Film

Backstage, hair falling flirtatiously into her face, Louise Brooks (as Lula in Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929) smokes, poised to expose her current lover. She is a woman who ruins men by sheer force of feminine wiles. Marlon Brando wields a cigarette with equal power in The Wild One (1954) as a gang leader who terrorizes a small town, charting anxiety both about the opaque discontent of youths and about masculinity run amok. In countless films throughout cinema history, smoking highlights the hyperbolic construction of gender that creates stars and sex symbols. But smoking is not gender specific, signaling femininity, masculinity, and androgyny, the latter most famously encapsulated by Marlene Dietrich. Likewise, smoking—tobacco's most ubiquitous and visual form—can represent all kinds of opposing characteristics and social relationships, even within the same film.

In The Big Heat (1953), a classic of film noir (a genre known for its atmospheric use of smoking), cigarettes are signs of both servitude within the criminal chain of command and domestic happiness and equality. Fat cigars dangle from the mouth of the hands-on hit man, marking his illegitimate power and wealth. And cigarette burns appear on the corpse, signaling the sadistic thrill that accompanied the murder. The cigarette burns on the dead body, the disfiguring coffee burns on the hit man's girl, and the titular "heat" (or attention) focused on the investigation further extends the metaphorical reach of tobacco, emphasizing it as a product that burns. Tobacco is transformed from a material substance to smoke, an abstract signifier of indeterminate meanings.

One might be tempted to conclude that tobacco is cinema's floating signifier, malleable enough to mean anything. If this were true, one would expect the use of tobacco to be historically determined, having different meanings, for example, when women smoke in the silent era, prior to ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 guaranteeing women universal suffrage, and when they smoke in the block-busters of the 1990s and 2000s. One would expect tobacco to have one meaning before the dangers of smoking have been exposed, and another meaning after 1950 when a major epidemiological study definitively linking smoking to lung cancer was published in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association. But this does not turn out to be the case. Although tobacco depiction in cinema fell through the 1970s and 1980s, it increased significantly after 1990 despite questionable tobacco industry claims that its campaign to place their products in movies had ended.

One might expect the cinematic uses of smoking to shift with fluctuations in product placement trends, becoming more "positive" to satisfy industry demands. However, treatments of smoking in cinema have changed more in degree than in kind. Big tobacco has been mostly concerned with preventing antismoking groups from positioning smoking as unfashionable, with preventing Hollywood from presenting tobacco as a cause of health-related suffering, and with preventing Hollywood from portraying smoking as an activity practiced among people in the lower socioeconomic sphere. Indeed, films regularly used stars to glamorize smoking. However, films that depict criminals and destructive rebels as smokers can be "positive" (that is, sexy) even when linked to death and destruction. The tobacco industry's involvement in promoting its products in film has not resulted in significant shifts in the meanings it generates, no more than the scientific knowledge about its dangers has altered smokers' perceptions that tobacco was addictive or compromised health, though the industry's efforts have been linked to increased numbers of smokers.

Therefore, the tobacco industry's influence in determining the meaning of smoking in cinema history remains speculative. Yet, smoking has consistently been one of cinema's most efficiently evocative props, motifs, structuring devices, and emblems because smoking always occupies a range of easily legible meanings that have been surprisingly stable throughout its history. It operates in completely predictable ways, functioning as a cliché, confirming conventional wisdom and received knowledge. From the beginning of cinema history, tobacco flags weakness, power, rebellion, destruction, glamour, and sex. What cautions against concluding that tobacco can mean anything is that all of the meanings on this list share something in common, namely a certain relationship to limits and borders, the special relationship to death that smoking possesses, which has been so elegantly articulated by Richard Klein in Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993) as the intimation of mortality.

