Yet More Bad News for Hollywood Product Placement

Well, duh!

Science Daily reports today that yet another study shows that exposure to on-screen smoking in movies has a strong correlation with beginning to smoke or becoming established smokers among young adults 18-25, a critical age group for lifelong smoking behavior.

Mel Gibson? He just quit. You know he's got six kids. Not that he couldn't live forever and smoke, but, listen, I know where you're coming from. Mel was a beautiful smoker. The best contemporary smoking I've seen was in Lethal One. He took that smoke in so far you weren't sure it was ever going to come out. And when it did, it was like the breath of a dragon. It made me want to start smoking again... I almost did, in fact.

Nick Naylor discussing the beauty of product placement in Christopher Hitchen's brilliant Thank You for Smoking.

The main effect is to recruit new smokers from among young adults," noted senior author Stanton Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.. "Movies encourage them to experiment, and once they start experimenting with cigarettes other factors take hold. Movies create the expectation that smoking will turn out okay.

The article suggests mandatory R ratings would limit the influence on-screen smoking has on impressionable teens. Well, it would limit the influence of scenes like this to a slightly less impressionable crowd.

Can you see them, sharing a postsex cigarette in their spaceship, in a rounded bed with satin sheets and a clear bubble top. The galaxies go whizzing by, the smoke curls weightlessly upward. That doesn't prime your pump? You don't think that would sell a few cartons?

But... All irony aside, this is an industry built on the aggressive marketing of a dangerous, addictive product. Not only does Big Tobacco have a powerful, well-funded lobby, the tobacco industry benefits from the unequal weighting of our Senate system, that disproportionately aggregates power in small, lightly populated states. All it takes is one good ol' boy in the Senate to a put a secret hold on any offending legislation and they are set for life.

Granted, I too am sympathetic to the charge of "paternalism" in calling for a nationwide ban on smoking and a ban on exports and/or cultivation of tobacco. People have the right to make their own mistakes, the argument goes, but at what point does common sense kick in? Do we cut off our nose to spite our face? Many small pleasures are sacrificed for the public good. I, for one, enjoy driving fast, but I understand that I become a risk to myself and others when I do so. If the government has any responsibility to "protect the herd," then surely it has the power to abolish the industry, if not the will. When the balance between harm and liberty becomes so unequal, at some point the tipping point must tilt towards government action. If cigarettes were invented today, they would never receive approval for sale.

    Mike Wallace: And that's what cigarettes are for?

    Jeffrey Wigand: A delivery device for nicotine.

    Mike Wallace: A delivery device for nicotine. Put it in your mouth, lit it up and you're gonna get your    fix?

    Jeffrey Wigand: You're gonna get your fix.

(Editor's Note: It was reported in yesterday's New York Times that "under pressure from an antismoking lobby unsatisfied by a promise that the industry's trade group made in May to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.").

Posted by Garth Sullivan.

Comments

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