The constant puffing in TV's Mad Men is shocking now, but sex, fags and cool were once sold as synonymous
Jump to full article: Times Of London (uk), 2009-03-07
Author: Ben Macintyre
Intro: Today, the art of smoking on film is all but dead. Yet the appeal of on-screen smoking remains in our cultural bloodstream. The television series Mad Men, featuring Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway (right), and the British Film Institute series on screen seductresses both celebrate the lost world of nicotine-chic. . . .
Today, the art of smoking on film is all but dead. Yet the appeal of on-screen smoking remains in our cultural bloodstream. The television series Mad Men, featuring Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway (right), and the British Film Institute series on screen seductresses both celebrate the lost world of nicotine-chic. When Donald Draper lights up, or a screen siren blows a smoke ring, it still sends a jolt, an aesthetic buzz that is peculiar to cigarettes. We are still hooked. This is the legacy of Edward Bernays. . . .
In a chilling memo to film producers, written in the 1950s, the golden age of smoking, Bernays laid out the various ways a cigarette could convey multiple meanings on screen.
"Everything," Bernays declared, "from the gayest comedy to the most sinister tragedy can be expressed by a cigarette, in the hands or mouth of a skilful actor."
This is only one example of the inspired and deeply calculating way in which cigarettes were implanted in the cultural landscape of America, and therefore the world. . . .
The medical and legal history of cigarette smoking is now well known. Less understood is the way that the cigarette came to reflect America's perception of itself: this was a triumph of marketing, a moral tragedy, and a tribute to human ingenuity, mendacity and fallibility.
In many ways, cigarettes defined modern America. As Allan M. Brandt writes in his brilliant deconstruction of cigarette-smoking history: "The cigarette permeates 20th-century America as smoke fills an enclosed room." . . .
Thanks to the wave of litigation that engulfed tobacco in the later part of the century, we know more about the inner-workings of the cigarette business than any other in history. Brandt is at his best tracing the slippery brilliance with which the cigarette makers clouded the issue: the health dangers of cigarettes were "unproven" . . .
One billion people across the world are expected to die of tobacco-related disease in the course of this century.
Defying the odds and raking in the dollars, Marlboro Man still rides the range: beautiful, immortal and lethal.
Jump to full article » |