Is Friendship a Pro-Cigarette Movie?
When Austin (Paul Rudd) and Craig (Tim Robinson) hang out for the first time in Andrew DeYoung’s feature debut, Friendship, the two men go on a little adventure. Whereas many suburbanites would be content with a beer or watching a game, Austin instead leads Craig down into the sewers of their suburb of Clovis, winding through dank tunnels, only to arrive inside city hall. What is there to do inside a municipal building after dark? Their intentions aren’t quite so mischievous: Austin takes Craig up to the roof and they enjoy a cigarette together.
Cigarettes loom large over Friendship. Austin, the object of Craig’s affection and obsession, is a smoker — not addicted, no, but casual about the whole affair, even rolling his own. Craig often looks out from his office window to watch his co-workers — peers he doesn’t like or really respect — share cigarettes outside on break. The cigarettes become representative of a type of in-crowd thing Craig can’t crack to his dismay (and our amusement). It’s not so much that Friendship makes smoking look like a good thing to do, but it lumps smoking in with all the people Craig is incapable of connecting with.
“I always want to make characters smoke, and I always want to make characters go into holes,” DeYoung said. “I’m not a smoker, but I think it’s cool as hell, and Austin is cool.”
Part of what feels so jarring about seeing these characters smoke cigarettes is how de-smokified most contemporary films are. You see all kinds of cloudy cigarette smoke in period pieces, but present-day smokers are few and far between, in part because the Motion Picture Association has tamped down on cigarette-smoking onscreen. DeYoung pointed out that most of these characters (were they to exist in the real world and not one in which, say, a man’s wife can get lost in the sewer for several days) would likely be vaping. “I’m not interested in that, though,” he added. “There’s something just classic about smoking.”
DeYoung also explained how smoking visualizes the act of breathing. “We all know that smoking is toxic, but it’s also kind of boring to just breathe and meditate, even though we all should be doing that. When I watch someone on a smoke break, I can feel their relaxation — I get that they’re in touch with their breath and their body,” DeYoung said. That envy comes through in Craig’s forlorn jealousy of those around him — his work peers, as much as he detests them, are capable of stepping outside themselves in order to relax. Craig, on the other hand, is a mess of nerves and idiosyncrasies. A cigarette might really fix him, were he ever to possess that level of self-awareness or a fundamental need to decompress.
While DeYoung hadn’t considered Friendship a pro-smoking text, he freely gave his blessing as a reading of the film. Part of what’s thrilling about seeing so many cigs in Friendship is that the movie isn’t going out of its way to prove that smoking is cool. It’s just one more thing that Craig isn’t a part of — and not for any moral or health reasons of his own. He just can’t find his way in. That cigarette he shares with Austin on the roof of city hall is a singular experience. Things will never be that good again.
Related