22 ms·

The Last Cigarette: Cinema’s most seductive prop

29 points by prismatic 4y ago

fuzzfactor 4y ago
An empty glass That last cigarette https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grash9Kv1_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grash9Kv1_M
dredmorbius 4y ago
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.
pull_my_finger 4y ago
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?
- musicale 4y ago
  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.
nluken 4y ago
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.
latchkey 4y ago
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). In my eyes, there is nothing sexy about smoking.
- JPKab 4y ago
  Agreed. 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.
- mcculley 4y ago
  I went through the exact same scenario with my mother. I toy with the idea of spending my retirement tormenting tobacco corporation executives and shareholders. I welcome any ideas and assistance.
Veen 4y ago
> 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.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  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.
  - blairbeckwith 4y ago
    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.
Markoff 4y ago
Just for the record that site has one of the worst readable fonts I've seen recently.
- Benanov 4y ago
  It was so bad that I went into the inspector and disabled the font rule. One of the fallback fonts was immensely more readable. Try that.
feintruled 4y ago
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.
somenewaccount1 4y ago
Cancer is a minority of cigarette smokers death. Heart disease and stroke happen way way earlier, and more universally, and more often.
- mcculley 4y ago
  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.
AlbertCory 4y ago
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?" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt0hEYrMsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt0hEYrMsc
NoGravitas 4y ago
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.
rr808 4y ago
I still wonder about how smoking has become unpopular but obesity with diabetes and drug use has ballooned, is there a trade off? Which is worse?
- alar44 4y ago
- maxboone 4y ago
  Probably because second-hand smoke is a thing.
  - version_five 4y ago
    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?
    - maxboone 4y ago
      I'm a smoker, and it stinks and affects other people around directly. It makes sense that it's different than things that don't drink and affects others directly. I don't feel like smokers are vilified at all, people just don't like to stand or have to work in their smoke.
- UweSchmidt 4y ago
  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.
photochemsyn 4y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Somewhat famously, though many cigarettes are shown, none are actually smoked.
- aaron695 4y ago
  [dead]
iostream24 4y ago
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.
durnygbur 4y ago
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.
robonerd 4y ago
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.
sandworm101 4y ago
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. (1) The shot glass. (2) The handgun.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Cell phones are the new cigarettes— it's what people take out at parties when they're bored, and also it appears that everyone is addicted to them.

29 points by prismatic 4y ago

An empty glass That last cigarette https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grash9Kv1_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grash9Kv1_M

dredmorbius 4y ago

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.

pull_my_finger 4y ago

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?

musicale 4y ago
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.

nluken 4y ago

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.

latchkey 4y ago

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). In my eyes, there is nothing sexy about smoking.

JPKab 4y ago
Agreed. 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.
mcculley 4y ago
I went through the exact same scenario with my mother. I toy with the idea of spending my retirement tormenting tobacco corporation executives and shareholders. I welcome any ideas and assistance.

Veen 4y ago

> 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.

the_only_law 4y ago
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.
- blairbeckwith 4y ago
  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.

Markoff 4y ago

Just for the record that site has one of the worst readable fonts I've seen recently.

Benanov 4y ago
It was so bad that I went into the inspector and disabled the font rule. One of the fallback fonts was immensely more readable. Try that.

feintruled 4y ago

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.

somenewaccount1 4y ago

Cancer is a minority of cigarette smokers death. Heart disease and stroke happen way way earlier, and more universally, and more often.

mcculley 4y ago
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.

AlbertCory 4y ago

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?" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt0hEYrMsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt0hEYrMsc

NoGravitas 4y ago

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.

rr808 4y ago

I still wonder about how smoking has become unpopular but obesity with diabetes and drug use has ballooned, is there a trade off? Which is worse?

alar44 4y ago
maxboone 4y ago
Probably because second-hand smoke is a thing.
- version_five 4y ago
  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?
  - maxboone 4y ago
    I'm a smoker, and it stinks and affects other people around directly. It makes sense that it's different than things that don't drink and affects others directly. I don't feel like smokers are vilified at all, people just don't like to stand or have to work in their smoke.
UweSchmidt 4y ago
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.

photochemsyn 4y ago

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.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Somewhat famously, though many cigarettes are shown, none are actually smoked.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]

iostream24 4y ago

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.

durnygbur 4y ago

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.

robonerd 4y ago

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.

sandworm101 4y ago

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. (1) The shot glass. (2) The handgun.

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Cell phones are the new cigarettes— it's what people take out at parties when they're bored, and also it appears that everyone is addicted to them.