Newstand Operator: “Of course, I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would want to buy that sort of crap.” – “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” from The X-Files
As I thought of possible works to discuss for this holiday, the first one that came to mind was the above-quoted episode. Today, we examine history as presented in artistic texts. This 1996 episode is the first of the popular fantasy/science fiction program to focus on the shadowy character known as “the cigarette-smoking man.” I thought it would work well after the last entry, since I believe he was one of the most convincing representations of evil on TV. On this postmodern show about “good” FBI agents, he is the chief antagonist, an antagonist working in some branch of the “deep state.”
In this episode, he has written a serialized book based (we don’t know how accurately) on his experiences. He credits his semi-fictionalized self as having killed both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as preventing the Buffalo Bills from winning the Super Bowl. Producer Chris Carter explains, “… even if your mission in life is a destroyer, that you still have some hope in the back of your mind that you can be a creator — and that this all of a sudden, this vanity, is his vanity. And we see that so clearly here and it makes him sort of a silly person.” – Wikipedia, (Scholarly citations removed.)
The character almost quits his job when his work is finally accepted in a cheap magazine. The below clip shows his bitterness when he finds that the publisher had changed the end of his story.
Happy Interdependence Day!
Seeker247365v2 