Helen O'Hara is a film journalist for Empire magazine. We asked her what she thought about the depiction of vaping in movies - does it say anything about a character's personality? Here's what she had to say…
No action a character takes in a movie, especially a good one, is without meaning. If they’re smoking, or drinking, or even wearing a red scarf, it’s because the director of the movie wants the audience to judge the character’s personality by those actions. So what does it mean if a character vapes on screen? The big screen is still trying to figure that out, and we’ve already got a few examples to show us the way.
First, let's review history.
From the earliest days of cinema, audiences have been drawn to cigarettes. It’s hard to imagine the blockbuster movies of the 1930s and 1940s without them. Think of beautiful girls holding cigarettes and asking for a light, with seductive eyes like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Or mysterious private detectives standing under streetlights, their cigarette smoke wafting in their wake.
Rita Hayworth in Gilda
Fred Astaire's ballerinas often smoked, and Marlena Dietrich used cigarettes to add charm to her characters. Smoking had its own language in those days: the smoke added an air of mystery and drama to a film, or told the audience that the smoker was a person of class and importance.
But as the dangers of smoking became known, its symbolism changed. Smoking became a symbol of danger: villains, like John Travolta as Castor Troy in Face/Off, or Elle Driver’s Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill, smoke, but protagonists rarely do. The few exceptions are transformed heroes who act without regard for consequences, like Keanu Reeves in Constantine, or who are destined to die, like Carlos Oliveira (Oded Fehr) in Resident Evil: Extinction.
The rise of vaping on screen
With the rise of vaping, it also requires its own language on screen, because no character in a movie acts without a reason. And since its modern connotation is not about death and destruction like cigarettes, how should filmmakers use vaping imagery?
The available examples give us some clues. One of the first appearances of vaping was in the 2010 film The Tourist, where Johnny Depp’s character Frank Tupelo uses an e-cigarette on a high-speed train in France. He cleverly avoids a no-smoking sign that at the time did not apply to vaping. By doing so, the audience immediately deduces that he is someone who can bend or even break the rules if he wants to.
A scene from Drive Hard
Vaping also works to the charisma of Rodrigo Santoro's character in Focus (2015). Santoro plays billionaire Formula One team owner Rafael Garriga, and he vapes regularly. This suggests he's tech-savvy, health-conscious, and not as laid-back as people assume. It's a pretty good character development for a film about con artists and trickery. John Cusack vaped to similar effect in Drive Hard (2014), where he played a thief who tricked a veteran race car driver into becoming his personal driver. He was a deceitful character, but later proved to be more of a good guy than a villain. Even Zac Efron in Bad Neighbors vaped, and it seemed to fit his ridiculous playboy image.
The meaning of vape on screen
Sometimes, vaping is a sign that a character is in recovery, or struggling with an addiction. Season 2 of Detective saw Rachel McAdam’s Detective Bezzerides vape —a stark contrast to her drinking and gambling habits. The show suggests that smoking was once a habit she successfully controlled, a small glimmer of hope in a cruel world.
Several popular TV characters have also made the switch from smoking to vaping – with mixed success and failure. Eastenders veteran Dot Cotton made the switch in 2013, and at the suggestion of June Brown, the actress who played her is also a vaper.
Patty and Selma on The Simpsons reject change because it’s “too clean.” Both decisions are in character. Cotton is a sensible woman who takes care of herself, and Eastenders is designed to reflect the real world, where vaping is still prevalent. And Patty and Selma? They’re not realistic or sensible, so it makes sense that they reject change.
A scene from True Detective
There have been some attempts to portray the dangers of smoking with vaping. For example, Dennis Quaid’s killer character in Beneath The Darkness (2012) uses a vape throughout the film, but does not use any action to tell the audience about his character. More interesting and effective is the film The Lazarus Effect (2015), where a character with superpowers uses a vape device as a weapon.
In reality, it’s still early days for vaping on the big screen. There’s no single language for the habit, which can represent glamour, danger, control, or even disbelief. But the rise of vaping in the real world and on screen suggests we’ll likely see more of it in the future, and the symbolic language and character meanings will likely evolve along with it.
