so myself, but I give some credit to the director, Bob Goodwin, who pushed me to be simple and direct. I imagine it was this episode that firmly established me with the fans.

  Don’t give up your day job, Bill. That was episode 8. It would be episode 22 of season 2 before I appeared again.

  “F. Emasculata” gave me another strong scene with Mulder. Once again shadowed by John Bartley’s evocative lighting, I dress down Mulder in Skinner’s office and begin to make the case that will be the character’s driving force. ‘It is better to do what you can than what you should.’ (Does this sound eerily like President Obama?) In this episode, it is better to suppress information about an epidemic than to risk panic by making the information public. More insidious compromises will be revealed as the series progresses.

  In episode 25, “Anasazi,” the finale of season 2, the conspiracy and my role in it begin to take shape. I have a terrific scene with Mulder’s father, played by the Canadian actor Peter Donat. A nephew of Robert Donat, I had known of Peter since the fifties when he was a regular performer in the early days of CBC television. I had taught his brother at the National Theatre School in the late sixties. I was quite in awe of the opportunity to work with him. In the scene I have come to warn him that Mulder may learn of his involvement in the early days of the conspiracy and he should deny everything should it come to light. As it happens, he decides to open up to Mulder, and Krycek finishes him off for me. I’m not sure what would have happened if Bill Mulder hadn’t happened to go to the bathroom in the middle of his conversation with his son. Well, Krycek fumbled jobs later, as we shall see. He nearly blew this one, letting Bill Mulder tell his son more than he should have. Nonetheless, in the end, Bill Mulder was dead and David had one of his first crying scenes. Later in the episode Mulder discovers the skeletons of aliens in a buried box car, which I order burned while Mulder is inside. End of season 2.

  I recall the scene with Peter Donat playing beautifully as we rehearsed it and shot my coverage. But, curiously, at some point, whether sent for or not, Chris Carter joined director Bob Goodwin at the monitor. After a while Bob gave Peter a different direction. Team player that he is, Peter responded with a much more obvious, portentous, and less nuanced performance than he had been giving before. Chris gave Bob a thumbs-up and left. What can I say? Chris was making the big bucks. Something similar happened later with what should have been the inspired casting of John Neville as the Well-Manicured Man. One of the world’s great actors, John could have been brilliant in the role, but again he was
encouraged to give a rather heavy-handed and obvious performance. Both Peter and John were good — how could they not be — but in my humble opinion they could have been so much better.

  I don’t recall when I first had a crisis of conscience about being involved with The X-Files, but the first episode of season 3 could certainly have contributed to a feeling of unease. I am, after all, a skeptic and the show relentlessly challenged skeptical thinking, relentlessly presenting what we skeptics call pseudoscience as real. It is not the obvious fictions in the show, the aliens and alien abductions, that are insidious. We know it’s a story and we know that we are inhabiting an imagined world. It is the embedded assumptions that may be dangerous, that may encourage an anti-scientific habit of thought. “The Blessing Way,” the first episode of season 3, opens with a voice-over narration by a Native American extolling the virtues of his traditions in general and, in particular, the greater reliability of memory over history. Unlike history, “Memory like fire is radiant and immutable,” he declares over an image of fire. Anyone who has played the memory game in a circle, where a simple statement is whispered to each person in turn until the last person reports something quite different from the original statement, knows that memory is shaky indeed. Anyone who has struggled to light a campfire in the rain knows that fire is hardly immutable. Yet on The X-Files we are expected to value these ancient traditions and to believe that modern medicine would have no chance of saving the ailing Mulder, but only an extended — and rather boring — healing ceremony could (and does) bring him back to life.

  Later in the episode in trying to figure out how a computer chip might have been implanted in her neck, Scully is advised by a psychiatrist to try hypnotism to recover her suppressed memory. She succeeds in dredging up snatches of images until she abandons the session out of fear of what she might discover. Few contemporary notions in psychiatry have been as dangerous and as wrong as the notion of repressed memory. Innocent people were jailed for years on the strength of testimony from people whose ‘repressed memory’ revealed they had been sexually abused. Believing that the worst things that could have happened to one would be the things they could not remember, that the memory would be repressed, a generation began to believe that they might have been sexually abused or worse. Fortunately, thanks to more recent research in the field, science and the public seem to have come around to the more obvious thought — that the more traumatic and vivid the event, the more likely it will be consciously remembered.

  But in “The Blessing Way” these two notions, the efficacy of prayer and repressed memory, are simply embedded in the story. They are not presented as issues for debate; unlike the more admittedly paranormal events in the series, there is no Scully saying these things are ridiculous. There is no ambiguity; they are under the radar if you like. They support the story but they are not part of the story. Does this make them more likely to influence the viewer?

