hollywood+smoking
originally written 08.10.2002
In response to Joe Eszterhas’ august 9th op-ed in the ny times titled hollywood’s responsibility for smoking deaths
Do Hollywood movies glamorize smoking? Of course they do? But is this glamorization a product of Hollywood alone? I would suspect not. While it would be interesting to study the historical relationships between the tobacco and film industries, assuming that no such explicit relationship exists, Hollywood movies simply perpetuate existing social ideals, not create them. Unfortunately, one of those social ideals is that smoking is rebellious (sexy, sophisticated, enter your favorite ridiculous adjective here). Hollywood makes movies that are grounded in popular culture, so of course they are going to mirror societies notions about things such as smoking. However, I don’t feel that Hollywood is ultimately responsible for the glorificaiton of smoking. What Hollywood should provide, I think, is a medium to express the ideas and realities of modern life. If Hollywood can be criticized for anything, it is not that they make movies that glorify smoking, but that they fail to make movies where, as is the case in real life, the token rebel doesn’t smoke or use drugs and the seductress is defined by something other than the overwhelming banality of the cigarette cliche.
Do screenwriters have a responsibility to remove tobacco from scripts? No. I think it is the screenwriters’ responsibility to make a film that is in some way meaningful. That said, relying on convention and cliches to make some statement does not seem to meet that responsibility. If a screenwriter is considering a character who smokes, I think that it is their responsibility to question why the character is smoking. Is it because the actor smokes, or because the cigarette is a simple way to depict the character as the token badass. I don’t think that either of these reasons is a particularly good one, and I don’t think that it makes for good cinema. Still, I can think of cases where the act of smoking goes beyond a stereotype and actually adds something to the film. I don’t think that these instances are particularly effective in bringing consumers towards tobacco use, and i would hate to see films suffer from their ommision. The example I can think of off the top of my head is in the movie “The Royal Tenenbaums” where Margot Tenenbaum (Paltrow) is portrayed as a lifelong closet smoker. For the character, smoking is something forbidden, secret, intimate, and self-destructive and by the end of the film, it is clearly a metaphor for the romantic feelings she harbors for her adoptive brother. I think that the film would have suffered had the smoking aspect been removed. I think advocating arbitrary censorship is a very bad idea. I think that urging good screenwriting and looking beyond social cliches and to hjow people actually live their lives is a really good idea.
Is putting a cigarette in the hands of a star ons creen equivalent to aiming a gun at a 12 or 14 year old? Oh hell no. I strongly object to this sort of argument, and the post-Columbine rhethoric that it uses as an all-too-familiar and all-too-illigitimate critique of Hollywood. It assumes that a 12 or 14 year old is incapable of making good decisions in their own life. 12 or 14 year old kids aren’t stupid, and they’re not media zombies. If they are manipulated by the media, it’s only because they don’t have access to the broader context of the media’s message. With campaigns like the truth, youth now have access to that context, and a better understanding of why cigarrettes might be in so many movies. I think that they’ll use this information to make the decision not to smoke. Should movies be more accurate in portraying non-smokers? Sure. Can youth, given the right information still make good decisions, even when confronted with the most blatant examples of cinema-tobacco commercialism? Yes.