Smoking to affect movie ratings system*

* Actual News Headline

[Again, the ruination of my plans for the evening starts out with a wire story on cnn.com. Curse you, wire stories on cnn.com!]

The PC Police are now getting set to crack down on smoking in movies by slapping a restrictive “R” rating on movies deemed to have too much of the wrong kind of smoking (it’s a tortured but still loosey-goosey set of rules they’ve established for this effort, explained in fuller confusion in the link above).

Look, I don’t smoke. I don’t dig being around people who smoke because they are potentially putting my life, and my family’s lives at risk with their second-hand smoke. They make my hair and clothes smell like shit, especially the next day when the smoke has gone stale. It’s a boorish habit pushed like any other drug by a ruthless cartel (in this case in Washington, DC) and I’m all for any crackdowns in places accessible to the public, even outdoor places like parks, sidewalks, any place paid for by my tax dollars that a reasonable person might expect to innocently find himself.

It’s not cigarettes that’s got my dander up. I look ahead, and I see smoking as something vestigial, connected to the previous millennium and on the wane. Soon, it will be a period thing of its own – “Oh look, that character is smoking. This film must take place in the 20th Century.” I think that’s a good thing, and I also think it doesn’t need my help jumping the cultural shark beyond being a good example to my son. The anti-smoking lobby has done excellent work and I salute them.

But cigarettes in movies are smoke-free for me, in the audience. My rights need to protected from second-hand smoke, not two-dimensional smoke! No Thought Police required!

See, this isn’t an issue about smoking, it’s about movies. It’s about creative expression. Ultimately, it’s about free speech.

Here’s a random example: Not only would “The Bad News Bears,” as shot in the 70s not be PG-rated today, but it wouldn’t even get made. Ask the people who filmed the remake a couple years back, serious fellas like Billy Bob Thornton and (director) Richard Linklater – their script was watered down from the original, then watered-down even more by nervous Suits to get the hallowed PG-13 rating. I saw the original on TCM a few weeks back, and was amazed at how ribald it was.

Regarding 70s movies in general, without the PG-13 rating to fall back on, the MPAA seemed to err on the side of sex and nudity when applying the PG label. Often I have said to The Missus while watching the pop culture of my childhood, “Wow honey, look at that! They’re rated PG!” (PG-rated “Logan’s Run” was a watershed for me, hormonally.) Even TV standards and practices were extremely lax by today’s metrics. Rent the first season of “Charlie’s Angels” for all the evidence you’ll need. BBBOOOOINGG!!!! Again, it’s another show they wouldn’t make today for the very reason that made it so popular at the time, and I’m pretty sure we all still like nipples as much now as we did back then.

Now we’re just better at pretending we’re not prurient because we get all the titillation we need on the internet or Pay-Per-View in the middle of the night. We can afford to talk out of both sides of our asses during the day time.

And why the FUCK is violence okay, but nudity and cussing isn’t? Jesus Christ, in the 70s disgruntled college students stripped and ran naked through their campuses. Today, they arm themselves to the teeth and go on shooting rampages. You’re going to tell me the 70s weren’t safer than today, and that our fucked-up pop culture doesn’t reflect that relative incivility? You can debate forever which phenomenon — the coarsening of pop culture or the general decline of American civility — begat the other but I believe they’re inextricable; mirror-images of each other, each impossible without the other.

Now here we are, 30 years later, in a society ever more glutted with escalating violence and preening hypocrisy and we’re going to turn our cultural guardians loose on ... the movie ratings system to penalize smoking?! Wildly sadistic images of brutal mass mayhem (as long as nobody bleeds) and a film can squeak by with a family-friendly PG-13 rating (hello, “Lord of the Rings” trilogy); but have a lead character who smokes and suddenly you’re “banished” to the realm of 17-and-above with the cussers and the flashers of nudity? “You’re hard core, baby – heh heh – you’ve got a monkey on your back and he looks a lot like Joe Camel!” [cue ominous background music]

I’m sick of pop culture being stripped away to the lowest common denominator. From shitty pop music, to reality shows all over TV, to what laughingly passes as the mainstream news media (All Talking Heads, All The Time), it’s all been brought to its current sorry state by an apparently indiscriminating public.

And it’s an indiscriminating public that lets something as insidious as this happen. As a society, we’re beginning to remind me more and more of the dystopian-future lunkheads from “Robo-Cop” (R-rated and damned righteously so!) sitting around our TVs, loaded and overweight, laughing at the most puerile swill and slurring, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

For those more academically inclined, first, go rent “Robo-Cop.” That’s a movie! Second, allow me to paraphrase the late anti-Nazi activist, Martin Niemöller, in a way that will draw your attention to the core of my unease with this cultural trend as it relates to the movie rating system:

“First they came for the titties in my movies, and I didn’t complain, because I have titties of my own. Then they came for the characters who said the “F” word, and again I did nothing for I don’t care for the word, myself. (Sounds dirty.) Next they came to eliminate the cigarette-smoking characters and I said ‘remove them far downwind for they smell like soggy ashtrays!’ And when they finally came to write out the haughty, self-righteous-prick characters, there was no one left to defend me (except gay best friends and hookers with hearts of gold and they were no help at all).”