The Femme Fatale

Tobacco and smoking have played a role in films that span 100 years of history, as many U.S. and foreign films show. Perhaps the most noteworthy cinematic example is the character of the "vamp," a figure whose smoking flags the same set of meanings in films from 1915 through 2003. The term vamp was coined to describe the silent film star Theda Bara, in her first appearance in the silent film A Fool There Was (1915). The word itself is an abbreviation of the word "vampire," a creature that drains another's vital resources, a creature whose curious ontological status—the undead—challenges the limits of mortality toward which smoking always hints. Although tobacco makes just two appearances in this film, they are significant, especially considering how heavily silent film relies on props.

The "fool" of the title, John Schuyler (Edward José), is one of the film's only smokers. Walking cheerfully arm in arm with the vamp, he is utterly unaware of his fate. The viewer, however, has been forewarned: He is smoking, generating clouds of smoke signaling pleasure. The vampire casts a kind of spell over him (the trance typical of vampire narratives), causing him to forget everything he held dear. While his wife waits and wonders, the vampire drains him financially. She is eventually installed as his official mistress, and not even the sight of his child can rouse him from his stupor. He loses both family and position.

The other smoker in the film is the vampire herself, who smokes with the same kind of casual, indifferent deliberateness (in the face of social indignation) that characterizes her destruction of men. However, she does not smoke throughout the film, but in a particular location, forging a link between smoking and the townhouse in which the fool "keeps" her; smoking belongs to the illicit dwelling for which he has sacrificed life as he has known it. Further, it is an attribute of weak men and the women who destroy them by manipulating their desire both here and in femme fatale films over the entire course of cinema history.

In 1932, in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, the vamp plot was modified, but tobacco still signifies weakness, power, desire, and destruction, differently wielded by different characters, but always configured around the exchange of money and sex. The millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant), to whom Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) prostitutes herself to pay for her husband's medical treatment, smokes confidently, with easy, calm self-satisfaction. The husband (Herbert Marshall), on the other hand, has real needs, medical and emotional. He smokes desperately and frantically. Helen, who, in her final stage performance—in her famous androgynous costume of white suit, top hat, and cigarette in long holder—is icy, detached, shut down, and smoking as part of her act. How one smokes and what one smokes is important in determining meanings, but the range of possible meanings remains limited.

By 1979, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), the use of tobacco had been enhanced and extended, but its meanings remained stable. This film uses tobacco to show that the economic and political and even emotional recovery from fascism relied on prostitution. Maria Braun (Hannah Schygulla) has been married to Hermann Braun exactly a half a day and a single night before he is sent to war. His absence enables every sort of sexual intrigue. The role of tobacco as a marker for prostitution, moral and economic, is established early on, as Maria finds herself the object of insulting insinuations by a group of American soldiers. The offense, of course, is the suggestion that Maria is an available sexual object. Confronted by Maria, one soldier makes amends, giving her a pack of cigarettes. But in his attempt to mitigate the offense the soldier repeats it, proving, with the cigarettes, the implicit claim that Maria can in fact be bought. Maria then literally sells herself to the appetites of foreign men first as a dancer in an American nightclub, and afterward as the secretary/mistress of a French businessman.

The weakness of the men, evidenced by their desperate, addictive, compensatory relationship to Maria and tobacco (Hermann diving toward the pack of cigarettes at the very moment that he catches his wife with another man), stands in contrast to Maria's own use of cigarettes, which is deliberate and controlled. Maria tells men that she doesn't smoke, withholds when necessary, and smokes as she likes. As the postwar German, Maria reverses her nation's xenophobic principle but not its ill effects, getting close enough to foreign men to use them up and dispense with them. Fassbinder punishes her at the end, when, finally reunited with her husband, she explodes as she lights a cigarette from her gas stove.

