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Cigarette, Anyone?
by Sam Folk-Williams Brought to you by 98six.com, the college health experts. There has never been a moment in the history of movies when cigarettes have failed to play a significant role on screen--mimicking, shaping or critiquing the roles they have played in American society. But Michael Mann's latest critical darling The Insider is delivering the word on how the image projected by cigarette smoking, and the cigarette industry itself, is changing. But step back a minute. Check Winona Ryder driving her beige BMW through the mess of Houston's freeways with Janeane Garofalo, singing along to "Fruits of Another," slowly dancing her head back, seeing through oversized sunglasses and smoking so casually, with a smile of satisfaction and contentment. It's all cool until Ben Stiller rear ends her while talking on his cell phone. "Do you ever have those moments in life where you think everything is okay?" Stiller asks Ryder on their first date ten screen-minutes after their car-wreck introduction in the opening scenes of 1994's Reality Bites. |
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Maybe she has had those moments, but they were only, well, momentary. According to Reality Bites, and so many other movies of its time, smoking cigarettes on end goes hand-in-hand with hard life in the 90s. No job worth dragging yourself out of bed for; no money to spend on anything but fast food, gasoline and cheap liquor; no hope of sustaining a relationship beyond the first disappointing sexual encounter. Smoking seems to be the only thing that can be depended on to deliver what it's designed to deliver--comfort. Step back another minute. In Paul Verhoeven's 1992 sexual thriller, Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone models the smoking of a cigarette to the most overblown seductive extremes imaginable. "Are you sorry he's dead?" Michael Douglas asks Stone during his initial investigation of the ice-pick murder that opens the film. "Yeah," says Stone, letting out a dramatically cool breath of smoke, "I liked fucking him." Other obvious issues aside, Stone uses her cigarette in this scene as a driving source of psychological power over the sexually vulnerable leading man. Stone's deliberate cigarette-fondling motions punctuate her speech and cause her chilling words to resonate deeply, with the viewer as well as with the other characters on screen. |
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"Do you have a cigarette?" Stone asks Douglas in a later scene, while he is escorting her to the police station for questioning. Douglas delivers a self-assuring: "I don't smoke," to which Stone curtly, coolly replies, "Yes you do." The power of smoking is clear. Stone's character is using the somewhat gauche status that cigarettes took on in the '80s and '90s to play up her own rebellious, I'm-a-woman-and-I-can-kill-people persona on screen. There was a time, of course, when cigarettes were a simple part of the everyday grandeur of cinema. Look at Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961), Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944), Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) or any of the John Huston film-noirs (such as the 1941 classic, The Maltese Falcon). We see Bogart, Newman, Grant and so many other leading men and women incorporating cigarettes into their every movement. As The Insider illustrates, though, in present times cigarettes have become a sign of the ruthless nature of corporate-American mentality, serving as a tangible suggestion that people will do anything to make a fortune. But, that's not to say that American pop culture is in exclusive cigarette-rejection mentality. The big screen seems to be taking away the diverse visceral appeal that it used to hold for cigarettes and has begun capitalizing on the common perception of smoking that prevails in American mainstream media. When we see Winona Ryder filling up ashtray after ashtray, we don't need the context of the plot to assume that she's feeling desperate. But when Cary Grant lit up on the silver screen, it was nothing more than an affirmation of his sex appeal. The Insider is telling us that cigarettes have a new image, and the movies no longer have to subscribe to that image--they can tear it apart. |
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