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”.
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