"There's a lot of unnecessary tobacco use in movies." So says Amy Yateman of the Middlesex-London Health Unit, by way of explaining the local agency's call for the provincial ratings board to crack down on the depiction of tobacco use in movies.
If the health unit has developed a standard for what constitutes "necessary" tobacco use in Hollywood productions, it's not clear. My wild guess is the folks there would object to any character who looks cool smoking, thus allegedly encouraging impressionable young people to take up the habit.
The obvious objection is that tobacco use, necessary or not, hasn't been much of a factor on the silver screen lately.
Take the last two months. In March and so far in April, five films have topped the North American box office - Hop, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, Limitless, Battle: Los Angeles and Rango.
Of these, only one has been flagged by the Ontario Film Review Board as containing tobacco use. And it was Limitless, the least likely of the lot to appeal to our sons and daughters.
If you blinked and missed the film, it stars Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper - performers who do not have any sort of pull with younger movie fans.
"They're at the age where they're trying to define themselves," Yateman says of the teens who report they began smoking after seeing a character light up in a feature film.
If there are any teens in this province idolizing Robert De Niro's work in Limitless, I have yet to meet them. The truth is that, as in society at large, smoking on the silver screen is getting harder and harder to find.
Presumably, the health unit's ultimate goal is to eliminate smoking altogether in this Ontario. So why go after a ratings body?
Why not lobby the McGuinty government, which has the power to outlaw tobacco use by means of provincial legislation? Why not lobby city council to pass even more restrictive smoking bylaws here in London? Why not take the case directly to local teens?
Putting pressure on the film-review board - which also has no standard of "necessary" tobacco use, nor necessary violence nor necessary sexual content - is, at best, an indirect way for the health bureaucracy to achieve its goal.
That the health unit would target the big screen in the age of the Internet is also puzzling. What we know about moviegoers in 2011 is the ones who can reliably be counted on to see films in old-fashioned theatres belong to the older demographics.
While it's true teens generally dictate which movies are popular on any given weekend, they're also the most likely to watch motion pictures using other platforms; they're the so-called platform agnostics, for whom any size screen is sufficient.
They don't have the same nostalgic attachment to theatres as their parents. How did Rebecca Black get more than 100 million views for her Friday video? From young people here in London and elsewhere.
What this means is if you really want to change the behaviour of teens, the silver screen is not the best target.
Yateman and the health unit would be better off focusing on YouTube. If they could somehow convince the video-sharing site to ban tobacco use in viral videos, that could potentially have a huge impact.
If you want my two cents, I'm willing to bet this campaign will pass without any measurable effect, much like other health unit efforts that inexplicably reach beyond this region.
The truth that we may not be willing to acknowledge is it's up to filmmakers to decide if smoking is necessary or not. And they live and work in Hollywood.
All we can do is exercise our best judgment - and instill in our kids the values we treasure - so when those Tinseltown productions reach London audiences, city teens make the right decision.
E-mail dan.brown@sunmedia.ca, read Dan's blog or follow Danatlfpress on Twitter.
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