
Although it lasts just a few seconds, there’s a scene in Conclave, Ralph Fiennes’ latest film about voting for a new pope, that’s impossible to unsee. During a particularly tense moment of pontificating, Cardinal Tedesco – a staunchly traditionalist candidate – whips out a jet black vape and takes a puff. It’s an irresistible hit of bathos, a gasp-in-the-cinema moment of incongruence.
Does it foreshadow the smoke signal that will later rise from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel? Not really. More likely, it’s another symbol of the Vatican’s marriage of tradition and technology – the Catholic Church forced to exist in a largely post-Catholic world. Cardinals now doomscroll, drive Mercedes and, yes, vape. In Conclave’s universe, Hail Marys and Lost Marys coexist.
Watching a cardinal in ecclesiastical garb huffing on a digi-cig is strikingly weird, but vapes on screen are no longer a novelty. Over the last few months, they have appeared in the likes of the thriller series Black Doves, the it-girl favourite Anora and the new season of Industry. Perhaps the true watershed moment was Phillip Schofield smoking one during his grovelling video apology in 2023, a masterclass in eschewing good manners and good optics. Schofield aside, can film and TV ever help make the vape look cool?
Ever since cigarettes first appeared in films in the 1920s, smoking on screen has been seen as a voguish act of hedonism, a teasing act of oral pleasure, a bolshy acceptance that we’re all going to burn anyway so, why the hell not? And unlike vapes, which were invented to stop us from succumbing to dangerous temptation, cigarettes face the devil head on. Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction; the wiseguys of Goodfellas; Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct – smoking kills, but it looks great on screen. And it’s recently enjoyed a resurgence: Saltburn featured 124 scenes with cigarettes, The Idol was a nicotine orgy and popstar Addison Rae even puffed two at once for her “Aquamarine” video. The New York Times boldly suggested in 2022 that cigarettes were “making a comeback”.
Vapes were always going to be a more difficult sell. It wasn’t until 2010 that they first appeared on screen, when Frank Taylor (Johnny Depp) huffed on an e-cig in The Tourist. “It’s not a real cigarette, look! It delivers the same amount of nicotine, but the smoke is water vapor,” he tells his love interest Elise Clifton-Ward (Angelina Jolie). “That’s somewhat disappointing,” she quips back. “Would you rather have me smoking?” Frank asks. “I’d rather you be a man who does exactly as he pleases,” Elise purrs.
Since, as an undisclosed source from The Times claims, only 45 films have been recorded to contain vapes. Their relative absence from visual media is strange, in some ways. Nearly six million adults in the UK vape and probably another six million lie about it (especially likely, considering that five million disposable vapes alone are thrown away each week).
So what explains it? They’re unphotogenic, for a start: clunky, gauche, unsightly and lacking the contrast of textures afforded by cigarettes (perhaps Big Vape is aware that we don’t want to see how tragic it looks). The alluring risk factor is diminished: elemental fire replaced with synthetic sweeteners, coquettish gestures for unwieldy grips, fashionable savoir faire for awkwardness. And while they are part of the modern world and probably use some quite clever technology, there’s something strangely anachronistic about them. Sci-fi never predicted them because they don’t really seem that revolutionary. Cigarettes, meanwhile, are, if not futuristic, entirely timeless: Harrison Ford smoked Marlboros in Blade Runner, not a replicant version of Juul. Smoking cigarettes can make you feel ashamed, but the dysphoria caused by vaping is far more powerful: it makes you feel embarrassed.
And so, they have predominantly been deployed to signal that a character is a bit of a prick, like obnoxious bro Mark in Midsommar, airhead Freddy in The Gentlemen or jaded entrepreneur Marla in I Care a Lot. Elsewhere, they have sometimes been used for a bit of light comic relief, like when Nessa twos a vape and a cigarette at the same time in the Christmas special of Gavin & Stacey, or when the vacuous brats of Bodies Bodies Bodies vape while trying to hide from a murderer on a rampage.
Even conscious attempts to make vaping seem cool fall flat. Anora is filled with a constant deluge of weed vape fumes (lead Mark Eydelshteyn even vaped naked in bed for his audition). In the new trailer for the upcoming dark comedy Death of a Unicorn, Jenna Ortega blows out a ring of vapour to spell out the film distributor A24’s ident. The problem is simple: the device is kitsch, cloying and has none of the cultural history afforded to the cigarette by the Hemingways and Hockneys of the world.
The tableau of the vaping cardinal in Conclave is glamorously camp – funny but not cool. Vaping as a visual gag might be worth a cheap laugh. But beauty will never be found through the miasma of a Triple Melon Elf Bar.
[See more: Conclave: this papal power struggle is high entertainment]