Thank You For… ah, Crap

So, you’re writing a movie or a TV show, and you’ve got this evil-twin situation, right? Created by, I dunno, let’s go with a freak accident involving a puddle of salt water, a well-placed lightning strike, and, if you’re Joss Whedon, a character saying something like, “Man, I bet my dark side is boring, too.”But how are you going to let your audience know? I mean, we’re pretty dumb out here. When we see our protagonist, the fighter of the good fight, snap the neck of a random passerby for the fun of it, we’re not really sure they’re bad. They could just be cranky. It’s not until they exhale a curlicue of cigarette smoke that we’re sure that they’re just unrestrained evil.

The statement this week by the MPAA that the ratings of films may change based on smoking in the film immediately got me irritated. I’m not a fan of the city-wide smoking bans that are becoming popular. I’m not a real smoker, maybe one pack a year; most of those used to be at shows at the Black Cat.

But! The MPAA seems to be taking on a semi-reasonable defensive position here, against the ridiculous Mrs. Lovejoy-ism of the American Legacy Foundation. They’re acknowledging that PG-13 movies may get R ratings, depending on their subjective view of how smoking is portrayed in the film. OK. Well, film ratings are largely idiotic and arbitrary anyway, so this doesn’t make them any more idiotic and arbitrary.

The ALF, though, wants “an R rating for all smoking references unless they were historically accurate or ‘unambiguously demonstrate the health issues.’” It’s that second part that’s galling.

Financially, an R rating isn’t always the best idea for a film, especially one that may have wide appeal. The position that filmmakers would, essentially, have to have every smoker in their film fall dead of lung cancer by the end of the film, basically takes away a character trait across the board. (Though, this puts an awesome image in my head of the last ten seconds of a film where the entire cast keels over suddenly, clutching their chest and saying, “Ow, my lungs,” and dying.) Sometimes people smoke, ignoring all warnings. Sometimes, they don’t die.

Let’s be clear: the tabacco execs who didn’t tell people about the addictive nature of nicotine should be shot off the planet. The warnings on packs should be bigger. Ariel shouldn’t defy either the laws of thermodynamics or taste by lighting up under the sea. But, asking every film to be an afterschool special is a bit much.

There’s a sense here that other people are responsible for our own actions. That the filmmakers are creating smokers. Of course, kids are dumb and will play follow the leader and there are correlative studies (from 2003 and, apparently, not causal) which point to connection between teens taking up smoking and watching films with smokers in it. But, film smoking, the MPAA points out in their release, has gone down independent of any official involvement (though I’m uncertain of whether that’s a trend or a random bump).

But, regardless of that, why should artists be constrained? The MPAA’s decision will put “…and smoking” at the end of their litany of sins commited by movies to get their ratings. The R rating hits most films with smoking already, because filmmakers are already self-editing to the point where smoking is conjoined with violence and, horror of horrors, sex (cause we all know a breast is worse than blood to the MPAA). It seems that they’re following the trend of turning smokers into outcasts, already. I’m fine with that. So, why turn every film that has a smoker into Reefer Tobacco Madness? The information is there for parents, which is the group that the MPAA is there to inform.

The point the studies make is that teens emulate the rebellious characters in movies, and rebellious characters in movies sometimes smoke, and thus smoking shouldn’t be allowed in movies. But, there will always be that black-leather clad rebel in film, and that character will need to actually do something unacceptable to society or else they are not a rebel. Following a path of “nothing bad that teenagers emulate can be in a non-R-rated film” gives us no anti-heroes, no morally grey (i.e., human) characters except for people 18-and-over. We go to a black-and-white world of stark, false morality dictated by a board of parents at the MPAA. We go to “Rated R for complex moral situations.”

Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You For Smoking, put it best (quoting from the article on the MPAA announcement in the WaPo):

Of the policy, Buckley wrote by e-mail: “I can only hope this means that the MPAA will strip such films as ‘Casablanca,’ ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’ of their G-ratings and re-label them for what they were: insidious works of pro-smoking propaganda that led to millions of uncounted deaths. Bravo.”