Mad Men’s Betty Hofstadt may be one of only four screen characters in more than a decade to suffer serious harm from smoking. The others were on the big screen: Constantine (Keanu Reeves) in Constantine, Tim Donohue (Donald Sumpter) in The Constant Gardener, and Otis Blake (Jeff Bridges) in Crazy Heart.
Four thousand different characters have smoked in 1,100 top-grossing movies since 2002. If only three of these film characters were diagnosed with lung cancer or heart failure, that’s a (potential) on-screen mortality rate of 0.08 percent (less than one-tenth of one percent). This starkly contrasts with the 50 percent tobacco death rate for adult smokers sitting in the audience.
Still, were those occasional, tobacco-induced diagnoses an object-lesson for adolescents, the group most prone to start smoking?
No, for a simple reason — all three movies we mentioned were R-rated. Kids were actually restricted from seeing them.
In fact, in 600-plus youth-rated smoking films released since 2002 (55% of all smoking films) — with more than 1,900 smoking characters (48% of all smoking characters) — the real health consequences of tobacco use were invisible.
Since death by tobacco doesn’t sell tickets, don't expect Hollywood to portray smoking in a realistic manner, unless they’re paid to. (We’ve been approached to pay a couple of times. But extortion is such an ugly word.)
A more sustainable solution is for the film industry simply to leave tobacco out of the movies that kids see most. The R-rating would accomplish this, for free and voluntarily.
The R-rating would create a market counter-incentive to Big Tobacco’s historically persistent payoffs to the film industry. And if a movie does show the serious consequences of tobacco use, it would keep a youth-rating.
Do you know of other tobacco-induced cancer, stroke, heart attack or emphysema acted out on screen? Please tell us. We want to be completely fair.