Cigarettes and censorship

Tuesday March 30, 2010

A report by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine claims that young adult smokers will light up immediately after watching smoking in movies. Yes, really. Karen McTigue reports.

Researchers took 100 cigarette smokers aged 18-25 to watch a movie montage both with or without smoking scenes. The participants were then observed during a 10-minute break to see whether or not they smoked. Apparently smokers (that is, not children, or non-smokers, just adults who would normally smoke) may be ‘more’ [no figures given] likely to smoke during the break.

This will undoubtedly be grist to the mill for those calling for greater censorship within the film industry. Campaigns such as Smokefree Liverpool luckily have been given short shrift by the BBFC who have clearly stated that imposing an 18 rating on films which feature scenes of smoking is “not going to happen”.

Nonsensical

Back in the US however the report advises the following: “The bottom line is that young adults who are trying to quit smoking should not watch movies with smoking scenes” (Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California).

This is quite clearly a nonsensical argument. If one walks down any street one will see individuals and groups smoking, many more so now than ever, forced via the smoking ban onto the streets outside offices, pubs and restaurants. Unless one is to remain a shut-in, exposure to others smoking is simply impossible to avoid.

Seeing smoking on screen or stage is also a fair step removed from reality, and the suspension of belief usually means one can still make fully functional adult decisions like whether to smoke, drive a car etc… immediately on exiting the theatre. Yes, really.

Subliminal

While fully understanding the power of subliminal signifiers, one does not immediately run for the nearest hostelry having watched Sideways, (luckily my local cinema has its own rather charming bar), nor to the nearest karaoke joint having sat through Mamma Mia, just one more time than was strictly necessary.

Last week it was claimed that young people in Britain see significantly more smoking in films than their US peers, mainly due to the fact that in the UK we do not immediately over-classify films as ‘adult only’ simply because they may include smoking. Let us only hope that this continues. Otherwise no more Dirty Harry, Goodfellas or Casablanca. Even the multi-grossing Avatar would be out of reach (not that this would be a bad thing, but only because it is a truly dreadful film).

The report, which must have taken quite some time and money, the researchers having to sit through 572 top grossing films, then counting the number of tobacco impressions within them. (For the uninitiated a tobacco impression is defined “as one person seeing an occurrence of smoking or tobacco on one occasion”, with the cumulative number of impressions being a measure of how much the film encourages smoking.)

Exposed

They then claim that evidence (no figures given) from several countries, including the US, ‘suggests’ that the more smoking young people are exposed to in movies, the more likely they are to start smoking themselves.

So, in essence, we are being told that we must protect our young people from seeing others smoking because they are so impressionable that whatever they see, they do. Kind of runs counterbalance to kicking smokers out of the pubs and into the gardens and streets where they are on full view.

One recent film that would not pass the requested test is A Single Man (Tom Ford’s cinematic version of the Christopher Isherwood novella). There’s the excessive drinking: Julianne Moore playing a beautiful lush; there’s the smoking: Colin Firth on the Sobranis; and a notional glimpse of nudity – all for the price of a fair British 12A. Now that’s entertainment.