Nanny State Hollywood?
10th July 2012
Movies that show actors smoking tobacco should automatically earn an R rating in order to minimize copycat smoking among impressionable tweens and teenagers, the authors of a new study suggest.
PG-13 films account for nearly two-thirds of the smoking scenes adolescents see on the big screen, according to the two-year study, which surveyed roughly 5,000 children ages 10 to 14 about the movies they’d seen and whether they’d ever tried a cigarette.
Smoking in PG-13 films — including background shots and other passing instances — was just as strongly linked with real-world experimentation as the smoking in R-rated films. For every 500 smoking scenes a child saw in PG-13 movies, his or her likelihood of trying cigarettes increased by 49%. The comparable figure for R-rated movies was 33%, a statistically negligible difference.
This, of course, presumes that anybody pays any attention to the ratings on movies. The number of films that are seen ‘on the big screen’ as opposed to Netflix or other online providers (not to mention just buying the damned thing from Amazon, who will cheerfully sell you an R-rated movie without asking your age) makes this exercise in optimism Just Another Crustian Inconvenience, producing a warm fuzzy feeling on the part of the ruling class without any effect in the real world.