Anyone as old as me (67) knows how much Americans (and Brits) used to smoke.
For much of the last century, tobacco use was commonplace. Cigars. Pipes. Cigarettes. Snuff. Chewing tobacco (back in the 1990s I had to interview someone who kept spitting the juice from his chew into the wastebasket. Disgusting). As writer Dan Wakefield put it in New York in the Fifties, smoking was part of being cool and sophisticated — if you weren’t square, you smoked.
Doctors might warn patients not to smoke too much but this seems to have been the same way they worried overuse of any sort of stimulant or indulgence might be harmful. There was no awareness of the health hazards: while autopsies showed smokers had blackened, shriveled lungs, smoking was so common this seemed normal (as the book Emperor of All Maladies explains).
Smoking was, according to friends who indulged in it, a wonderful thing, simultaneously calming and stimulating. I know lots of people who quit and I think all of them miss smoking.
One of the things that dates science fiction from before, say, 1960, is the assumption — quite reasonable at the time — that smoking would continue on into the far-distant future. Seriously, why would we give it up? The protagonist of Poul Anderson’s War of the Wing-Men happily takes up smoking again after doing without due to being stranded on an alien planet. EE Doc Smith’s Lensmen celebrate graduating from Lensman Academy by lighting up with their preferred brand of smokes.
Even after the Surgeon General’s report that tobacco was (gasp!) harmful, that assumption continued. Smoking was addictive and very hard to quit, and lots of people still enjoyed it. American tobacco companies put millions into promoting their product and fighting any sort of restrictions. Smoking would always be commonplace and unremarkable … right?
Slowly, though, the balance has shifted. In 1953, 47 percent of adults in the US smoked cigarettes; now it’s 1 in 5. A combination of knowledge (nobody doubts smoking kills), government warnings, restrictions on advertising (when I arrived in the United States, cigarettes commercials bombarded TV viewers) and restrictions on where you can smoke have all discouraged tobacco use. Attitudes change too: someone who refuses to let friend smoke in their home is no longer an uptight killjoy, they’re sensible.
None of this proves tobacco use won’t be around a century from now or even five centuries from now, but it’s unlikely to be as common as 1930s science fiction imagined.
The flip side of this is that with fewer actors who smoke in the present, the past in movies and TV has become one where nobody smoked either. In the last season of Agents of SHIELD, they were traveling through time, stopping at various points in history. When they run into Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a speakeasy during Prohibition, nobody there smokes; even the president doesn’t sport his famous cigarette holder.
Just recently I finished watching the 2015 British series Jekyll and Hyde, set in the 1930s. The plot concerns Robert Jekyll (Tom Bateman) discovering the truth about himself and why he hulks out when he doesn’t take his meds. It’s watchable, though hardly must-see TV, but once again it exists in a world where nobody in the 1930s smokes.
I can understand actors not wanting to take up the habit (or pick it up again if they quit); I had a friend who learned to smoke for a theater role and remained addicted for years. It’s a little harder to understand when print fiction does it. For instance The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry is set partly in England in 1960. Nobody in the books smokes except the protagonist’s boyfriend, and the disgusting smell — she has to clean herself after snuggling with him a while — is a clear sign he’s not right for her.
Bollocks. I was in England int he 1960s and just like the US lots of people smoked. Much as I disliked it, the smell was omnipresent — there was no point to washing it off because five minutes later you’d smell it again. It’s the most glaring of several errors in the book (Brits refer to math as “maths” for instance) — though I enjoyed the book even so.
I don’t know if it’s just sloppy writing or a sign that lots of people find smoking so gross they don’t want their characters doing it, any more than they’d toss out a racist insult. Either way, if this goes on, anyone who travels back 100 years is going to be astonished how heavy the smoking was.
Art by Jack Kirby, Bob Kane and Gene Colan, top to bottom.
I’m extremely annoyed by the lack of smoking in movies and shows set before the 1990s, say. I mean, we have so much computer technology, and you can’t add some CGI smoke? The actors don’t have to actually smoke, you know!
