There's a fabulous movie short [1] by John Waters, where he tells the audience there's no smoking in the theater. Then he takes several long, blissful drags on his cigarette, and says "Don't you wish you had one right now?"
> Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag.
This left me sorely tempted to get in my car and drive to the nearest shop for a pack of smokes. I started smoking when I was 15 and quit a few years ago after two decades. I still miss it and it only takes a whiff of someone else's cigarette to bring back the desire.
As the writer says, one of nicest things about smoking is the social aspect. I met many friends (and girlfriends) standing outside clubs and pubs for a smoke. I'm just old enough to remember dancing in clubs with a bottle of beer in one hand and a Marlboro in the other (before smoking inside was banned). Happy times.
It's a terrible, smelly, health-destroying habit, and I was right to give it up, but I think I'll always be a smoker at heart.
I greatly enjoy my ability to indulge the occasional cigarette. It's truly an experience, and nothing feels quite as cool as leaning against the wall outside a venue and lighting up under the mercury lights.
It's amazing how romantic (not just romanticized) smoking is.
I just know how it feels, and if marketing created that entire experience, that marketing team is the best on the planet. Obviously not an objective perspective :)
A lot of people are aware of how jaywalking was pushed by newspapers to favor cars at the request of automobile manufacturers.
Your probably know about wedding rings, valentine's day, mother/fathers day, etc getting pumped up by De Beers and the greeting card companies.
Those of course aren't the only times this has happened. Huge swaths of human behavior is driven by advertising campaigns that finished a century ago and have become a meme traveling down the ages.
I was a (hand-rolled) cigarette and pipe tobacco smoker during my university days, and there was definitely a feeling of romanticism that's quite hard to explain.
Sitting outside alone, late at night, watching your cigarette smoke drift up to the stars, listening to Bob Dylan with a glass of whiskey in hand: it feels like you're the star of your own indie film.
How much of that feeling was a byproduct of marketing? It's hard to say. Smoking tobacco (1) gives you a rush of dopamine, and (2) was viewed as edgy/counterculture by my 20-year-old-self, and I think those two alone are enough to explain the 'romanticism' I felt back then.
However, in hindsight, that 'counterculture' vibe I got was from two aspects:
1. I was big into 1960s counterculture & beatnik culture in my early 20s, and all of my 'heroes' smoked cigarettes or pipes: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Alan Watts, etc. That's definitely marketing, or at least marketing-adjacent.
2. Smoking is a nasty habit that people (including myself, now) rightfully are grossed-out by. My younger self interpreted "people find smoking gross" as "smoking is counterculture".
My thought is that going out for a smoke is a socially acceptable way of stopping whatever you're doing and letting down your guard. Working hard? Stop everything, stand up, walk somewhere, think about whatever, and also have a cigarette. Partying hard? Stop dancing, go outside, get some fresh air, talk to people without pretenses, and also have a cigarette. Marketing certainly influenced the appeal, but they also found a release valve that humans need while we're playing one of our characters.
I quit smoking earlier this year. I still haven't found something to replace those breaks. I can go out and sit in the same spot for 10 minutes, and look around outside... but it's not the same. I just get anxious sitting there doing nothing, and want to go do something else. The end of the cigarette was the natural conclusion to my break. Without that, I just don't sit there very long. It's a gap in my life that I have yet to figure out how fill.
Nicotine is an absolutely amazing chemical, and on its own is relatively innocuous, even beneficial. It's only part of the smoking experience, though. Vapes are pleasant, but not the same effect by any stretch.
It made me understand how 'smoking the peace pipe' is a thing. Standing outside the office building with a few colleagues from different departments. That small brotherhood of "meh, fuck it". Just enjoying your smoke together. I'm also long past my smoking days but I do miss it at times.
Oh man. Same here. It’s just such a social activity. I stopped smoking when I moved to the US since it’s just difficult to smoke here and nobody else smokes. However, whenever I go back to the Balkans I revert back to my old habits quickly. I can’t resist it when I’m having a coffee or a drink with someone else who smokes.
When I went to school in France, I started smoking for the social aspects. When I came back to the states, I just chucked the cigarettes in the bin when I got home and never bought another one.
I’ve been trying to switch to vaping recently as a lot of people I know said it helped them and god it so hard to get used to.
everything from the draw, to the sharpness is very different and the person who sold it to me was trying to sell it on “cloud size”. And charging/refilling are even more obnoxious than running out of cigarettes. I will say it’s helped me cut back on cigarettes at least, though I’m probably hooked on nicotine more than ever.
