A class action lawsuit against the Motion Picture Association of America—claiming “tobacco imagery” in Hollywood movies brainwashes our youth—would have every film with as much as puff receive an R rating.
Among recent films targeting tender young minds with alluring swirls of smoke, the suit cites 2015 Bond flick Spectre, in which a skeleton puffs a cigar, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. They’d slap an R rating on Gandalf the Grey’s baroque smoke rings? Not quite Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones sexily smoking in outer space.
Lawyers for the MPAA, who created the ratings system in the first place to avoid legal snarls much like this one, argue a First Amendment defense, while the complaint claims that Hollywood studios have known since 2003 that scenes of smoking in movies with ratings G, PG or PG-13 will lead kids to light up.
Studies from the early 2000s tie onscreen tobacco imagery to smoking among teen moviegoers whose parents don’t smoke. The anti-smoking lobby’s favorites seem to show that the subjects most likely to take up smoking in their mid-teens saw a lot of smoky movies in their preteen years (instead of spending that time at the library, the country club, or the football field, say) and yet have nice, non-smoking moms and dads. These same teens, one would assume, bummed around town with their no-good friends and ran out of good ideas—Gandalf’s pipe notwithstanding.
Even with all of cinematic history a click away, the case seems to casts today’s youth as terminal wimps who’ll lose interest in anything illicit enough to merit an R rating—sex, violence, foul language… and now cigarettes. Class action plaintiffs and their lawyers might find that if their suit succeeds, it will have the opposite effect.
