Smoke Screens

Cigarette usage is increasing on film while it declines in the general population.

By: Bob Brown
   It’s banned in most public places, but smoking is way up in movie theaters — at least onscreen. As Elvis Mitchell noticed in his New York Times review of Sundance films this winter, "There was so much contemplative dragging on cigarettes amid operatic shafts of backlighting that Brown & Williamson missed a bet by not signing on as corporate sponsors."
   Although Mitchell was "amused," the trend is neither amusing nor news to the watchdogs of tobacco. In 1996, the American Lung Association started handing out "Hackademy Awards" in their "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down" program for films that either discourage or glamorize smoking. One of last year’s Academy Award nominees, Sissy Spacek of In the Bedroom, earned a Thumbs Down because her Ruth Fowler resorted to Marlboros after her son’s murder.
   Oscar-winner Denzel Washington also took his lumps for Training Day. The group Multicultural Advocates for Social Change on Tobacco pegged the film as one long subliminal push for tobacco usage by every socioeconomic group. What MASCOT noticed is a phenomenon increasingly familiar on today’s smoke-filled screens: a tendency toward pervasive and indiscriminate smoking. Smoking has become part of the background rather than a point of the story.

	Christine Boisson lights up another cigarette in the 2002 film The Truth About Charlie.

   Is Big Tobacco lurking around every corner at the studios? In 1988, a federal law (15 U.S.C.A. 1333) prohibited the common practice of tobacco companies paying to play in the movies, and in 1989 the studios voluntarily agreed to refrain from further promotion in films. But in 1996, the nonprofit group Action on Smoking and Health filed a formal complaint with the Justice Department seeking a criminal investigation into whether Big Tobacco was backsliding. ASH argued, among other things, that films strongly influenced public behavior, as "Many remember that, after Clark Gable appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night, sales of undershirts plummeted." No one has ever presented sales statistics to prove this assumption, however.
   To stoke the fire, in 1998 Professor Stanton A. Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco published findings which showed that, in top box-office films, tobacco usage appeared on average once in every five minutes of film during the 1960s, declining to once every 10 to 15 minutes in the ’70s and ’80s, but rising again to once every three to five minutes by the 1990s. Cigarette usage seemed to be increasing on screen while it was declining among the general population, and the evidence piles up on the "Smoke Free Movies" Web site maintained by Glantz’s group (smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu).
   But is on-screen smoking more pernicious than ever? Will people pick up a cigarette because Sissy Spacek did? What I think has happened is that smoking has become a sort of narrative wallpaper, like mood music or lighting, to suggest rather than hammer home a point. This is a shift from earlier movies. For example, in last year’s Signs, there is just one smoking moment. Joaquin Phoenix as Merrill Hess, a cigarette in his mouth, descends from his loft in the outbuilding and crosses the lawn toward the farmhouse, where he’ll join the family. He stops to peer at the cornfields, where he senses something lurking. He tosses his cigarette on the ground, flings a stone into the field, and heads indoors. Neither he nor anyone else is ever seen smoking otherwise, and there appears to be no specific point.
   In earlier times it was different. In the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), the dance of seduction between Frank (John Garfield) and Cora (Lana Turner) is choreographed in one scene that turns on a cigarette. In her restaurant’s kitchen, Cora pulls a smoke from her pack; he strikes a match to light it; she turns aside and starts to light it herself, but she can’t. He moves to her other side and she reluctantly accepts this small form of control, which is emblematic of their entire relationship.
   Likewise, in Charade (1963), Reggie (Audrey Hepburn) nervously listens to the Paris police chief explain that her dead husband has led a double life. As the revelations pile up, her increasing nervousness leads from her popping snacks to smoking a cigarette and then to bumming smokes from Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau). She rips the filters off, saying, "I can’t stand these things. It’s like drinking coffee through a veil." Except for a match-tossing threat from the villainous Tex (James Coburn), there is no other smoking in the film, and no reason for it. Reggie isn’t a casual smoker, she’s a worrier whose smoking builds up to a comic climax and is then dropped.
   Smoking cigarettes is far looser in Charade’s modern remake, The Truth about Charlie (2002). The French detective (Christine Boisson) is a chain smoker, with a cigarette on her lips even in the rain. Thandy Newton is apparently a nonsmoker who accepts smokes when the going gets tough. But no tidy plot points revolve around these things, they’re just there, like second-hand smoke.
   Will cinematic smoking spoil our youth, as ASH argues? It depends. Are kids going to pick up cigars because they see Pinocchio? Not unless they dream of running to Pleasure Island and turning into a donkey. But perhaps we could use a little less smoke and a bit more light.