As someone who quit smoking using vapes, and has recently kicked vapes after a good five years – it's all in the vape. If someone was selling you based on "cloud-size", they were the wrong person to be talking to. They were a vape enthusiast. You're not looking for the "best" vape experience, you're looking for the vape experience that is closest to smoking.
For this, you'll actually want to go with one of the Big Tobacco-backed vapes, because it's also what they want – the closest thing to smoking. I suggest Juul or Vuse, both of which are backed by Big Tobacco, contain nicotine salts (fast acting like smoking), and have a similar draw and lung hit to cigarettes with smaller vapour than other devices.
You'll also completely avoid refilling and everything, as they're "closed pod" systems.
For five years, I considered (ritual aside, as you can do it discretely essentially anywhere) vaping to be superior to smoking in every way. Good luck.
my biggest issue has been battery life. I mean I suppose the heating element requires a decent bit of power, but I have religiously stuck to things that don’t require me to charge them: most notably, I’ve stuck to wired headphones
Most vapes I’ve tried end up lasting a couple hours when turned on unless I spend a whole night charging.
I played around with vapes for a bit, and I found them to be way more compulsive and addictive than traditional cigarettes. Had to give them up completely. Just typing that out really makes me want to vape.
(Vs having been a cig smoker for years, now just socially, and I can easily moderate to whatever level of consumption I want, w/o cravings. Not so w/ the vapes!)
Vapes make it so easy to take in Nicotine. There's no end like with a cigarette, and no need to go outside to use it. I started dragging on a vape pen one night while watching a movie. After a while, I realize my heart was racing like crazy, and I was up all night. Definitely overdid it on the Nicotine. For better or worse, I quit using the vape pen after that.
God this whole thread makes me want to smoke again.
The margins on vape liquid must be insane. I quit smoking using a vape and made my own liquid for it, it's only four ingredients which are all really cheap if you buy in bulk and you can can taper down as slow as you like. I went down to an eighth of a milligram per millilitre before I binned it off for good!
I finally ditched cigarettes almost entirely. Saltnics with the right dosage: for me it's about 5mg/ml. Resistance about 1.2ohm. This lasts much longer than non-salt nic. I carry a 15mah stick with pods. I have two so that I always hve one charged.
I still smoke cigarettes when I go fishing. But I can drink beer or coffe just fine with the vapestick.
The vape that managed to get me off cigarettes was the Juul2, I'm still tempted by the real thing occasionally and Juul has its share of issues regarding cartridge disposal and advertising to kids. But the experience is significantly better then the other ones I tried over a 2-3 year period
> It's a terrible, smelly, health-destroying habit, and I was right to give it up, but I think I'll always be a smoker at heart.
It's incredible how much I can relate to this. I finally managed to quit smoking after multiple attempts but I would still say I will always be a smoker at heart. I loved smoking and probably always will.
I mean people drink heavily while chastising smoking (both are bad) but there are people who are social drinkers or smokers. I’m not so sure that smoking one or two cigarettes per week or a month is that bad, I mean obviously the best is to not smoke. But only 30% of people get addicted to nicotine.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that life is finite anyway and nothing beats going to the top of a mountain and lighting up a smoke whether it’s a joint or a cig. Just don’t abuse it like anything else.
I’m no expert here and hopefully a doctor or public health student can chime in with the most accurate data here.
However a quick google search suggests that nicotine is categorically more addictive than alcohol. It’s hard to measure exactly what proportion of people who consume alcohol are alcoholics, but it seems like 10% is a reasonable estimate.
For cigarettes it seems like smoking even only once per month puts you at a much greater than 10% risk of nicotine addiction.
I used say, "I hate being a smoker, but I love smoking." Pretty much 90% of my social circle evolved because of smoking. Like church, it is fulfils a particular role in society that you don't really understand if you haven't experienced it.
Kind of odd there's no mention of the only movie I know of about the tobacco industry itself, "Thank You For Smoking", which has some of the funniest scenes about lobbying and marketing in film history.
Meh, I quit 15 years ago and the way I quit (cold turkey) was by saying that I’m not a disgusting smelly smoker.
Watching my friends who still smoke basically ruin every surface around them and render themselves incapable of going up a meager set of stairs continues to convince me, despite the best efforts of the author here to entice me back.
I found something in the last few years about the use of a cigarette as a prop. The Vertigo comics character John Constantine is a heavy smoker. Part of his character; he even comes close to dying of lung cancer at one point, and weasels out of it via a deal with some devils. They made a Constantine TV series in 2014, canceled after half a season, and then the same actor reprised the character on the CW's Arrowverse serieses, most notably on Legends of Tomorrow.
