David Lynch’s death shocks smokers into quitting: ‘It’s just not good for us’

David Lynch was a smoker. With an American Spirit perpetually locked between his teeth, he figured fire and smoke as magical textures in his films. To Lynch, cigarettes weren’t merely delicious, but sacred: they gave him the impression of breathing in the world, then blowing it back out again with fabulous grace.

Born in 1946 – 20 years before the US surgeon general pronounced for the first time that cigarettes could cause cancer – Lynch came up in a time when American glamor was buttressed by cigarettes and cinema. Actors like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis danced a beautiful and foolish waltz with death, smoke in hand, while cigarettes were considered the sine qua non of the artist’s life, an ashtray piled up with butts evidence of a good day’s work. “I always associated smoking and drinking coffee with the art life. They go hand in hand,” Lynch told the Independent in 2013.

Eleven years later, in his final interview, Lynch revealed to People magazine that a 2020 diagnosis of emphysema, a chronic lung condition, had forced him to quit one of the great romances of his life.

To Lydia Kiesling, a Portland-based writer and smoker, Lynch’s smoking exit interview was “more catalyzing for me than anything ever has been”. After taking up smoking at 15, Kielsing had been seesawing off and on again ever since, unable to quit a habit she’d fallen in love with (nearly 70% of smokers say they want to quit; the cessation rate is much lower, at 8.8% of smokers in 2022). Now 40, and conscious that the damage done to her lungs may be irreversible, Kiesling said that she found Lynch’s interview sobering: “To me he was a genius of living, and that included smoking, and it mattered a lot to me to see him stop.”

It’s been nearly 50 days since Kiesling’s last cigarette, a number she intends to push higher following Lynch’s death at age 78, 20 days ago. When the cravings feel particularly intense, Kiesling thinks of how smoking ruined Lynch’s health, and his stubborn love for cigarettes regardless. While Lynch always held those kinds of contradictions in his films with generosity and curiosity, he offered one unequivocal statement towards the end of his life: “You can quit these things that are going to end up killing you,” he said. Smoking is, after all, the number one preventable cause of death in the US. All of this helps Kiesling stave off cigarettes for at least one more day.

Tom Bardem, a 27-year-old British expat in Melbourne, Australia – also a Lynch fan and smoker – says he has witnessed a flurry of people online and in his personal life quit since Lynch’s death. “It felt like an urge to his fans to quit alongside him,” he said.

While statistically, smoking is at an all-time low – less than 12% of Americans smoke today; it was about 41% when Lynch was born – cigarettes re-entered our cultural imagination after the pandemic. According to research by Smoke Free Media, depictions of smoking on screen are very much in vogue. Photos of contemporary smoking icons like Chloë Sevigny and Kate Moss regularly make the rounds on popular Instagram pages @ciginfluencers and @indiesleaze. Enfant terrible popstars like Charli xcx and Addison Rae have made cigarettes a core part of their brand imagery. Models walk the runway cigarette in hand, championing the kind of luxury fatalism and art-fueled hedonism that led someone like Lynch to smoke in the first place. Smoking has become a rebuke to an era of puritanism, and of relentless self-improvement and self-surveillance. But Lynch’s death complicates this conveniently rebellious attitude.

Related: ‘A one-way trip to heaven’: cigarettes were David Lynch’s magic wand – and his undoing

“There aren’t as many celebrities dying of smoking-related illnesses as there once were, so Lynch’s death has had a profound impact on me,” said Bardem. While he has “cut back a lot”, he’s still finding it difficult to resist the Saturday night beer and smoke. “But I do think when I eventually pack smoking in fully, I’ll look back at Lynch’s death as one of the big catalysts for me,” he said.

The great smokers of Lynch’s youth – Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Betty Grable – all died terrible deaths of conditions related to smoking, and inspired smoking to be reconceived as the most wretched of societal diseases. That Lynch died still in love with his vice and in acknowledgment of how bad it was, is helping a number of smokers to put down the stick for good.

“When you start you only notice what smoking gives you (social connection, focus, a reason to dip out from work). Paying attention to what it was taking away, before it got as unignorable as what Lynch is talking about, helped me quit for good,” wrote a fan on X.

Others have found the strength to admit how heartbreaking their quitting is. “It’s just not good for us, and it’s OK to be really sad about that,” said Kiesling. “Maybe in the afterlife what we love is good for us.”