Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Smoking gun thickens the plot

By Dale Bryant

A cigarette can say a lot about a person. And I don't mean all that "smoking's bad for you; it can ruin your health" stuff. I mean interesting stuff. Like if a guy casually blows smoke rings while taunting some poor slob he's about to blow away, you know he's a really callous person. Probably a sociopath. A more ordinary sort of a killer would hold the cigarette between his thumb and index finger, drag deeply and drop his arm to his side, hiding the cigarette, but leaving a small telltale ribbon of smoke rising from the back of his hand. Cigarettes can offer a big clue about how sexy someone is, too. A glamorous actress increases her sex-kitten quotient if she can French inhale--that is, if she can blow smoke out her mouth while simultaneously inhaling it back through her nose and out again through her mouth. This is very sexy stuff.

Back when I was warming up to write the Great American Novel, I wrote a lot of short stories. Most of my characters smoked. Why? Because a writer can reveal a lot about a character by describing how he or she smokes. There are also endless possibilities for meaningful eye contact when a handsome stranger lights the heroine's cigarette. And a suggestion of even better things to come if she should be so bold as to cup his hand and pull it close as she leans forward and allows him to light her fire, as it were.

There are perfectly good reasons why writers and movie directors used to inject cigarettes into dramatic situations. It's a nice little crutch. Characters can light cigarettes and exchange meaningful glances without ever having to utter a word of dialogue. Then cigarettes got a bad reputation. And characters in movies had to get along without them.

Movie characters could no longer light cigarettes across a table in an intimate little restaurant; they stopped puffing nervously while trying to meet deadlines; they even had to stop smoking in bed, which, of course, meant they had to get right down to business, which probably is why sex on the screen has become such a dreadful bore.

For a while there, it looked as if a whole generation of Americans might grow up without ever knowing what French inhaling was. With real-life smokers pitifully lined up outside office buildings, dodging raindrops to grab an illicit drag on a cigarette, and with smoking banned in restaurants and just about every other place where anyone who wanted to light up used to be able to, it seemed as though the pleasures of smoking might soon be relegated to the oral tradition. And I'm not talking here about anything Freudian. What I mean to say is that cigarettes had such a bad rep that it looked as if the only way young people could learn about the tradition of smoking cigarettes was at the knees of their elders.

But that's all changing because of a trend I've been observing. Smoking is back on the silver screen. Big time. I know this because I watch a lot of movies. And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that I have not seen a movie in at least a year where people weren't smoking cigarettes as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

To watch movies these days, one would think that it's still OK to smoke in restaurants and offices; one might even think people still smoke after sex.

I'm not the only one who's noticed this phenomenon. A while back, an intrepid TV reporter asked a movie producer why so many people were smoking in movies these days. The reporter was so brazen as to suggest a little money might be passing under the table. Why a reporter would think such a thing is beyond me. Just because Coca-Cola pays big bucks to ensure that a character in a movie pulls a Classic Coke from the refrigerator instead of a Pepsi? Or that a car manufacturer pays to put a movie character in one make of car instead of another?

Meanwhile, all the anti-smoking people are blaming Joe Camel for the growing popularity of cigarettes among young people. In press releases, the anti-smoking people refer to "slick tobacco advertising," and they say it's responsible for a 9.7 percent increase in smoking among Santa Clara County youth between 1990 and 1993. Of course, these are old numbers. Seven years ago, everyone in movies wasn't lighting up the way they are today. One teacher at Los Gatos High School told me recently that when she walks across her classroom, she can smell cigarettes on many students. She said she thinks as many as 75 percent of her students may be smoking.

I can't help thinking Joe Camel is getting too much credit for this trend. Pay attention to what's going on in the movies, and I think you'll agree.

I started smoking when I was in college, and I quit, under intense spousal pressure, when I was 25. I haven't longed for a cigarette in many years, but I have to tell you that watching all these people enjoying cigarettes in movies is making me remember all the things I liked about smoking. Like when I lived in the college dormitory and I returned from the library just under the wire for the 10:45 p. m. lockout and climbed the stairs and wandered down the hall to Myrn Smith's room, where all my friends were gathering to discuss the day and to light up a cigarette and pass it around so everyone could have a drag or two. When we all got a little experience under our belts, someone might go downstairs to the cigarette machine and buy a pack to share. Sometimes I might smoke a whole cigarette by myself. God. It was so decadent. It was so good.

Do I remember waking up with a mouth that tasted like a herd of buffalo had stampeded through it? Not unless I force myself to. Do I remember when I lived alone--a single career girl in a studio apartment--and every morning brought a frantic search in ashtrays for a cigarette butt long enough to light because I never bought more than a pack at a time and always ran out before the night was through, and I had to have a cigarette first thing in the morning? Only if I force myself to think about why smoking really was pretty disgusting.

I'm a fairly intelligent person, and I know all the reasons why people shouldn't smoke. My father--lured at the age of 14 by slick tobacco advertising that portrayed smokers of Chesterfield cigarettes as the ultimate sophisticates--suffers from emphysema. I've known my share of people who've died from lung cancer, too. Many of them populated my early career as a journalist. We all worked under a haze of smoke, typewriters clicking furiously. After work, we'd gather in the hotel bar next to the newspaper and smoke more cigarettes while we enjoyed a drink. That was good, too.

At least it seemed good at the time. But, of course, that was back when I was young and consequences could be ignored or, at the very least, delayed. Sort of like in the movies.

Dale Bryant is the editor of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.