Title: The
Interior Life of CSM Author: LoneThinker
I've been wondering for a while what CSM's tie to the Mulder family
actually is. I'm not talking here about doing a DNA test to see if CSM is Samantha's father. I'm talking about some kind of emotional investment, because I see little hints of this dropped for us from time to time. The one that hit me most blatantly was the photograph of Teena and little Fox in
*Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, a picture CSM retrieves from who-knows-where and proceeds to carry with him for a long, long time. Why does he do it?
It seems from the circumstances when this picture is first presented that CSM is not acquainted with the Mulder family (i.e., he doesn't spend time with them.) Obviously CSM and Bill Mulder have professional connections, but when Bill Mulder shows CSM the photo, he says, "my one-year-old". He doesn't refer to the baby by name, which I'd think he would if CSM was, say, a friend of the family and knew Fox. Be that as it may, CSM ends up with the picture, and we see it again and again as the episode progresses. Why?
The only thing that makes sense to me at this point is that perhaps CSM, being an orphan--and not just any orphan, but the product of a traitor and a CigaretteSmokingWoman who was unwilling, or unable, to sacrifice her habit for the sake of her child--he sees the attraction of family, connection, belonging represented in Bill Mulder's situation, and in this particular photograph. After all,
his father was not around to show off a baby picture and tell anyone, "My son said his first words today." Perhaps, like a cold man, he has come to warm his hands at this fire.
(Thinking back to our Skinner discussion hereabouts, perhaps M/S are a similar draw for Skinner the warrior. What could be more arresting than seeing this dynamic in front of you, two people whose different surfaces fit together like puzzle pieces, who fill each other's empty spaces. For Skinner the self-contained man hollowed by the invisible shrapnel of war, Scully would present a powerful figure: someone who understands her partner's needs and emptiness implicitly and is always there to fill them.)
But back to CSM: why does he continue to hold onto--and to look at--that picture of a colleague's wife and young son? It could be argued that there's a simple mechanical explanation, that he and not Bill Mulder is the child's father.
Certainly that viewpoint has been floated. Still, the fact that he takes the photo out and looks at it so many times indicates to me that something more is involved here. Maybe this is CSM's one link to his own humanity, the thread that keeps him from succumbing entirely to the cerebral world where presidents are assasinated for the greater good of the country, where murder is honorable if you do it yourself because you hold the victim in such high regard.
There is a shred of humanity in CSM--a chink in his hardened armor against the world, if you will. We see it most clearly where he gets the letter of acceptance for his story. Here, for once, he is completely childlike and guileless, all defenses down. His story will at long last be published; he has no clue that there will be strings attached, that once again things will be twisted, as they always have been, into something less--and darker--than the ideal he holds in his mind. (This is, BTW, one of the things I like best about TXF, that CC & company give us
villains as three-dimensional as the good guys. They are not mere devices.)
The other incident where we see a visible chink in CSM's armor is in Redux, where he enters Mulder's apartment after hearing of Mulder's death. Get your tape out and watch this one over if you don't recall it well. CSM is MOVED here, visibly so. He walks tentatively; he is not smirking. He is sobered by the outline of the dead man on the floor, and
by the blood-soaked carpet. But it is once again a photograph that nearly brings him to tears, a photograph of... young Fox, once again, with Samantha. He swallows back the emotion, but perhaps more significantly, he takes the photo, as he did in Musings. It is the thing he clutches--latches onto--when he is shot through the window of his apartment.
Over the course of five years we have heard CSM say what appear to be contradictory things about Fox Mulder: that he has made him--created him; that he is crucial to the success of the project (as a smokescreen? as a rodeo clown to draw attention away? or in some other role?); that he has seen too much (implying, as far as I read it, that he should be eliminated); that he has protected Mulder so far (this to Bill Mulder on the afternoon of his death.)
Where do CSM's real allegiances lie as far as Mulder is concerned? And what emotional investment
does he actually have in the family whose pictures he seems to carry
with him in the same way cavemen carried fire?
