Indulge me with this rant, dahlings, and I’ll make it up to you later with some eye candy. Maybe.

At the moment, some group of doctors in Scotland is pissing me off because they aim to convince government officials thoughout the UK to take a tougher stance on ratings certificates for those films that dare to glamorize smoking. Obviously, smoking is a disgusting habit, and I haven’t touched a ciggie (my token bad habit for law school) in two whole years, but I’d never begrudge anyone else their freedom to emphysema, bad breath, and all that crap. Seriously, the nicotine in cigarettes may very well be addicting, but it’s still a conscious choice to light each and every one, and that fact will never be changed by blaming the cinema for society’s ills:

Any film which shows smoking in a positive light should go up one classification, from a 12 to a 15 age certificate, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of the BMA science and ethics said, because of the huge impact imagery has on children taking up the habit.

Films like Pulp Fiction show Uma Thurman smoking and in the US blockbuster Independence Day every time Will Smith kills an alien he lights up a cigar.
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The message to young people is that smoking is associated with success and money, where as in reality it is people from the lowest socio-economic groups who smoke.
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As well as raising the age to view a film with positive images of smoking, they should be preceded by an anti-smoking advert showing the dangers of cigarettes.

The thing about these discussions, which I generally avoid, is that many people are willing to accept such paternalistic government actions if they agree that, say, smoking is a filthy, repulsive habit. However, your particular guilty viewing pleasure may be in the cinematic chopping block next — e.g., graphic violence and sexual promiscuity — in real life, these things can kill you! Hey, no shit.

Look, they’re just fucking movies. If cigarettes are such a blight upon society, then just make them bloody illegal. That would fix this little problem of the little people who are so incredibly stupid that the government must step in and wipe their asses, right? Oh wait… that’s some serious tax revenue, so governments couldn’t wouldn’t possibly make cigarettes illegal.

Such circular logic drives me crazy. Cinema may be, at times, fantastical, but it still reflects society. If you sanitize films, that won’t erase what inspires them, that is, life and death.