2016: The Year in Cinematic Smoking

Times change, and the movies are constantly trying to change with them. One of the joys of following movies is to see the ways in which our evolving, changing culture is reflected through our popular entertainments. Sometimes, we can only see where we are going by watching the ways in which the movies follow us as we get there.

Most of the time.

Sometimes, movies can be pretty retrograde. Wonderfully, glamorously retrograde. Oh sure, this isn’t always a good thing. We want the movies to be forward-thinking. But every now and then, we look to the past with a wistful eye. And a smoky visage. Because here’s the thing: smoking is terrible, and terrible for you, and it’s been almost entirely scrubbed out of modern polite society. This isn’t to say that people don’t smoke anymore. We’ve just peer-pressured them all into exiling themselves when they do. On curbs and in backyards and in their own hazy, stinking apartments, far from the discerning nostrils of cafe society. And yet it is undeniably true that 2016 at the movies has been utterly and rapturously in love with smoking.

And not weed-smoking, either. As cigarette-smoking has become increasingly verboten, pot smoking has become rapidly more normalized. We’ve had plenty of years within recent memory where pot smoking was glamorized and lionized and otherwise stitched into the fabric of our art. Basically pick any year with a significant Seth Rogen contribution and you’ve landed on a year when cinema was in love with pot smoking. 2016 has been different. Movies in 2016 have been head-over-heels enamored with smoking in a way they haven’t been since … 1994, maybe? The year that Reality Bites and Winona Ryder enshrined Generation X into the smokers’ Hall of Fame and Pulp Fiction‘s Uma Thurman exhaled expectantly from her booth at Jackrabbit Slims.

What makes the Smokers of 2016 so fascinating has been just how varied they have been. For starters, they’re some of our most beloved leaders and political figures. That we got two separate movies in 2016 that dramatized the younger days of Barack Obama is fascinating enough. But the fact that both Barry and Southside with You separately took enthusiastic interest in young Obama’s smoking habits takes it to another level. Before 2016, Obama’s smoking habit was a well-known bit of trivia and a vice that we’d all agreed to find charming about our President. After 2016, having watched Southside with You and Barry, we have to at least consider … is his smoking habit one of the things we like BEST about Obama? It communicates so much about him so quickly! His youth, his romanticism, his thoughtfulness (consider how many times in Barry we see Obama smoke while he’s reading; the very first shot of the movie is Barry Obama smoking while reading a letter on an airplane). Smoking is also the quickest shortcut to giving an Obama character flaws without taking shots at, say, his beliefs or his politics. In that way, what we love about Smoking Obama is how it gives us something to disapprove without getting political.

In a very similar way, in Jackie, Natalie Portman’s Jacqueline Kennedy smokes like a chimney to communicate a contrast between the perfect facade of Camelot and the earthbound realities that left her a widow discarded by her own country. Yes, sure, it’s mostly there to communicate period detail — and to wallow in the ways in which we were allowed to poison ourselves right there in front of God and society — but the sheer volume of cigarette smoke floating in the frame at any given time ends up contributing a lot to the misty atmospherics at play in Jackie. To America, Jackie was regal and pristine. Just off camera, the lady was — if this movie is any indication — a pillbox-hatted smokestack.

20th Century Women sees Annette Bening a good 15 years removed from Jackie and yet still, it’s the cigarettes that have endured. Playing a single mother in 1979, looking to find a way to parent her teenage son via a web of surrogates (including Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, and Billy Crudup), Bening gives some of the best scenes of her career when she’s just reacting to people. And invariably, these reactions are accompanied by the sight of a fuming cigarette between her fingers. Similarly, Elle Fanning’s character uses smoking to help her seem older and more mature, a tactic as venerable (and as misguided) as any in our culture. These aren’t just photogenic poses, either (though it should not be underestimated: everybody looks good when photographed while smoking; it is just a fact). Much mention is made about Bening’s character’s smoking habit, and the harsh realities of a life spent in its thrall do not escape the film’s notice. In a way, 20th Century Women represents the end of this era when smoking didn’t have to portend any ill.

Of course, it’s not just the period pieces where smokers thrived. Two of the most iconic images of contemporary-set indie cinema in 2016 involved characters lost in thought and exhaling carcinogens. In the breathtaking final third of Moonlight, Andre Holland’s character is photographed against the wall of his diner, taking a smoke break, exhaling a plume of pure sex appeal. Director Barry Jenkins told Vanity Fair‘s Little Gold Men podcast that the shot wasn’t even supposed to be in the film until he saw Holland smoking on his actual smoke break. Serendipity rules in the Year of Smoking 2016. Meanwhile, no one image helped to sell the indie family drama Krisha better than its title character staring off into the middle distance, cigarette between her fingers, contemplating how she’s going to survive the however-many minutes she has left with her family. Smoking has always been used this way — indicators of fascination or of characters at the end of their rope. In 2016, these indicators were iconic.

So smoke up, movie characters of 2016. You filled our cinematic lungs all year, and for that we thank you.