The Rebel

Smoking mobilizes the same set of meanings to describe the rebel as it does to describe the vamp. In Rebel Without a Cause (1955) tobacco is used as sparingly, pointedly, and significantly as in A Fool There Was. Jim Star (James Dean), the bravest kid in town, is a milk-drinker, not a chain smoker. Rebel depicts a world in which no one gets what he or she needs. The generation gap is insurmountable. Gender roles are in crisis. The social order depends on both repressing sexuality on the one hand and exaggerating its danger on the other. Against the background of the desperation that the 1950s ethos provokes, tobacco appears three times. Once, it appears to characterize Star's heartthrob as a "bad girl." Later, the father's rejected cigars mark the weakness of the paternal position. Finally, tobacco appears as a symbol of reckless abandon in a world where kids risk their lives both as a point of honor and to alleviate boredom. A cigarette dangles casually on Star's lips as he prepares to drag race to the cliff's edge, in a test engaging the absolute border between life and death.

This border is explicitly invoked in the best-known film of the French New Wave. The first and last shot of Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) are of cigarettes. The gangster rebel, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), smokes in imitation of his hero, Humphrey Bogart, one of the most famous smokers of all time. In the last scene of this film, he runs from the law, cigarette in mouth. Falling to the ground as he is shot, Michel exhales smoke with his last breath. David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) chooses the other side of the border, reversing Breathless. Chased down by thugs, Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) lights up. Armed with the cowboy brand, Marlboro, he provokes his attackers, has an epiphany, and runs from the fight to deliver his marriage proposal.

The Vamp as Rebel

In Basic Instinct (1992) tobacco has a central role in propelling the plot, in defining the characters, and in presenting the overarching themes of the film. The first scene in which Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) appears shows her smoking as the police approach her for questioning about a murder. The way she smokes—drawing on the cigarette and flicking it away—immediately establishes her character in terms of taking and extinguishing pleasure, taking and extinguishing a life. As the film progresses, the use of tobacco marks the endpoint of defiance, destruction, and self-abandon pushed to their limits in both homicidal and suicidal gestures. As a writer of murder mysteries whose fictions become enacted, Tramell's authorial power is given a demonic slant. She knows that police detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) has smoked before, but her prediction that he will smoke again makes her erotic power, like the addictive power of tobacco, mechanistic and inevitable.

"Killing isn't like smoking; you can quit," says Tramell, whose flippant remark proposes smoking as a basic instinct. But the question is not whether a person can quit (smoking, desiring, or killing) but who is smoking, desiring, or killing. Given the importance of identity and identification in this film, the question of tobacco as a marker for homosexual identity is also relevant, especially given the intense criticism leveled against the film by gay and lesbian communities. Smoking flags the danger that comes from defying social rules. That is, Tramell's smoking in the police station where it is expressly forbidden is analogous to her rejection of the heterosexual imperative. That her lesbian and bisexual objects both end up dead casts her crossing of social-sexual borders, marked by smoking, as a matter of life and death.

The "Human"

This is the border to which each use of tobacco refers, here and across the spectrum: in silent film, in classical narrative cinema, in European art film, and in the Hollywood blockbuster. In each allusion to this border, achieved by a puff of smoke, a deep inhalation, or the flick of an ash, a standard set of meanings is flagged. Sex, destruction, and rebellion announce themselves as having independent and self-sufficient meanings. But the limitation of life and death that tobacco addresses can be further specified as the limit of what it means to be human. Von Sternberg's blonde Venus begins with such a specification when, in the first sequence, a young man asks his friends, "Anyone around here human enough to give me a cigarette?"

In one of the most important examples of product placement in film by the tobacco industry, Superman II (1980) uses cigarettes to delineate the human. Although the Lois Lane of the comics was never a smoker, she becomes one in this film. Despite her role as Kent/Superman's (Christopher Reeve) love object, Lois's (Margot Kidder) smoking does not propose her as desirable to the viewer. But it makes her desirable to Kent by signifying her absolute otherness as a sophisticated, neurotic, big-city, chain-smoking journalist, while he is shy, awkward, naïve, and wholesome. Lane indulges in risky, unhealthy, delicious behaviors: spying on terrorists and eating hamburgers with all the condiments at 9:00 a.m. But her smoking also marks her difference from Superman by signaling her humanness, the difference of her body's fragility from Superman's invulnerability.

