Hollywood's Smoke Screen

May 11, 2007

 

With all the cultural refuse we see straight-piped out of Hollywood into our movie theaters these days, I find it odd that the Motion Picture Association of America has deemed, of all things, smoking our most important societal ill. Forget that culture rot has set in, in no small part, because of images splattered across our silver screens. What used to pass as an R rating has now been downgraded to PG-13 because the standards have changed. Not the standards of ordinary Americas but the standards of those who rate our movies.

 

Any given PG-13 movie can allow all sorts of language, sexual content and gratuitous violence. Even the F-word is allowable if it's only used once. This can create quite a quandary for parents who want to shield their children from as much of the social garbage that now passes as acceptable. Sometimes ordinarily good films will throw in a sprinkling of foul language just to avoid the dreaded G rating. It's kind of sad when you think about it. Many of the great classics of the film industry were G-rated. And many of those films depicted people smoking. Smoking was then, and in many cases is now, a reality. From an industry that prides itself on reflecting reality it seems hypocritical that they would insist that cursing makes a film more genuine but smoking does not.

 

Don't get me wrong. I am certainly not advocating smoking. What I am advocating is some measure of common sense and perspective. There are far worse things a child under the age of 17 can be exposed to. For example, Michael Moores's famous propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11 , poisons young minds with lies and distortions and a socialist agenda but slides by the movie raters with nary a disclaimer, much less an R rating. Other films glorify promiscuity, homosexuality, and a whole host of other social issues that most American parents find objectionable. These films, too, make it past the self-appointed gatekeepers of morality in Hollywood. But smoke and you're banished to the world of adult-only appropriate viewing.

 

If we're going to start banning film depictions that we don't want our children to emulate then how about drinking? Alcoholism destroys millions of lives through drunk driving, domestic abuse and alcohol-related deaths. Or, how about high-speed car chases? Do we really want our children taking a cue from dangerous drivers? Automobile accidents rank high on the list of child killers in America.

 

I recently re-watched an old favorite of mine, The Italian Job . One of the principal characters in that movie smoked. However, he was reminded by an electronic billboard how many people die from smoking each year. The MPAA is more concerned about his smoking than the fact that all the good guys made a living as thieves. I was concerned with neither. It's just a movie, for crying out loud.

 

Just because a film is rated G or PG doesn't mean it's targeted to children. After all, Casablanca is rated G. I understand the concern of targeting children with images of smoking in order to entice them to start. That's already banned. We're talking about banning, with little regard to context or purpose, any smoking in any movie unless it carries an R rating. This broad-sweeping kind of standard not only doesn't make sense; I would think Hollywood would be up in arms, shouting claims of censorship. Ah, but smoking is politically incorrect and Hollywood has long been the standard bearer for that. Heaven forbid we actually clean up Hollywood. Instead, we just continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.