finalthoughts

    Smoking on film enables the audience to recognize certain characteristics of the person with the cigarette, especially notions of gender, for example Humphrey Bogart displaying masculinity with a cigarette in one hand in Casablanca. Bette Davis, shown above on a 1947 magazine cover, is another example, fearlessly displaying her feminine power as she waves around her cigarette in All About Eve. The feminine mystique is brought to life by the way Marlene Dietrich bends gender rules in Morocco, the same film that features Gary Cooper smoking as a means of defense, or possibly for escapism.

     The prop of a cigarette is a small but powerful one in the cinema. Note the film Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, France, 1950), a film that relies on images and props rather than words to convey its message. The two lovers share a cigarette through their prison wall, blowing the smoke back and forth. Here the smoke is represented as dreams or memories, which is the only thing they have together. The cloud of haze is shared through their pipe, and this time the cigarette knows no gender, but only the human.

     While small, these props represent larger physical things, for example in All About Eve the cigarette plays out like a sword, which Margo uses as a defense against men. The sword metaphor could also be applied to Morocco, as Amy uses it as a defense against her vulnerability. There is even the idea of the cigarette as a phallic representation, perhaps by Cooper (pictured below in a Hollywood glamour shot) or Bogart as an affirmation of their manhoods.

The cigarette is not only used as a defense; in fact, it is frequently a prop of pleasure. The history of smoking by women began by females like the gypsy, the whore and the actress, all going against the traditional roles forced on them by the hierarchy of the male power structure. These women gave themselves a form of pleasure rather than receiving it. Freud once stated, "That smoking is a form of oral pleasure, let there be no doubt."**

While Margo Channing might have negative subconscious reasons for smoking, she also smokes for pleasure, as evident in the scene where she smokes alone in bed. Likewise, the characters in Un Chant d'Amour also derive pleasure from smoking.

    The way the characters hold their cigarettes is crucial; femininity is shown by the two-finger hold, smaller fingers down, while masculinity is represented by the knuckle-baring index-finger-and-thumb hold. Even the blowing out of the smoke can be identified as a certain context, for example, Margo blowing her smoke upwards in All About Eve could be perceived as very feminine.

     Even in films from the time of the introduction of the Production Code up to 1950 it is possible to see how gender constructions are formed. Like previously stated, humans are not born "masculine" nor "feminine", therefore audiences rely on the gestures, postures and movements of those who created such constructs in the past or those already established to form their own notions of gender.

     Matthew Hilton, in his study of smoking in British culture, states, "The cinema and the Hollywood film here provided a particularly strong incentive to smoking as screen 'gods' and 'goddesses', from Dietrich to Bogart, were transformed into sophisticated icons of the culture of the cigarette."***

     Notions of gender, whether masculine, feminine or even neither or both, are ideologically constructed. Being male does not necessarily mean being masculine, therefore it is important to note the other physicalities (like the cigarette) that do define such constructs as masculinity or femininity. Learning these representations from the cinema is a great place to begin.