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Date Posted: 11:55:23 01/26/24 Fri
Author: Bazzle
Author Host/IP: 31.50.13.125
Subject: Times Article - Smoking in Films back in fashion
Not only is Oppenheimer the favourite to be named best picture at this year’s Oscars but it was a frontrunner for the more dubious accolade of most likely to promote smoking.
So disgusted was Cillian Murphy, its star, with the 3,000 cigarettes he puffed during filming that he has promised that his next character will be a non-smoker.
The film, in which Murphy plays J Robert Oppenheimer as he helps to invent the nuclear bomb, featured 137 scenes of smoking, comprising 104 with cigarettes and 33 with a pipe. The only mainstream film of 2023 to feature more tobacco was Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson, which featured 63 incidences of cigarettes, 58 cigars and the same number of pipes.
For cigarettes alone, the highest score was for Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s drama of an outsider inveigling his way into the upper classes, which has 124 scenes showing characters with a cigarette.
The films contributed to a reversal of the long-term decline in the depiction of smoking in films, which has fallen steadily from 75 per cent of mainstream films in 2003 to 38 per cent last year
Research by Smokefree Media, an anti-smoking lobby group that monitors films that make more than $1 million at the US box office, showed that despite the long-term trend, the proportion of films to feature tobacco was 2 per cent higher in 2023 than in the year previously.
Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s biopic of Leonard Bernstein that features cigarettes in almost every scene, does not appear in the research because Netflix gave it only a limited run in US cinemas. Netflix does not release box office figures, but according to reports, it made $300,000 – meaning that it did not meet researchers’ thresholds of being in the top ten at the box office or making $1m.
Film studios had been turning away from tobacco, in part due to encouragement by the Motion Picture Association, which began discouraging smoking in 2007, and Netflix, which announced in 2019 that it wished to eliminate smoking in films and television aimed at children aged 14 or under.
In past years in which smoking featured strongly, such as 2016 and 2017, many of the problematic films were biopics. Darkest Hour, the 2017 drama in which Gary Oldman portrayed Winston Churchill, featured 280 scenes with cigars.
In 2023 there was no such excuse. Oppenheimer was an exception in a year in which smoking was overwhelmingly used by directors who thought it looked cool.
Fennell said that she set Saltburn in 2006 and 2007, immediately prior to the smoking ban in the UK, because she wanted to show her characters smoking indoors.
John Britton, professor emeritus of epidemiology at Nottingham University and a retired consultant in respiratory medicine, said that smoking on film caused real harm.
He and university colleagues lobbied the British Board of Film Classification to take smoking into account when setting age restrictions but without success.
“We’ve argued with the BBFC, saying that seeing smoking in films doubles the risk of children becoming a smoker,” he said. “But they don’t give a toss.”
While the board will impose an 18 certificate for depictions of heroin use, it does not have set rules for tobacco.
Its guidelines state: “Where smoking, alcohol abuse or substance misuse feature to a significant extent in works which appeal to children, this will normally be indicated in ratings info. Classification decisions will also take into account any promotion or glamorisation of such activities.”
Britton said that cigarettes caused more public harm than heroin.
“We pushed really hard for 15 years because it’s the last area where tobacco is advertised to children. Sometimes it’s because directors are lazy and having a character smoke makes them edgy and interesting.”
He cited Jodie Comer’s recent portrayal of a mother of a newborn child in The End We Start From as an example of unnecessary smoking.
“She plays a middle-class mother with a baby living in a nice house in London and she lights up. It was completely implausible.”
He criticised the use of smoking as a plot device to allow characters to leave a group to chat alone, which happens in television comedies such as Gavin & Stacey.
A review in 2022 of studies about the effect of smoking and vaping in films found that there was a 40 per cent increase in smoking uptake among children exposed to them.
Britton said that pressure from health groups was making a difference.
James Cameron tried to brush off criticism when he chose to make Sigourney Weaver’s character smoke in Avatar despite being in a laboratory on a space station. However, there was no smoking in his sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, in 2022.
Other directors routinely depict smoking. All seven of Wes Anderson’s films monitored by Smokefree Media have featured smoking.
Vaping has yet to capture filmmakers’ imaginations.
Only 45 films are recorded as portraying vaping. They include Midsommar, a folk horror starring Florence Pugh, and 99 Homes, which featured Michael Shannon as an amoral property developer.
Ramin Bahrani, who directed 99 Homes, said that he made Shannon use a vape because it felt villainous.
Murphy said that he was fed up with smoking after portraying both Oppenheimer and a mobster in the interwar crime drama Peaky Blinders.
“I’ve smoked so many fake cigarettes for Peaky and this,” Murphy said. “My next character will not be a smoker. They can’t be good for you. Even herbal cigarettes have health warnings now.”
Rather interesting?
B
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- Re: Times Article - Smoking in Films back in fashion -- RuEmerald, 23:11:19 01/27/24 Sat
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