It’s eight o’c lock on a Saturday night. Two cool-looking people, both in their late twenties, are sitting across from each other at an elegantly set table in a trendy restaurant, located in the downtown area of a North American city. For convenience, let’s call them Cheryl and Ted. Other couples are seated at tables in other parts of the eatery. The lights are turned down low. The atmosphere is unmistakably romantic, sustained by the soft, mellifluous sounds of a three-piece jazz band playing in the background. Cheryl and Ted are sipping drinks, making small talk, looking coyly into each other’s eyes. At a certain point, they decide to step outside for a few moments and engage in a shared activity—smoking cigarettes in a secluded area outside the restaurant, set aside for smokers. Smoking is a tradition that this particular restaurant has decided to preserve, despite great opposition to it from city legislators, not to mention society. The scene overall is distinctly reminiscent of a classic Hollywood romantic movie.
What Cheryl and Ted do not know is that nearby is a semiotician, whom we shall call Martha, quietly and unobtrusively capturing their actions and conversations on a smartphone both inside and outside the restaurant. Martha is our research assistant, assigned to record our couple’s words, facial expressions, body language, and other behaviors on her mobile device, so that we can dissect them semiotically. Her device transmits the images and sounds simultaneously to a remote monitoring computer to which we have access.
Let’s start by first examining the smoking gestures that our two subjects made. As the video starts, we see Cheryl taking her cigarette out of its package in a slow, deliberate manner, inserting it coquettishly into the middle of her mouth, then bringing the flame of a match towards it in a leisurely, drawn-out fashion. Next to Cheryl, we see Ted also taking his cigarette from its package, but, in contrast, he employs a terse movement, inserting it into the side of his mouth, and then lighting it with a swift hand action. As the two puff away, we see Cheryl keeping the cigarette between her index and third fingers, periodically flicking the ashes into an outside ashtray provided by the restaurant for smokers, inserting and removing the cigarette from her mouth, always with graceful, circular, slightly swooping motions of the hand. Occasionally, she tosses her long, flowing hair back, away from her face. Ted is leaning against a nearby wall, keeping his head taut, looking straight, holding his cigarette between the thumb and middle finger, guiding it to the side of his mouth with sharp, pointed movements. Cheryl draws in smoke slowly, retaining it in her mouth for a relatively longer period than Ted, exhaling the smoke in an upwards direction with her head tilted slightly to the side, and, finally, extinguishing her cigarette in the ashtray. Ted inhales smoke abruptly, keeping the cigarette in his mouth for a relatively shorter period of time, blowing the smoke in a downward direction (with his head slightly aslant), and then extinguishing the cigarette by pressing down on the butt with his thumb, almost as if he were effacing or destroying evidence.
Cigarettes and Courtship
Welc ome to the world of the semiotician who is, above all else, a “people-watcher,” observing how individuals and groups behave in everyday situations, always asking: What does this or that mean? Meaning is the sum and substance of what semioticians study, no matter in what form it comes, small or large, so to speak. So, let’s start our excursion into the fascinating world of semiotics by unraveling what the various gestures and movements recorded by Martha might mean. But before starting, it might be useful to check whether there is some historically based link between smoking, sex, and romance.
Tobacco is native to the Western Hemisphere and was part of rituals of the Maya and other Native peoples, believing that it had medicinal and powerful mystical properties. As Jason Hughes has aptly put it, “Tobacco was used to appease the spiritual hunger, thereby gaining favors and good fortune.”1 The Arawak society of the Caribbean , as observed by none other than Christopher Columbus in 1492, smoked tobacco with a tube they called a tobago, from which the word tobacco is derived. Brought to Spain in 1556, tobacco was introduced to France in the same year by the French diplomat Jean Nicot , from whose name we get the term nicotine. In 1585 the English navigator, Sir Francis Drake , took tobacco to England , where the practice of pipe smoking became popular almost immediately, especially among Elizabethan courtiers. From there, tobacco use spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world. By the seventeenth century it had reached China , Japan , the west coast of Africa, and other regions.
By the early twentieth century cigarette smoking became a routine activity in many societies. In America alone more than one thousand cigarettes per person each year were being consumed. American society at the time believed that smoking was not only highly fashionable, but that it also relieved tensions and produced physical health benefits. During World War II , physicians encouraged sending soldiers cigarettes in ration kits. However, epidemiologists started noticing around 1930 that lung cancer —rare before the twentieth century—had been increasing dramatically. The rise in lung cancer rates among the returning soldiers eventually raised a red flag. The American Cancer Society and other organizations initiated studies comparing deaths among smokers and nonsmokers, finding significant differential rates of cancer between the two. In 1964 the U.S. Surgeon General ’s report affirmed that cigarette smoking was a health hazard of sufficient importance to warrant the inclusion of a warning on cigarette packages. Cigarette advertising was banned from radio and television, starting in 1971. In the 1970s and 1980s several cities and states passed laws requiring nonsmoking sections in enclosed public and work places. In February 1990 federal law banned smoking on all domestic airline flights of less than six hours. Today, there are laws throughout North America that prohibit smoking in public places, buildings, and vehicles. The goal of society over the last decades has been to achieve a smoke-free world.