  But it’s the more obvious issues that concerned Richard Dawkins. Now famous for his stance on atheism, Dawkins in the nineties was professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, author of the influential book The Selfish Gene, and my hero. I think I have read every word of every book he has published. But here is what he had to say about The X-Files in the 1996 Dimbleby Lecture:

  How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium — in which case it’s depressing to realize that the millennium is still three years away. Less portentously, it may be an attempt to cash in on the success of The X-Files. This is fiction and therefore defensible as pure entertainment.

  A fair defence, you might think. But soap operas, cop series, and the like are justly criticised if, week after week, they ram home the same prejudice or bias. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?

  Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: “But it’s only fiction, only entertainment.”

  Let’s not go back to a dark age of superstition and unreason, a world in which every time you lose your keys you suspect poltergeists, demons, or alien abduction.

  Here and at other times, Dawkins attacked The X-Files as promoting anti-scientific thought. And here I was, a rising star on the series, on the verge of a major breakthrough in my acting career. What was I to do? Swallow my conscience, like CSM himself, and serve the greater powers — in this case Twentieth Century Fox — and preserve my own self-interest? Or should I, like Mulder himself, champion the truth, abandon the show, and join Dawkins in lecturing against it? Well, we know what I did. But how did I explain it? How did I justify it?

  There are two arguments that could be posed against Dawkins’ position. Dawkins uses the analogy of the unacceptability of a crime show where the culprit is always black. Of course, he assumes, there would be moral outrage at such a program. But what about a show where each week a mystery is posed and each week there are two rival kinds of explanation, one posed by a man and one posed by a woman? And the man is always right. Shouldn’t there be moral outrage, from the feminists at least? Women love the show and the character of Scully in particular. Even though she is always wrong. Where is the moral outrage?

  But more germane to Dawkins’ argument is to turn his own argument for atheism back on him. Why does he prefer science to religion? Because of “evidence” he constantly, and in my view correctly, argues. But where is his evidence for the insidious effects of The X-Files? He presents none. He has none. My own straw polls of groups attending my talks on the show indicated no greater belief in the paranormal than would be found in the general population. Not very scientific, but it’s a tad more evidence than Dawkins presents for his side of the argument.

  And so, armed with these two comforting positions, I did not have to sell my soul à la CSM to stay on the show and go for the ride. My conscience was clear. Dawkins was wrong, and I could happily continue to promote my own self-interest as a performer on the show. Well, perhaps.

  The show constantly poses another question: do you compromise with reality or do you constantly challenge it? Mulder challenges, CSM compromises. I guess one could always argue that if I didn’t act on the show someone else would. The show would go on whether I went with it or not. So I might as well go with it. This defence carried little weight at the Nuremberg trials. If I didn’t kill Jews someone else would so I might as well fire away. And yet? And yet? How could an actor turn down such an opportunity just because he was a little squeamish about some of the ideas presented on the show?

  What does one make of compromises in life? And are they only different in scale from the compromises of Chamberlain, or the Vichy government in France during World War II, or CSM himself, whose compromise with the aliens is similar to Marshal Pétain’s with Hitler? I know I should emit a fraction of the carbon that I do and yet I still drive a car (a Prius, admittedly), still fly if I have to, and still maintain three homes with the heat turned down as much as possible. Is it possible to be fully true to one’s beliefs and still live a life on this planet?

  In truth, going to The X-Files from running my own private acting school was like jumping from one compromise to another. For an acting school, private or public, to be financially viable requires a certain number of students. And yet how many of those students have a realistic chance of a career in the profession? And yet somehow one has to encourage enough people to train at your school to make the finances work. Does one have to encourage false hopes? Because of the rigid admission process and huge government subsidy, I didn’t feel quite the same conflict at the National Theatre School, though even there only a minority of graduates ended up as professional actors. But a
private school has to actively beat the bushes for students. Can one do that with a clear conscience, knowing the perils of the profession? Do I differ from my character only in the scale of the compromise I am willing to undertake? Certainly I was never put in CSM’s position. What would I have done? Indeed, what would you have done?

  The finale of season 2 and the first two episodes of season 3 formed a three-part arc that firmly established the mythology theme of the series. It was now clear, to the extent that anything is clear on The X-Files, that CSM, along with Mulder’s father and others, entered into some kind of arrangement with potential alien invaders as long ago as 1947. The dates might be a little shaky — CSM was probably only ten at the time. But the big surprise for me, the actor playing the character, was to discover that I was not top dog after all. I had seemed to be such a powerful presence up to that point in the series, but now I was little more than a lackey reporting to a mysterious Syndicate led by the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville) and another figure, affectionately referred to later by the fans as the Fat Man, played by my good friend Don S. Williams.