Cigarettes and Movies

Just read an NYT article about the ongoing campaign by the AMA to ban cigarettes from movies. Apparently, the PG13-rated film, He's Just Not That Into You, has some cigarettes in it but no smoking. There's also a sort of anti-smoking storyline in the film.

In the past couple of years, the AMA has been fighting to get Hollywood studios to eliminate any acknowledgment of the existence of cigarettes, or their use, from films, saying that smoking in films causes 200,000 teenagers to start smoking each year. The organization wants any film with smoking in it to get an R rating.

As someone who has recently quite smoking after 15 years of the habit, I recognize how dangerous smoking can be and how difficult it is to stop. It's a pretty stupid thing to do that, I admit, I probably saw as cool or fun or grown-up in part because of depictions of smoking in popular culture. When I smoked, seeing someone smoke in a film would often trigger a desire to have a cigarette myself - of course, this was once I was already a dedicated smoker.

But fuck the AMA. It offends me deeply when some organization or another works to ban something in pop culture as a means of social engineering. And evidently, as in this latest skirmish, you don't even have to have smoking in the film to warrant a rebuke, just cigarette packaging. In the article, Melissa Wathers of the AMA Alliance (apparently a domestic spying organization in which volunteers are asked to police films for violations) says, "There is absolutely zero artistic justification for this." And you are...who, exactly?

I haven't seen the film, but I would hazard a guess that there is little "artistic justification" for its entire existence. But that's the filmmakers business, as is whether or not they find a contextual need for cigarettes in the film. Quite possibly the AMA could find some better things to do with its time.