Yet in spite of the health dangers and all the legislative and practical obstacles, a sizeable portion of the population continues to smoke. Although there has been a dramatic shift in how tobacco is perceived across the world, many still desire to smoke.2 Why do people smoke, despite the harm that smoking poses and despite its prohibition virtually everywhere? People smoke, or at least start smoking, because it is socially meaningful (or at least fashionable). To the semiotician, this comes as no surprise, since cigarettes have, throughout their history, been perceived as signs of something desirable or attractive. Let’s consider what these might be.
The smoking scene that Martha captured on video is identifiable essentially as an ersatz courtship display, a recurrent, largely unconscious, pre-mating ritual rooted in gesture, body poses, and physical actions that keep the two sexes differentiated and highly interested in each other. As Margaret Leroy has suggested, such actions are performed because sexual traditions dictate it.3 Let’s scrutinize Cheryl’s smoking gestures more closely. The way in which she held the cigarette invitingly between her index and middle fingers, fondling it gently, and then inserting it into the middle of her mouth, slowly and deliberately, constitutes a sequence of unconscious movements that convey sexual interest in her partner. At the same time, she exhibits her fingers and wrist to her suitor, areas of the body that have erotic overtones. Finally, her hair-tossing movements, as she simultaneously raises a shoulder, constitute powerful erotic signals as well.
Ted’s gestures form a sequential counterpart to Cheryl’s, emphasizing masculinity. Her movements are slow, his movements are abrupt; she puffs the smoke upwards, he blows it downwards; she holds the cigarette in a tantalizing dangling manner between her index and middle fingers, he holds it in a sturdy way between his thumb and middle finger; she puts out the cigarette with a lingering hand movement, he crushes it forcefully. Overall, her gestures convey smooth sensuality, voluptuousness, sultriness; his gestures suggest toughness, determination, and control. She is playing the female role and he the male one in this unconscious courtship display—roles determined largely by culture, and especially by the images of smoking that come out of classic Hollywood movies, which can be analyzed in exactly the same way.
Smoking in contexts such as this one is essentially romantic fun and games. Moreover, because it is now socially proscribed, it is probably even more fun to do (at least for some people). The history of smoking shows that tobacco has, in fact, been perceived at times as a desirable activity and at others as a forbidden one.4 But in almost every era, as Richard Klein 5 has argued, cigarettes have had some connection to something that is erotically, socially, or intellectually appealing—musicians smoke; intellectuals smoke; artists smoke; and to this day romantic partners smoke (despite all the warnings). Movies have always told us that cigarettes are meaningful props in sex and romance, as do advertisements for cigarettes. Smoking is, in a word, a sexual language, which, as Michael Starr puts it, is designed to convey “certain qualities of the smoker.”6
Ever since it fell out of the social mainstream, smoking has entered the alluring world of the verboten. Anytime something becomes taboo it takes on powerful symbolism—the more forbidden and the more dangerous, the sexier and more alluring it is. Smoking communicates rebellion, defiance, and sexuality all wrapped into one. No wonder then that regulations aimed at curbing the marketing and sale of tobacco products to young people have failed miserably in deterring them from smoking. As Tara Parker-Pope has aptly put it: “For 500 years, smokers and tobacco makers have risked torture and even death at the hands of tobacco’s enemies, so it’s unlikely that a bunch of lawyers and politicians and the looming threat of deadly disease will fell either the industry or the habit.”7
The smoking gestures that Martha recorded are performed in parallel situations throughout many secular societies as part of urban courtship rituals; they form what semioticians call a code. Codes are systems of signs—gestures, movements, words, glances—that allow people to make and send out meaningful messages in specific situations. Codes mediate relationships between people and are, therefore, effective shapers of how we think of others and of ourselves. The smoking routines caught on Martha’s video are part of a courtship code that unconsciously dictates not only smoking styles, but also how individuals act, move, dress, and the like, in order to present an appropriate romantic persona.
The particular enactment of the code will vary in detail from situation to situation, from person to person, but its basic structure will remain the same. The code provides a script for social performances. No wonder, then, that teenagers tend to take up smoking, early on in their tentative ventures into adulthood.8 In several research projects that I undertook in the 1990s and early 2000s, I noticed that adolescents put on the same type of smoking performances that our fictional restaurant protagonists did, using cigarettes essentially as “cool props,” albeit in different situations (in school yards, in malls, at parties).9 Cigarette smoking i...