Connections

[abassadams]

One thing that stuck out to me about “Smoke” is the way that every character is connected to each other, while also being, for the most part, completely unaware that a connection exists. Auggie’s whole life revolves around his cigar shop, enough so that he spends years taking a photo of it every morning. Paul Benjamin’s whole life revolves around his wife, and, now she’s dead, missing her. Perhaps his life didn’t always revolve around this hinge, but as we can see from his interactions with other characters, including Auggie and Rashid, his wife is always a shadow in his life, for better or worse. Rashid is consumed by his search for his father, who fled the family after Rashid’s mother died, and Ruby, Auggie’s girlfriend, is focused on caring for her daughter.
Like ourselves, each one of these characters has their own life, all-consuming to them and seemingly entirely separate from their neighbors, but linked far more intricately once we examine them closer. Rashid’s and Paul’s shared grief for their families (dead or simply missing) allow them to become puzzle pieces for eachother- a son with a missing father and a would-be father who never got to have a son. Rashid’s questionably-gained five thousand dollars is turned from a guilty Albatros into a potentially life-changing sum for Ruby and her child, although Rashid has no idea that’s where his money ended up after he gave it to Auggie.
Living in New York, it is sometimes easy to dissolve the people around us into background characters- as if they were born only seconds ago with the sole purpose to walk in the background of your photo, and then vanished into thin air as soon as your attention was diverted from them. It is almost overwhelming to look at everyone in Times Square and remember that they have their own “cigar shop,” their own focus point and struggle, and that it may be closer to your own than you realized. The challenge, of course, is to do exactly that. And more importantly, the struggle is to realize that not only does everyone around you have their own story, but their stories could be connected to your own without you ever realizing it. Sometimes, like Rashid and Ruby- two characters who never meet, but yet are connected by the 5,000$ sum- we may walk past someone on the sidewalk, or lean on the same counter they just touched, and never realize the connection we have with them under the surface.

[Chalmers Mathew]

I think you have perfectly captured the challenge in personalizing the people around us just as well as those first fifteen minutes in the movie did. It is remarkably easy to look at the throngs of people as a collective mass associated with the general mood of the day. However, it takes effort to recognize individuals and their humanity. To simply understand that the person next to you could be running a bodega that you will go to five days later, or that the people around your own age may be in the exact same community and school as yourself, there is a disproportionate amount of the world that we do not take into account. Despite the belligerence of painting ourselves into specific neighborhoods and boroughs, New Yorkers are all living in the same city, enduring their own woes, and searching for absolution and humanity in others. Just as Thomas pays a debt to Auggie, so does Auggie pay one to Ruby.

[Cristian Statescu]

I think the way you connected the movie into the way our lives function as New Yorkers was a really solid comparison. In all, we New Yorkers have an individualistic view when it comes to others. There are too many people in NYC for us to notice or care about all of them. A solid example of this is when I would go to school (speaking from a New Yorker’s POV), the ride never felt like I was with others. The people just blended in with the train, and it felt like it was just me riding it 5 days a week to go to school. Thinking about it now, however, it’s crazy that maybe I rode the train with someone who I didn’t know back then and know now, or possibly a professor I have yet to take a class with, etc. We New Yorkers may be more connected than we consciously realize, just like how Thomas and Ruby were connected, despite never physically meeting.

[Author]

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