Smoke Screen

The only people lighting up in movie theaters these days are the
characterson screen. Yet those most likely to smoke on film are among the
least likely to do so in reality: the virile, successful white
male.

In fact, white male movie heroes smoke at three times the rate of
the average college-educated white male, say University of California at
San Francisco researchers.

And if the smokers in the movies look familiar, it's because they
are the same people leering at you from highway billboards. "The
presentation of smoking in the media is more consistent with tobacco
advertising than with reality," says Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., reporting in
the American Journal of Public Health. "In real life, heroes don't smoke;
it's the uneducated and poor. They're the people advertisers prey
on."

Although smoking has declined significantly among the general
public, tobacco use on film remained stable between 1960 and 1990. And
kids are now involved in smoking scenes at more than double the rate they
were three decades ago.

Glantz is fuming over the high smoking rate on screen. "The tobacco
industry swears that it isn't doing more product placement" in films, he
says. But the cardiologist suspects tobacco firms are setting their
sights on teens who, in their endless quest for cool, may settle into a
lucrative, lifetime cigarette habit.

If that's the industry's strategy, it seems to be working: Some
3,000 teenagers start smoking every day. Though no specific movie
character or ad makes a kid smoke, says Glantz, together they normalize
tobacco use and equate it with power, success, and virility. "When you
smoke, you are putting a flamethrower in your mouth and inhaling poison
chemicals. It takes some doing to get people to do that."