Movie Review 5 - Thank You for Smoking

"There is no conclusive evidence that links smoking to lung cancer." This had been incessantly promoted by a cigarette lobbyist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), as a way to advertise and brainwash people into smoking as a response to the world's increasing campaign on anti-smoking environment. Nick first tried to put back smoking behavior into the society by using the celebrity in their sexy scenes in the movies. His theory was that the celebrities in the past were made famous by continuous indirect message that invited people to smoke, by their visual imagery in pictures, with them holding smokes and posing. This penetrated smoking practice into the society without even it knowing, but too bad, the world, or specifically a senator in the United States who did a strong campaigning against smoking.

Nick counteracted by bribing the original Marlboro guy into not lashing cigarettes (because he himself was diagnosed with lung cancer), meeting the Hollywood entertainment placer to persuade the smoking in the movies suggestion, or even went public with his ideas of the greatness of smoking. While seeing how the world almost a bit bought what he had to say, a seductive journalist used him to gather all the informations that could be used against him.

The report in the article by the journalist included how Nick compared and prided how cigarettes topped the account of the most deaths in the world, how he bribed the Marlboro man to stop using his lung cancer diagnosis against smoking, how he brought his son together in the lobbying in a business trip, and that all his lobbying was all for paying his mortgage. After this article, and his near-death condition, when kidnapped by a hater who kidnapped him and overdosed him with a lot of nicotine-patches, Nick knew he had to do something. He went to the Subcommittee Hearing on Tobacco and campaigned for smoking for the last time before he quit his job for good, but this time, in different way.

His speech in the hearing raised a certain important issue about how smoking was promoted against all these years. He pointed out that, in response to the senator's question whether or not he believed that smoking could cause serious health repercussions, he himself did. He asked the audience and asked to raise their hands if they did not know if smoking would be bad. It's a common knowledge, it's something everybody knew, thus why all this brutal and relentless campaign against smoking anymore?

Nick's point furthered to the fact that it was how people were educated. It was all how about children were raised and educated. It was all grownups were socialized and educated. In a family system, it was the parents who should take responsibility to educate (note: the word is educate, not force) their children of the importance of making the right decision. Although in smoking situation, this could be partially true because government would be responsible too, but he raised a very significant point in here. When parents, teachers, the community, or even the government kept on promoting against smoking, did they actually stop to think that they might be partly in fault when their loved ones started to smoke?

We were diverting the focus of blame onto someone else because we were too lazy and clueless into admitting that we might contribute themselves to falling into the smoking habit. Smoking children might have smoking parents, or smoking peers. Smoking children might have indifferent parents who did not care much about what their children were doing. Smoking children might be so because their parents were mostly into cure rather than prevention. All of these and a lot of other factors as well that go beyond blaming and campaigning against smoking, and putting a lame scary image at the side of a cigarette smoke as well, should be considered in treating, and more important, preventing the society from becoming even more and more desensitized towards smoking.

I hope we consider our roles and contributions we could make as parents and siblings and friends in the prevention of smoking behaviors. Well, unless we couldn't care less...