Smoking was having a comeback – until the director’s death after an emphysema diagnosis complicated its allure

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.