Shotgunning Smoke, So Hot Right Now

Shotgunning smoke has long been a surprisingly sexy onscreen move. In 2011, Rihanna somehow made inhaling a pack’s worth of cigarette smoke from the mouth of a Chris Brown lookalike in the “We Found Love” video look hot. The next year, her future baby daddy A$AP Rocky seductively blew smoke into a woman’s mouth in the “Purple Kisses” video. Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin shotgunned smoke into John Krasinski’s mouth as a gag in the tentpole of American cinema that is the 2009 movie It’s Complicated — but trust me, there was nothing sexy about it.

While shotgunning has traditionally been used as fun, flirty foreplay (or... whatever was going on in It’s Complicated), the vibes surrounding it shifted earlier this year. Blame it on Che Diaz, who shotgunned the married Miranda in And Just Like That in a moment of not-quite-cheating. Given the fact that Che is indisputably the worst, I was ready to write off their use of shotgunning as just a weird character quirk. But then it popped up again in a similar fashion in Best International Feature nominee The Worst Person in the World, when perennially dissatisfied and horny protagonist Julie shotguns cigarette smoke into a semi-stranger named Eivind’s mouth. On its face, And Just Like That and The Worst Person in the World have very little in common: one is an Oscar-nominated Norwegian film and the other is... And Just Like That. Yet here are two drastically different protagonists engaging in infidelity by way of sharing smoke with someone.

How did we end up here? Is shotgunning the new form of forbidden flirtation? (Dear god, please no.)

Honestly, no, not really. The people I talked to who had done this before all made it abundantly clear that the last time they’d done this was when they were teenagers. And I believe therein lies the appeal. What Che and Miranda and Julie and Eivind all have in common is that they are trying hard to cross the line into intimacy without tipping over into full-on infidelity. In fact, in The Worst Person in the World, Julie and Eivind spend an entire evening doing more and more strangely intimate things — like peeing in front of each other and sniffing each other’s armpits — while asking point blank, “This isn’t cheating, right?” As such, shotgunning becomes something to share that isn’t a kiss, but is pretty close.

The beginning of an illicit affair very much replicates the feelings of being a teenager: the sneaking around, the excitement, the anxiety, the risk. So often fictionalized affairs are built around the concept that the relationship a character has with their actual partner has grown stale: In And Just Like That, Steve is flattened into a parody of a middle aged man; in The Worst Person in the World, Julie’s older boyfriend Aksel is constantly begging her to settle down and have kids. Novelty beckons, and when it does it comes with — unsurprisingly — manifold transgression.

That’s not to say these transgressions always take the form of shotgunning smoke. However, sex scenes and flirtations between cheaters do often include more explicit and “surprising” sex acts. There’s the famous spit sharing scene between Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz in Disobedience; the peach in Call Me By Your Name. (Which is an illicit affair, even if not precisely cheating, since both men seem to be only loosely attached to other women.)

Perhaps this comes from filmmakers trying to show just how raw, intimate, and weird you can be with an affair partner, and that’s the appeal. Maybe this is how affairs really are. Or the furtive nature of them begets other intimate acts that we usually neglect after our teenage years. Either way, if Che is doing something, it’s probably not a great thing, so let’s leave shotgunning smoke for the teens and the TV show characters.