People in the film industry might argue that movies aren’t glamorizing smoking, but they can hardly argue that they’re not normalizing it. I grew up believing that spinach would make me strong because that’s what Popeye ate, but it didn’t escape my young eyes that he also spent a fair amount of his time puffing away on a pipe. In my six-year old mind, I remember thinking that smoking a pipe probably wasn’t so bad since Popeye was doing it and he ate spinach and was strong. Even at that tender age, I was already idolizing movie stars and their questionable habits.
Filmratings.com says this of PG-rated movies: “horror and violence do not exceed moderate levels.” Interesting. I’m guessing that no one in the industry saw the film about the man who began smoking at the age of nine and became severely addicted to cigarettes for the next sixty-five years. They might have skipped over the part where he had a heart attack while sitting in his recliner and was too scared to call anyone and was only discovered because his sister stopped in to check on him a few days later. They might also have missed the part where the doctor told his family that his emphysema had impaired his circulation so badly that they needed to amputate one of his legs. A few days later, they determined that they needed to amputate his other leg. But they never actually had to do it because he died. The end.
That might sound like a familiar story line to thousands, maybe millions, of people around the world—but that particular story line hasn’t been made into a movie yet. I know this because that's my dad’s story. He died nine years ago of illnesses that were all related to his sixty-five years of smoking: emphysema, pneumonia, and heart disease. While I’m certainly not suggesting that the film industry is to blame—I’ve got Big Tobacco to thank for that—I can say with complete confidence that the horror of my dad’s situation did indeed “exceed moderate levels.”
