Smoking in Films

Listening to the CBC around lunch hour is always nice: they typically have an interesting subject and have callers with a wide variety of opinions and viewpoints. The topic the other day was smoking in films, and in particular, Rango. Not seeing the movie I can't comment on the content; they mentioned that there were numerous scenes of various characters smoking. In most cases, they were the "bad guys" but I wouldn't be surprised to see Depp's chameleon lighting up at one point too.

The big talking point is this: should (animated) characters in kids movies be smoking? 

Well I'm going to have to go ahead and say no, they shouldn't. But there are some interesting viewpoints. The parents should take responsibility. This is a good one, and should be ever present anyway, right? You're not going to let social media raise your children for you...completely. It happens: the television has become a babysitter, and there is just no way you can protect your child from seeing everything naughty. They will witness violence, sexuality and drugs (i.e. smoking) on screen. They will process it, and I think there is a great degree of how they've been raised, that will determine the outcome. My niece hears cartoon characters in The Flintstones using the word stupid and she now reacts with a bit of an open mouth and saying "he's using a bad word!" like it's the end of the world. I can only suspect that is a good sign of things to come for her moral compass (although she can be quite devilish at times, but alas, thats kids for you).

I would be surprised to see a lot of smoking in an animated feature. I would be surprised to see it in just about any movie at this point, honestly. Hollywood is obsessed with making movies so universally accessible everything is and has been cut to the bone; case in point is the latest Die Hard film. So of course smoking is something that is easily removed from these films, and there's another viewpoint: simply remove smoking from any media. In Canada this has been happening for quite some time: you cannot advertise cigarettes (you only see them in American magazines here) and the actual product is hidden the counter. It wasn't enough that they were simply out of reach, they are now inside unmarked cabinets, although those cabinets can be plastered in ads for other non-tobacco products, such as soft drinks or chips. They threw some stats around saying this has all helped, so removing smoking from movies should contribute to success, success being a reduction in (youth) smoking.

Ghostbusters smoke. This is not something that I noticed as a child but as I rewatch those classics, I'm surprised to see how much of it was going on, and how it just wasn't a big deal. Perhaps that's the way it is: if you see it a lot in real life, and in movies, you think nothing of it. You're given more opportunity to decide for yourself, as opposed to hardcore pro-smoking (which I guess would be the glamourization of it, say for instance the hero of a film lighting up after conquering some bad guys...I'm looking at you Hellboy). Or hardcore anti-smoking, which I guess would be conveying the bad guys as addicts. Perhaps that's not the greatest view, but one of the listeners made a great point: if the bad guy is smoking all the time, as they do in Rango, kids will associate smoking with bad. But when they get a bit older and enter that wonderful teenage rebellion, they may be more inclined to take up behaviour that they've previously associated with being "bad" and in this case, that would be smoking.

An interesting situation; good luck to all you parents out there!