Similarly, in a film permeated by an atmosphere of smoke and mist, Blade Runner (1982) blurs the limits between the android and the human. In the most advanced "replicant" model, memories are implanted into Rachael (Sean Young), constructing a history for her that makes her believe that she is human. The fact of her smoking is evidence of her belief in her own humanity, a humanity in which the viewer too becomes convinced, faced with her soulful expression, and her deep inhalation of smoke. Here, as elsewhere, the sexuality, rebellion, and destruction that emerge with each act involving tobacco are an eruption of vulnerability and a refusal of limits against which one establishes one's identity, a refusal that establishes what the limits, for the moment, still are.

Humphrey Bogart and the Double Masculine Ideal

A ctors like Humphrey Bogart helped to glamorize smoking by forging the link between cigarettes and a double masculine ideal, that of the gangster and that of the soldier. On the one hand, Bogart is always partly the gangster of his first breakthrough role in The Petrified Forest (1936), above or outside the law, unconstrained by fear. On the other hand, Bogart is the soldier whose actual experience in the Navy left him with a scarred and partly paralyzed upper lip to which his smoking drew attention. In this case, masculinity is aligned with law, nationalism, and the ideal of manly self-control. Casablanca (1943), where Bogart's smoking is as relentless as his appeal, contains both versions of masculine glamour. When the film opens, Bogart embodies the amoral, or apolitical, gangster model. At its close, he has adopted the manly ideal of self-restraint, renouncing a woman to struggle against the Nazi occupation. He navigates this range with a cigarette clasped firmly in his fist.

If the films of the last decades of the millennium employ tobacco to ask about ultimate limits and borders, between life and death, and between the human and the non-human, tobacco now has another purpose. Now that smoking is banned from public places in New York City, as well as California, Hollywood produces a movie that uses tobacco to ask if we really know what we think we know. Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) returns us to the inquiries that were left in abeyance half a century ago. It is a film in which smoking is arguably the main action, a film where nothing really happens except recasting the moral question "What is good for you?" as an existential one. The story is told from the point of view of two Americans, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray), who cross paths in Japan, where their cultural alienation magnifies their existential alienation. The characters for whom health is cast as a moral question are made to seem simplistic to the point of absurdity. Charlotte's photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) introduces the health question in what seems to be a reasonable, if conventional, way: "Would you please stop smoking? . . . It's just so bad for you . . . ." But the reasonableness of his position is quickly undermined by the ridiculousness of the value of "health" as articulated by an attractive blond starlet whom he has shot. While the starlet explains how good it feels to get rid of toxins by "power cleansing," and how flattering it is to be mistaken for an anorexic, Charlotte, who majored in philosophy, smokes thoughtfully.

Less interested in health than in the philosophical question of what is good for you, Lost in Translation also asks whether being good is good for you, and even whether feeling good is good for you. The sympathy in this film is reserved for the smokers, who, without moralizing about "health," take care of each other with great tenderness. Charlotte and Bob use smoking in a conventional way (to mediate a kind of seduction, and eroticism, to indicate the possibility of adultery) in order to emphasize an inquiry that is somewhat less conventional, at least today. Smoking, an activity that marks the passage between exterior and interior, is still a good metaphor for subjectivity. It is both a sign of alienation and a momentary cure for it. Lost in Translation exposes "health" as a fantasy about happiness and control that occludes the inwardness, nothingness, longing, and loss that enable unlikely moments of connection. Smoking is the film's vehicle for appreciating a border less dramatic than that of life and death, but no less human: the border between abandon and restraint where intimacy plays out, where little nothings of events, like wisps of smoke, move us, make a claim on us, and change us.

See Also Literature; Visual Arts.

? DAWN MARLAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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hyperbolic exaggerated; overstated.

ubiquitous being everywhere; commonplace; widespread.

film noir (literally "black film") refers to the dark looks and themes of many American gangster and detective movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Wreaths of cigarette smoke were a common characteristic of theses films.

epidemiological pertaining to epidemiology, that is, to seeking the causes of disease.