Sunday, April 08, 2007
The Pursuit of the Harmless
Harvard School of Public Health has recommended the elimination of the 'depiction of tobacco' - brilliantly bureaucratic phrase - in movies 'accessible to youths' - and there's another. The Smoke Free Movies campaign will be delighted. They claim, 'Getting tobacco out of future G, PG and PG-13 films could be one of the most powerful health interventions in the last fifty years.' The Motion Picture Association of America seems to be a little embarrassed about this; they were expecting a rather tamer response from Harvard. Now they're stuck with this scorched earth policy, declining which will, presumably, be seen as a pro-tobacco depiction. What we have here is the not so thin end of a remarkably thick wedge. If tobacco, why not fat food - a particular problem for the Americans - depiction? Why not red meat depiction? Why not people taking insufficient exercise depiction? Why not walking too quickly with scissors depiction? Why not using a mobile phone on a plane depiction? (Actually, it turns out that is not dangerous at all, it's just airline control freakery.) Why not going to an Italian football match depiction? Why not being born depiction? It is, after all, an activity with a 100 per cent mortality rate. A fabulous youth-oriented movie suggests itself - a shot of a cloudy day (sun=melanoma) with no people and nothing happening. My Oscar is in the bag.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
In fact, that article makes the point that it is quite likely that, say, one per cent of passengers will ignore or forget the mobile phone switch-off rule on planes. If it is dangerous this should mean a number of incidents blamed on mobiles. But there seem to be one. This has often struck me.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds all terribly exciting to me. I admit to an almost total lack of interest in mainstream films which I put down to intellectual bias formed as a result of experience. However this is just the kind of artistic revolution that could get this particular bum back on the archetypal seat. It all suggests a kind of cinematic Aesop's Fables for a generation crying out for moral, spiritual and bodily improvement.
ReplyDelete1914?
ReplyDeleteThank you, Kaiser, for so persistently raising this pressing and generally ignored matter.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, warnings started to pop up all over the place that cell phones should be turned off while pumping gasoline. It showed up in car manuals, phone manuals and in little warning signs on the pumps themselves, but no one could quite figure out where this completely ludicrous idea came from. What seems to have happened is that some technical writer threw it into one phone's users manual and then bounced between gas pump manufactures, other phone companies and the automobile manufacturers.
ReplyDeleteBasically, if you say something with sufficient authority (and nothing is more authoritative than a statement that is printed), people not only believe you but invent all sorts of elaborate experiments that must have been conducted before someone would, for example, print something.
Another good example are drug expirations dates. "Experts" are always urging you to go through your medicine cabinets and throw away expired medicines but it turns out that those dates are basically made up by the drug companies. At best what they mean is "we know the drug is still effective through this date, because that's as far as we've tested." A few years ago the Army actually conducted exhaustive tests and determined that, thanks to modern packaging, unopened medicine is pretty much good indefinitely if kept from moisture or extreme temperatures. They saved millions of dollars by not throwing away perfectly good medicine -- and got in trouble for giving our troops "expired" drugs.
An Oscar in a bag? That's a potentially deadly weapon.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that most people thought that the ban existed now.But it may be amusing, watching the removal of reference to craven a/woodbine et al. from all early films. Still, memo to self, "buy extra hard drive".
ReplyDeleteThe American top universities tend give its union a sharp dose of the arts before letting them lose on other subjects. This little lot must have missed the Plato on Socrates segment of the course.
1915?
ReplyDelete