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Vapes are everywhere. I don’t need to tell you that. If you live close to a high street, chances are at least 60% of the shops on it sell vapes. Where I live in Sydney’s inner-west, Newtown’s King St was once a hub of culture and small business. Today, it’s one tobacconist after another. I’m encircled by them.
But the one place in our culture that has not been inundated by little plastic nicotine dispensing machines is the screen. Vapes have been ubiquitous for years now – you’d expect that they might have trickled into our storytelling – the same way smartphones have. For the most part, they just haven’t.
The sci-fi horror film Possessor sees its main character honking on a big old vape now and then, as does the grimy TV crime series Mare of Easttown. But for the most part, when our cultural characters want a nicotine hit, they go back to the analogue version: an old-fashioned dart.
Vapes are just not cool
It was Jemima Kirke who summed up their profoundly unaesthetic quality, in a chat with writer Emma Stout – conducted while smoking a durry.
“When someone’s smoking a vape, I sense a sort of desperation,” Kirke said. “Like, you really need that. This isn’t glamorous. It’s like you’re pressing a button in the hospital for more drugs. And they look horrible. They look like USBs or car parts.”
Cigarettes, on the other hand, have been a shortcut for a sort of unhinged glamour since the dawn of cinema. Femme fatales in the ‘40s and ‘50s sucked them down; action heroes and cops in the ‘60s and ‘70s smoked ‘em while taking a quick break from brooding moodily; and even as the health warnings became impossible to ignore in the 2000’s, characters just kept lighting up.
Related read: How Australia Accidentally Made Smoking Popular Again
Indeed, if anything, the rise in vaping has made cinematic depictions of smoking more prevalent. Celine Song’s icy-cool Materialists features its otherwise impenetrably collected main character relaxing with a ciggie, and Josh O’Connor’s anti-hero tennis champ in Challengers memorably scrabbled in an alleyway to pick up a half-smoked cigarette that Zendaya plucked from his hands and chucked away.
This sort of nicotine nostalgia isn’t isolated, either – it’s part of a broader trend of backwards-looking that is taking firm root in our culture. It was the documentarian Adam Curtis who recently bemoaned that no artists are interested in uncovering how it feels to live right now. And he’s right. We seem to have a cultural cringe away from picking apart much to do with our current moment.
Running Away From Our Present
Think of how surprisingly few films have seemed at all interested in wrestling with covid or its long shadow. There’s a reason Challengers is set just before the pandemic, an ever-so-slightly retro time period that the film deals with glancingly, if at all.
“Covid hasn’t happened yet,” is all that film has to say about its temporal setting. In all other respects, from its styling to its costumes, it could have been set right now.
So instead, we pore obsessively over the past, like Ryan Murphy’s smash hit look at the tragic life of JFK Jr, Love Story. Sarah Pidgeon’s depiction of the effortlessly cool Carolyn Bessette smoking a cigarette on her Manhattan windowsill has become its own contemporary cultural style moment.
Even the shows that are set contemporaneously get shot and constructed like period pieces. The Bear is set in our present, but a version of it that looks like the ‘80s, with characters that act like they’re from the ‘90s. Even the raft of shows about the wealthy elite can be read as a way of mostly disengaging with our present moment: the heroes of White Lotus and the second season of Beef have ensconced themselves in a bubble, their wealth protecting them from the singularly trying times that we currently find ourselves in.
The occasional acknowledgement that things are not going well does sometimes filter through the cracks, but it rarely makes much of a cultural mark – The Apprentice, the film about Donald Trump’s totally resistable rise, got good critical notices but hardly became a point of broader discussion. We are profoundly exhausted by the world we live in, and that exhaustion has manifested itself as a cringe away from anything that depicts it.
Meanwhile, look at any line outside a nightclub in 2026, and many of the kids waiting to get in have put the vapes away and are smoking old fashioned analogue cigarettes. Cigarettes aren’t good for you, but they are cool again. A return to 90s minimalism and heroin chic that dominated the culture at the time, just without the heroin this time.
And who can blame us? Cigarettes have become retro chic. Nostalgic. And nostalgia exists to wrap us up in a warm hug and remind us of a simpler time. Maybe in ten years or so, the cycle will come back around, and we’ll watch a main character elegantly honk on a vape, up there on the big screen. Until then, smoking is back.
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