Cigarette, Dahling?

A couple weeks ago at Cannes, there was an angry outcry after Nicole Kidman lit up during a press conference. Now here's an L.A. Times column touching on some efforts to snuff cigarettes out of the movies; if efforts to pressure Hollywood fail, campaign organizers plan to lobby Washington.

Hollywood glamorizes smoking in films, I hear. The L.A. Times writer notes, "Glantz (an anti-smoking activist) found that the on-screen references to tobacco were almost all positive: sexy, rebellious, cool, defiant. Characters were almost never shown hacking, much less recovering from lung surgery, or burying loved ones dead from cancer….The images associated with smoking in the movies…were the images of cigarette advertising."

(fwiw, that line about hacking may sound ridiculous at first, but: there's no shortage of tearjerkers about the Big C. and yet i suppose they, in their own way, glamorize the experience.)

But I think there's a reason much deeper than some Marlboro shill that cigarettes have their symbolic resonance. There is something sexy, rebellious, cool, and defiant about the kind of thinking that says, "I'm enjoying myself, now. To hell with everything else." Yes, it's also stupid, reckless. But it's a personality that's fascinating, appealing, tragic?especially (or perhaps only) in a world of fiction.

So efforts to write cigarettes out of stories say, "You can't tell your story this way." And that bugs me—whether it's a Hollywood bureaucracy or a governmental one that would set the rules.