This piece originally appeared in The Yale Review.
1. Fire: In Skyfall, the Bond girl smokes. Thin, fashion-model cigarettes. In one scene, we watch as one of these elegant coffin nails gradually grows a long, wonderful, drooping ash that threatens to litter the Macau gambling casino where she’s engaging in badinage with Daniel Craig’s 007. How long has it been since you’ve gone to the movies and seen someone smoke as a sign of sophistication? There’s a move afoot to protect kiddies by giving R ratings to movies where the characters smoke. Why bother? The only people who smoke in American movies now are Euroscum villains and less worldly lowlifes. Could the message be any clearer? Listen kids, if you don’t want to end up in Juvie or on Interpol’s most-wanted list, stick to your guns and say no when the neighborhood hard guy offers you a Marlboro Red. A few years back, some health-minded charity even recruited a bunch of little creeps to e-mail film critics preparing their yearly best-of lists and tell them about the movies these clear-lunged young paragons had singled out for condemnation because people lit up. ‘‘Tobacco is a motherless child,’’ the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante wrote. Especially in contemporary movies.
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