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What’s More Dangerous to Your Health?
By John W. Kennedy | February 26, 2008
The New York Department of Health last week spent $800,000 for full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal calling on the CEOs of major movie companies to quit showing characters smoking cigarettes in youth-oriented films. Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines urged the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to assign an R rating to any film that shows smoking in a glamorized fashion.
Smoking in movies has been prevalent for generations, of course. It’s hard to watch a motion picture from the 1930s through the 1950s without the lead characters lighting up and seeming to enjoy it. But the portrayal of positive smoking images fell precipitously after the Surgeon General’s Report in 1964 showed a definitive link between puffing and cancer.
I applaud efforts to eliminate cigarette smoking in PG and PG-13 movies watched by impressionable youngsters. But Hollywood is marketing something just as hazardous to health, if not more: violence.
Ironically, it’s the same MPAA ratings system that is responsible for the blood and gore now visible on the big screen.
Before implementation of the ratings system 40 years ago, filmmakers nearly always implied violence without graphic depiction. And evildoers usually had to pay for their crimes, one way or another.
Now, violence is depicted with detached amorality and applauded by the industry. Sunday’s Academy Awards to No Country for Old Men for best picture, actor, adapted screenplay and direction shows serial killer stories are highly prized in Hollywood. According to the Rotten Tomatoes Web site, 94 percent of critics gave No Country a favorable review. This is in spite of—or perhaps because of—the explicit murder scenes.
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal says the film has “some of the most horrifically violent moments put on screen.” Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times remarked that No Country is “an intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling; a film you can’t stop watching even though you very much wish you could.”
While moviemakers and reviewers claim that close-ups of men being shot in the throat, forehead, chest and belly are mere portraits of realism, what is the fallout of such images in an unprincipled context? There’s no redeeming value in young people watching such extermination; it only serves to inspire them to copy the behavior in real life.
Filmmakers have a great responsibility to not whitewash evil deeds. I suspect that young men who go on shooting sprees on campuses, at malls and in the family home have witnessed an abundance of killing on celluloid that has influenced their fateful actions. Do we need another Surgeon General’s report to state the obvious?
Topics: movies |
February 27th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I am glad to see smoking on screen get some attention, but you make good points about the violence in movies being as big an issue and the indifference it is shown. Another reason not to go see “No Country”.
No doubt Hollywood is hugely influential although they pretend they are not. I expect that as much as anyone, they are calling the shots about the way our young people think and act, what is acceptable and what is not. I remember watching only the first part of Scarface because of all the four letter words. A few years later I was really shocked to overhear some nicely dressed teenage girls use those words as part of their normal speech. We saw the industry go from cooperating with and respecting religious institutions years ago to open ridicule today.
You are right that the Industry has a responsibility not to whitewash evil deeds, but it seems the dollar dictates what we see and hear, not wise and good men.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I have finally had the chance to take a look. Congratulations! This is a great site!
March 11th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I plan on watching “No Country for Old Men” tonight, but I do not plan on killing anyone afterwards.
People are too quick to blame movies and music and video games for all the problems in this country. Millions upon millions of people watch violent movies, and only a handful of them actually go out and start shooting people.
To say that a person goes to the extent of actually murdering people in real life because of something they saw in a movie is completely ridiculous. Killers are not killers simply because they watched a violent movie or listened to Marilyn Manson or Eminem or played a violent video game, or whatever. They clearly have much deeper psychological problems than that.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I agree with Josh to an extent — but I also know that any crime begins in the MIND, and if you constantly view very violent movies and/or video games, and listen to music that glorifies violence (or simply has no respect for life), it may play out in real life at some point, given the right combination of other stressors. If a person is already unstable and struggles with anger issues, this kind of lifestyle could push them over the edge.