I also get the impulse to not make heroes racist or sexist if they’re in a historical setting, but it is interesting reading a lot of history, because even people we think are fairly admirable were, at times, ridiculously sexist and/or racist. That’s easier to reconcile, for me, than the smoking — maybe the hero of the story is the *one* person who’s not racist! — but, yeah, the lack of smoking bugs me.
The observation about older SF assuming that smoking would just be a normal thing even in the near or far future is so dead on; although it wasn’t the main point of either posts, I couldn’t help but note that fact when writing about H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books or Rosel George Brown’s Sibyl Sue Blue.
(Of course, I can’t help thinking about that scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which everyone in the future is smoking and one of the characters mockingly observes that people back in the 20th century thought wheat germ was healthy…)
But yeah, I definitely also find it bothersome when movies/TV shows, etc. set in any period prior to the mid-1980s do not show anybody, or at best only a few people smoking when it was in fact pretty ubiquitous – all you have to do is watch movies from those periods, or even TV shows; heck, I recall that sometimes guests on talk shows well into the 1980s, like Donahue or early Oprah, smoked on set.
One more recent show that does a pretty good job in that regard is the German series Babylon Berlin set in the early 1930s.
p.s. almost forgot one of the more obvious examples of a recent(ish) show that did get that detail pretty much right: Mad Men.
If you’re writing a story set between 1600 and 1980, your hero character does not have to smoke or be racist, but if systemic racism, sexism, and ubiquitous smoking (and alcohol!) are not part of the background and culture, you’re lying about the world.
Every surface had a yellow tinge, every room reeked of tobacco, the three-martini lunch was normal, drunk driving got you a mild scolding, popular entertainment was anchored in racist and sexist caricature. That was simply the world we lived in.
This drove me nuts on TV shows like Agent Carter and Heroes of Tomorrow. No, you cannot center an episode on a very public interracial love affair in Memphis in the 1950s or Los Angeles during WWII and have all the background characters ignore the public displays of affection. It did not happen that way, and quiet nods toward segregation as a minor inconvenience do not get you a pass.
I suspect a lot of people can’t grasp how evil and horrifying “race mixing” was seen as. It’s like the Victorian obsession with masturbation — it’s not like we don’t have people who condemn it today but it seems incredibly alien even so.
Audiences today find smoking a turn-off so many people will switch off shows with lots of smoking, therefore smoking gets removed. A good thing too, say I, who have always loathed smoking.
I’m all in on how disgusting it is. Despite which I write smoking into lots of my 20th century-set fiction because it’s a clear marker it was a different time (smoking in hospitals, for instance).
I am 60, I’ve never smoked, I’ve never seen my parents smoking, nor my friends while I was growing up (though I used to buy sweet cigarettes for the cards).
I was aware of smoking around (I remember a watch repairer sending me to a newsagent to get some cigarettes for him – I think I was about 13 at the time -that would never happen now), one of my university friends was a smoker.
In the late 80s I started work and some people in the office smoked though they generally sat fa enough away from me to bother me – the main problem was one man who would every now and then wander about with his pipe.
Everyone needs to use the toilet at times but many TV shows never show anyone using the toilet (unless it is relevant to the plot). I don’t mind, I have no particular wish to see it. Nor do I particularly wish to see smoking. Sure, if they do feature it, they should portray it realistically but I have no problem with it not being mentioned or shown.
I think in the UK, there may be some pressure on TV stations to not show it or limit the portrayal to not glamorise or encourage young viewers to take up smoking
(Certainly the TV adverts that used to be ubiquitous are no longer shown)
Well in contemporary settings there are huge areas where you’re not allowed to smoke (yay!) so it’s a lot more plausible.
Funny, I’m 67 and along with my parents it seemed like all the adults around me smoked. Very few of my friends. By the time I got to college, dividing the dining halls into no-smoking zones was a thing which was probably when I could tell the difference between smoking and life without it.