In all those appearances, Constantine is shown holding cigarettes, getting them out of a pack, gesturing with them, fussing with and lighting his lighter... but never actually lighting a cigarette or smoking. It's done so smoothly that you probably won't notice unless someone mentions it to you.
My experience watching my mother slowly die was that the cancer was easily beat. It was the COPD that caused the most suffering and eventually killed her.
My mom died from lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. Watched her slowly drown in her own lung fluid. I'm now watching my father slowly die from smoking related illnesses (skin, lung and heart issues).
My mom was a life-long drug addict, and I was raised by my father and at times in foster care with my mother's brother.
Before she got hooked on oxy in 1999, she was just a typical drug addict (coke, crack, tons of alcohol) who would get clean (usually substituting fundamentalist Christianity for her drugs) and chain smoke cigarettes at twice the rate she usually did. After the oxy, there was never any attempts to get clean, and she became a full-on opiate addict with the rewired brain and all of that. When she OD'd in 2015, she was already suffering from emphysema.
The smells of stale cigarettes bring back horrible memories for me. She always reeked of them, and even at 6 when we were on supervised visits at her house, I always sensed that the cigarettes were a slow suicide. She used to accidentally burn my hand all the time when she'd be smoking and holding my hand when she'd take me on a walk.
I'm really sorry for you to have to watch your father follow your mom. It's terrible to think about.
My dad enjoys the occasional pipe, and pipe tobacco never made me think of that nasty-ass death smell of stale cigarettes.
It took an immense effort over many decades to fight the tobacco industry. The food industry is orders of magnitudes more powerful and the "addiction" more widespread and entrenched, cause and effect even harder to prove.
Whatever truth there is to this, I think the death knell for smoking was the success of anti-smoking campaigns to frame smokers as our common enemy due to second hand smoke and whip up public sentiment (that is always looking for a politically acceptable group to vilify) against them.
This is the same hatred that authorities were able to leverage in the recent vaccine stuff. Some grain of truth gets distorted so that the out-group isn't just presenting an acute risk in some very specific situations, but becomes an evil that must be fought even when it doesnt actually affect us.
Reducing smoking is probably a good thing. I'm definitely happy I quit years ago. But at what cost?
Most seductive prop? Not even close. just because something is being gradually phased out of modern films doesn't mean that it is the last of anything nor that it was any more powerful an image than other props.
He describes so many great scenes from so many great movies! Reading back over all that, and imagining myself back in the 40s/50s watching all these, it's impossible to think I wouldn't have smoked too. A dreadful vice with amazing marketing.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the amount of money the tobacco corporations pumped into show business. Luckily public smoking ban cut off this cancer and now the only way for Philip Morris and other cunts is way down into the abyss.
It's crazy how everyone can wag a finger at the tobacco industry for paying actors/actresses to smoke in TV and films, but society collectively ignores the amount of "influencers" getting paid to vape on social media. Young kids with measurable influence over other young(er) kids pushing vape products. How is this OK?
It's a brilliant (and evil) strategy that seems to have been ushered in by Juul (now minority-stake owned by Altria.)
Vaping simultaneously made tobacco cool again (vs. uncool smoking and e-cigarettes that looked like cigarettes), added appealing kid-friendly flavors (since banned in the US but still marketed abroad), and dodged anti-smoking regulation (such as bans on advertising and youth marketing) and activism.
I'm sure Stanford's product design department is proud of the most successful product developed by their alumni (not to mention its innovative marketing.) Perhaps they can convince them to donate a Juul building to the university. And Nancy Pelosi must have been pleased to have sponsor Juul's logo displayed while she spoke at the California Democratic Party convention in 2019.
Cigarettes still have their place in art, and not just film. Smoking and cigarettes are a huge theme in Car Seat Headrest's Twin Fantasy, which was releaased in 2011. Even if you restrict your view to film alone, there's plenty of smoking in movies. You only have to go as far as Wes Anderson, or Marriage Story, or every other A24 film.
What this essay utterly fails to acknowledge is that the use of cigarettes in cinema, as with modern commercial positioning, was a deliberate and remunerated case of product placement.
The seduction didn't pre-exist this. It was a manufactured cinematic fantasy.
Seeing a pretty woman smoking a cigarette makes me want to gag, and they make men look like idiots. However they were perceived in the past, that spell is truly broken now. Cigarettes being seductive is a dying meme and I say good riddance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt0hEYrMsc