SMOKING IN FILMS

There’s been a move recently to reclassify any and all films that contain scenes of smoking because they apparently persuade youngsters to take up the filthy, disgusting and (allegedly) potentially lethal habit by somehow convincing the malleable young mind that smoking is somehow a “cool”, “grown up” or “sensible” thing to do if it appears in a movie.

I’m not really sure that this is true. After all, I may very well “believe a man can fly” whilst watching him in a cinema, but I’m hardly likely to jump off the roof afterwards, and whilst I can enjoy watching Bruce Willis demolish half of Los Angeles with little more than a merry quip, a smirk and a stolen truck, I think it’s highly unlikely that I would be likely to try anything similar with my own car on the way home.

That, I suppose is to rather miss the point, because this kind of imagery is more subtly persuasive I suppose, and the influence is probably more by osmosis than anything else. If you see someone you respect and admire as a role model, you are, if you are so minded, likely to want to try to emulate them, and small children have been known to believe they can fly, usually with less than fortunate consequences.

But then again, there’s not really all that much smoking to be seen in mainstream popcorn cinema that’s aimed at that demographic anyway, and if it is, it is usually the sole domain of those considered to be the villains of the piece. The films containing scenes where smoking is seen in a more “realistic” way tend to be made for a more “adult” audience and also tend to be more “drama” or “real life” based, aimed at a more “mature” mind, or are possibly much more obscure and intended for the “arthouse” set.

Still, anything that discourages the practice is, I suppose, to be applauded, although I do sometimes despair of this constant re-imagining of the past from a modern perspective, and pretending that things didn’t happen because we would prefer, because of our modern perspective and sensibilities, them not to have done so. I wonder whether whatever media moguls are running the show in fifty years time will think of all those characters running around with brain cancer-inducing boxes clamped to their ears that are currently cluttering our films and TV. Will they laugh and point and say “Dear, oh dear! What were they thinking?” (or possibly “D-O-D! Wt wr u thnkng?” or some other derivative) or just accept it as the historical folly they know it to be.

After all, despite all that we have learned over the past half century or so, what would a Bogie and Bacall movie be without smoking? Or a Ridley Scott movie for that matter? Where would Uncle Sherlock be without his pipes? Masters of the art of lighting for film know just how evocative those curling wisps dancing in the beams of light can be, and it’s got nothing at all to do with anything other than atmosphere, and it’s tough to fake that. Connery’s Bond always had a gasper to hand, Moore had his cigars, but more recent actors have ditched the fags to embrace some new idea of masculinity that involves strange and dark new arts like moisturiser, body-sculpting and waxing, which does rather dismiss the fast-living self-destructive tendencies of the literary character, although I fully expect someone to announce that the books are to be “updated” to excise all signs of the less noble vices sometime soon.

I don’t know really. Sometimes I can see their point, and other times I wish that they’d just butt the hell out of these things. I mean it’s very laudable that we do live in a time where  such things as gender and racial equality can be firmly addressed in our entertainments, but I do get rather tired when characters of gender or race are written into movies and TV programmes that are supposed to be set in history and take no account whatsoever of what real life was actually like for people who lived during those times.

It’s very commendable to try to increase the profile of such characters, and it’s good for anyone who falls into any subset of society to have positive role models to inspire them, of course, but to rewrite history just because modern twenty-first century life is thought to be much more fair and cosmopolitan is to dismiss the genuine struggles and sacrifices that were made to achieve those very equalities that we admire nowadays.

Although it is not to condone them, in the interests of historical accuracy, race and gender issues really should be addressed in the context that they actually existed, and to admit, however awkward it might seem to us now, that those prejudices existed, and were part of the society we lived in and grew out of. So a strong black and/or female character living during those times should be shown having to face the daily hardships that they might have actually had to face during those times because otherwise modern viewers might start to forget how hard-won those rights were.

Yes, it is truly dreadful that within the span my own relatively short lifetime, a family belonging to a so-called “minority group” moving into a street could become a cause for concern and conflict within a community, but we should never forget that these things happened. Nor should we forget that parts of the “Land of the free and the home of the brave” were just as segregated as the international pariah that was South Africa remained until just over half a century ago.

To pretend it never happened, or to try to rewrite history from a modern standpoint so that characters are much better treated than their real-life counterparts would ever have been, is not only disrespectful, but it’s just plain wrong, and to pretend it never happened is just as ill-educated as denying other dreadful acts of our collective histories. If we try to sweep these things under the carpet, we will never remember what intolerance was like, and when it begins to surface again, we would be ill-prepared to deal with it.