Big-Screen Smoke Screen

National Review Online, April 8, 2001

Medical science used to be about test tubes, dissection, and ugly moments in the mortuary. Not any more, it seems. At New Hampshire's Dartmouth Medical College, researchers had a very different project. They sat through 178 movies, and it wasn't fun. For, doubtless to their disgust, these selfless men and women of science were forced to witness something that they would probably prefer never to be shown on the silver screen. It was a spectacle more repulsive than Hannibal Lecter's skillet, a freak show more sinister than Freddy Krueger's grin. Yes, they had to watch cigarette smokers at play. Lots of them. Worse still, many of these puffing perverts seemed to be enjoying their nasty vice. This would be bad behavior at the best of times, but coming from movie stars, the consequences could be devastating. Cinema's sinning celebrities, worried the Dartmouth team, could lead "The Children" astray.

So they interviewed "The Children," 632 in total, all based in schools within two hours drive of Lebanon, New Hampshire. What the Lebanese had to say was shocking. A disturbing number of their favorite film actors scored far too many points on the Dartmouth survey's roll of dishonor, "the star tobacco use index," a system devised by the researchers for recording how often a particular individual can be seen smoking on-screen.

Now, as surveys go, an interrogation of a handful of New Hampshire high-school students is not the most comprehensive, but an analysis of the youngsters' replies led the research team to a horrifying conclusion. Students whose favorite actors came near the top of the index (in other words, the stars who were most often shown smoking) were, allegedly, more likely to smoke themselves. There "was a clear relation between on-screen tobacco use by movie stars and higher levels of smoking uptake in the adolescents who admire them." We can assume that these findings are meant to have implications beyond the Granite-State Bek'aa. Across the nation, mesmerized schoolchildren are, it is suggested, being lured by images of smokin' Brad Pitt into a short, stupid life of wheezing, nicotine-driven hell.

Of course, it is possible to argue with the methodology, the conclusions, and the researchers' choice of professional priorities, but I would not recommend trying this with Jennifer J. Tickle, the lady in charge of the study. Ms. Tickle, a Ph.D. candidate with a double major in psychology and, impressively, interdisciplinary women's studies, sounds like a stern sort. In a recent interview with the New York Post she warned that, "Movie stars should seriously think whether smoking is central to the character they are portraying." And they should also behave themselves off the set. Maybe they could "try not to be seen so much in public with a cigarette in their hand."

Leonardo DiCaprio, that means you.

Ms. Tickle, however, faces an uphill struggle. "The movie industry knows there is a relationship between teen smoking and what they put on the screen, but they seem to turn a blind eye to it," she scolds. She should not be surprised. Showbiz is filled with self-centered individuals, incapable of doing anything for the public good. Who among us, after all, can forget the Petaluma petition? This was drafted in 1997 by the scholars of Casa Grande (a Californian high school that clearly attracts students of a more refined type than the Skoal-chewing, chain-smoking, movie-crazed barbarians of Lebanon, N.H.). The petitioners called on local girl Winona Ryder to renounce smoking on the silver screen. Callously, she chose to ignore them.

But Ms. Tickle, it is you who should ignore Winona. For every Winona you wean off the weed there will be another Christian, Keanu, or Drew who lights up. In our straitlaced times tobacco use has become a symbol of rebellion, an easy symbol of cool for any new actor trying to win an audience. So, rather than trying to retrain these hopeless stars, find a role model of your own, an individual who smokes and yet who is so repellent, so horrible, and so utterly lacking in any good qualities, that no one will want to have a bad habit in common with him. Ms. Tickle, I know just the man.

Adolf Hitler, smoker.

There is, of course, one teeny problem with this idea. Hitler did not, in reality, smoke. Although the future Fuhrer was disciplined for smoking as a child, by the time the little tyke had his Reich, he had turned against cigarettes. On at least one occasion, he claimed that had it not been for the decision to give up smoking in his youth, Germany would not have been lucky enough to have him as savior. Well, thanks for that, anti-smokers.

In Adolf's view, tobacco was "one of man's most dangerous poisons." Even poor Eva Braun, the future Mrs. Hitler, was not allowed to smoke in the presence of her husband-to-be. Other acolytes had to wrestle with a similar prohibition. In a precursor of current rows over portrayals of FDR, Hermann Goering came under the Fuhrer's fire for permitting the erection of a statue that showed the Luftwaffe boss with a cigar in his mouth. But it was not all doom and gloom in the Chancellery. Hitler believed in the carrot as well as the stick. Friends who quit were rewarded with a gold watch.

This anti-smoking fervor was not just confined to the party's inner circle. Hitler's government imposed wide-ranging restrictions on smoking in the workplace and on public transport. It was made difficult for women to buy cigarettes, and SS officers in uniform were forbidden to smoke in public, as were youngsters under the age of 18. Tobacco advertisements were subject to the sort of strict control of which the FDA can only dream. There would have been no room for Josef Kamel in the clean-living Third Reich. Certain media, such as billboards, were often off-limits for the tobacco companies, and (take note, Ms. Tickle!) cigarettes could not be advertised in films.

This historical truth is, of course, a problem for those who would promote the idea of a nicotine Nazi, but it is not insurmountable. Anti-tobacco activists, who gave us the junk science of "passive smoking" (itself a term, "Passivrauchen," first coined in Hitler's Germany) will have no ethical qualms about reinventing the Fuhrer as a smoker. As a reverse role model he would last a thousand years. The National Socialist leader would be a perfect spokesman for the evils of the coffin nail. A Marlboro cowboy in reverse, Swastika Man was an unwholesome, unhealthy, mass-murdering, war-losing hysteric. No one sane would want to emulate him in any way.

The creation of a smoking Hitler would be easy. The technology that today is used by the Postal Service to remove cigarettes from the images of icons such as Thornton Wilder, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, and blues man Robert Johnson could, at last, be put more to more constructive use. Let us take the cigarettes out of the mouths of American heroes and jam them between the teeth of German villains. The sight of a frenzied Fuhrer furiously chewing on a stogie as he rants and raves at a hate-filled Nuremberg mob would horrify all but the most recalcitrant teen. Images of defeat would underline the message that smoking is for losers. We could enjoy newsreel of a pallid chain-smoking Hitler contemplating the annihilation of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, or maybe gloat over those few last photographs of a disheveled dictator grubbing around for butts on the squalid bunker floor. Add in a Soviet-autopsy report doctored to reveal that the dead man showed signs of emphysema as well as a bullet, and the off-putting picture would be complete.

Mention of an autopsy is, however, a reminder that Adolf Hitler is, like so many other smokers, no longer with us. While he will be the best long-term reverse role model, it would be better if his efforts could be supplemented by those of a contemporary villain. Saddam Hussein (a Virginia Slims man, I like to think) is one candidate, but it might be better to have a home-grown bogeyman this time round. Mercifully, there are no American Fuhrers, (outside Idaho, anyway) but there is one domestic political figure who, with a little work and a lot of cigarettes, might manage to achieve both the unpopularity and the association with Big Tobacco that is essential if this country's youth is to be scared away from Marlboro Country.

This prim, grim, grating grandee is a ruthless political operator who has forced a way to the top over the broken careers of friend and foe. We are talking about someone who is no respecter of laws or borders, someone whose latest triumph was to take power in another state far from home, someone who it is easy to dislike. Currently, this person does not smoke, but if it was in the interests of "The Children," she might be persuaded to take it up.

Sen. Clinton, may I offer you a light?