Why are cigarettes cool? Because of The Hays Code. 

Installed in 1934, the Hollywood Production Code, colloquially called the Hays Code (after Will Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America at the time), was a self-censorship device that major film studios adhered to in order to avoid investigation by the government. The Hays Code was notoriously strict about depictions of sex and violence in American film, not only cutting nudity, profanity, and murder, but also any depictions of homosexuality, divorce, miscegenation, drugs, childbirth, and taking the Lord’s name in vain. The Hays Code also included a list of “caution” items that urged “good taste.” Things like the depiction of smuggling, scenes of deliberate seduction (of women; men could be seduced), theft scenes that could be misconstrued as instruction, men and woman in bed together, “heavy” kissing, prostitution, open criticism of another country, state executions, and “attitude toward public characters and institutions” were all frowned upon.

Noticeably absent from the list was cigarettes. Tobacco use was fair game in feature films, and it didn’t take long for filmmakers to use cigarette consumption as a stand-in for sexual activity. Cigarettes involved the mouth and lips. If you were sharing a light, it involved holding a lit match between two people’s faces. People could touch as they held a burning cigarette to the unlit tip of another. It was all very phallic and sexual. While the corollary may not be direct, the CDC did note that cigarette consumption went way, way up in the 1940s. A film critic would point to the Hays Code as a direct reason for that. Since the late 1970s, cigarette use has been on the decline. This corresponds with discovered health problems that cigarettes cause. 

Despite a youth surge in tobacco use in the ’90s (it was those nasty grunge rockers, I tells ya!), smoking has become less and less popular an activity. In 2018, instances of smoking were as infrequent as they had ever been. Some might say this was the result of aggressive anti-smoking advertising campaigns. Others might cite changing fashions; it’s simply not as “cool” as it once was. Smoking is no longer needed as a sexual code in movies. Now smoking itself is considered a thing to be noted by censors, and the MPAA (what the Hays Code became in the late 1960s) can give a harder rating to films that depict smoking. 

 The Smokefree Media project, based out of the University of San Francisco — cognizant of the correlation between movies and cigarette use — have a website devoted to tobacco use in feature films, grading every movie they examine on a scale of how glorified tobacco use is. In 2009, the project put the biggest movie in the world into their crosshairs. Evidently, James Cameron’s “Avatar,” specifically the character of Dr. Grace Augustine played by Sigourney Weaver, was awarded the dreaded Black Lung.