Cigarettes in Movies

Last week, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time. My girlfriend has been trying to get me to watch it for years and I finally gave in. While I was more or less indifferent on the film, ultimately giving it a three and a half star rating on Letterboxd, what did strike me was the imagery of it. It’s a beautiful film. The images we see of New York and the two of them running around are iconic for a reason. The movie made me think of one thing more than anything though. Cigarettes.

In movies, cigarettes are a magical thing. They last forever. They’re cheap enough that people arbitrarily put them out half smoked. They don’t smell. They are just this beautiful addition to the scene, something that one can hold and look interesting or cool as a result.

Am I saying that smoking looks cool? Absolutely. You can tell yourself otherwise all you want, but you and I both know you’re choosing to believe they don’t. At least if you’re above a certain age. Perhaps, god willing, twelve year olds think they look stupid. I didn’t though. I thought they looked cool.

I started smoking when I was eighteen. I never thought that would happen. Both my parents smoked and half of my grandparents. I thought it looked stupid and I judged them for doing it, often urging them against it. Yet, when I was fourteen, I stole five or six from my dad over the course of a few weeks. That didn’t lead to me really smoking though thankfully, nor did the half a dozen or so I had during the spring semester of my senior year when a kid far cooler than me gave me one while we were out smoking weed so as to masque the smell.

At eighteen, I was a cinema-photography major and was in a group called the Movie Camera Militia on campus. We had a forty-eight hour film festival. For those unaware, in those, groups are simultaneously given a prop, a dialogue line, a character name, etc. and then sent off to make a short film with all of those ingredients, only being given…you guessed it…forty-eight hours to complete the task. I was in a group with the kids I thought were the coolest in the school, twenty-two and twenty-three year old seniors who I wanted to be like more than anything in the world. They threw huge parties and everyone loved them.

They all smoked. I didn’t. But on the second day of the festival we stopped at a gas station and I found myself walking up and buying a pack of Marlboro Reds. I hated myself for it and yet there I was, walking in my father and my mother’s footsteps before me, living up to some sort of fucked up, white trash family tradition. Awesome.

I’ve smoked ever since with the exception of about two years when I was twenty-five or so. Sometimes I quit cigarettes and go to vaping. Currently, I’m on that train.

Cigarettes have a certain thing about them though. There’s almost a disturbed brotherhood with them. When you’re at a bar and step out for a cigarette, there will be a crowd out there. You will have conversations you wouldn’t and meet people you might not. When I lived in the dorms and smoked, I loved going out to the smoking section where I would hang out with people I would only ever see there. They were my cigarette friends. To this day, I don’t know half of their names, still thinking of one by the impression he was great at, Christopher Walken.

Something happens when I watch old movies where people are smoking though. I want a cigarette. A vape isn’t the same. Does it deliver me nicotine? Yes. But does it make me feel like I am hanging out with Holly Golightly when I use it? No. Does it make me feel like a character in one of my favorite movies? No. There is nothing timeless or iconic about the imagery of a vape. Honestly, I associate the image of vaping entirely differently. I associate it with men in their early twenties in the early twenty-tens with gauge earrings, shitty tattoos and what I can only describe as emo boy shorts. The types that drink monsters, verbally abuse women and live at home as long as they can. Losers honestly. Cigarettes are not better than vaping. Yet it feels better.

Is that what I’m looking for really? To feel like I am in an old movie from back when the world seemed more full of promise and opportunity, at least for those fortunate enough to have been born into the necessary circumstances? No. Am I going to go buy a pack of cigarettes because I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's? No. Probably not. Maybe though.

There is something about the imagery of smoking that I still find iconic and appealing despite all of the reasons I shouldn’t though. Yes, one could make the claim this is as the result of my chemical dependence on nicotine but I think it runs deeper. I think that cigarettes remind me of a different time, of being a child and feeling like the world is all in front me, like anything is possible. This was a time before any of my friends or family were dead.

What’s the real point of this little rambling? I don’t know. I just know that I want a fucking cigarette.