ALONG with buckets of money — more than $1.6 billion so far, worldwide — and a couple of Golden Globes, James Cameron’s “Avatar” has collected a smattering of controversy. Some of the hue and cry has involved matters of political allegory and theological implication, as pundits have divined that this globally popular blockbuster may represent a veiled ideological attack on America, capitalism, humanity, monotheism or all of the above. But the fiercest attack on “Avatar” has focused on what may seem, compared to such lofty matters, like a minor detail. Of all the corny lines and ready-made catchphrases in Mr. Cameron’s script, perhaps none has turned out to be so provocative as one uttered by Grace Augustine, the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver: “Where’s my damn cigarette?”
In the view of anti-smoking activists, the correct answer should be: Nowhere, at least not in any real or imaginary world governed by a PG-13 rating. The logic of the Smoke-Free Movies campaign, which seeks an R rating for almost all instances of on-screen puffing, is straightforward enough. If the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board advises parents about sex, violence, language and drug use, why should it not also shield children from exposure to a lethal (if legal) product that hooks, sickens and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year? Since 2007 the M.P.A.A. has considered smoking when it makes its judgments, and one studio, Disney, has since then made all its family films smoke free.
Should that be true of all movies likely to be seen by children? Does it matter that Grace’s smoking, according to Mr. Cameron, is meant to emphasize the less attractive aspects of her temperament, including that she “doesn’t care about the human body”? And if that mitigation seems like a bit of a stretch (in the future, how likely is it that scientific laboratories on distant moons will allow what their earthbound counterparts forbid today?), what about some of the other recent instances tarred, as it were, by the opprobrium of Smoke-Free Movies? The principal smoker in the animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a villain, and if the hero in “Sherlock Holmes” takes a draw or two on a pipe, well, he is Sherlock Holmes.
In the movie-smoking debate, even clear positions — that children must be protected from images that might influence their behavior, or that filmmakers should be immune from censorship and interference — tend quickly to be fogged with questions of context and nuance. That is because underneath the public discussion about smoking (or gun violence, or sexual promiscuity, or whatever social problem has seized the momentary spotlight) is another, much more confused discourse: about movies and about the ways they mirror and occlude reality.
The power of movies is undeniable, but also elusive. Even the children whose fragile psyches grown-ups fret about know that what movies depict is not real, and yet even the most sophisticated or jaded viewers habitually peruse the screen in search of designs for living. The screen is, among other things, a domain of glamour, in which ordinary actions are given a luster, a charisma, far beyond what they possess in the everyday world.
Social scientists doggedly pursue evidence of correlations between on- and off-screen behavior, while some commentators insist that no such connections could possibly exist. The rest of us know perfectly well that we don’t play with anvils and dynamite just because we see Wile E. Coyote do it, though perhaps those Looney Tunes are cautionary tales. But we also can acknowledge that our actions, our fantasies and the pictures we consume are not all that far apart. And it is for precisely this reason — in recognition of the unique and dazzling impact of an art form that is also a mass medium compounded of big pictures and good-looking people — that movies have always attracted the attention of censors. In the United States regulation has been voluntary, a way for private enterprise to forestall the interference of the government. Elsewhere the state weighs in, either with outright prohibitions on certain content or with restrictions on who can see what.
Hollywood’s self-imposed system has tried both approaches. From the mid-1930s to the mid-’60s the Production Code kept a tight rein on what all audiences could see, and promised that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” It is easy enough, in retrospect, to laugh at the starchy Victorianism of that language. But at the same time the idea that movies might ennoble their audiences and even improve us as we watch them, affirms a faith in cinema that is almost Utopian.
The code may have withered, but the ideal of movies as a universal and fundamentally benign form of entertainment has hardly gone away, and is indeed what informs many of the efforts to broaden and strengthen the ratings system. That system, devised in 1968 by Jack Valenti, president of the M.P.A.A. for almost 40 years afterward, has undergone some tweaks over the years, replacing X with NC-17 and adding the PG-13 between PG and R. Such changes, and attempts to refine the criteria for any particular rating, represent an earnest attempt to keep abreast of public sensitivities even as they also suggest the quixotic nature of the enterprise. What committee could possibly take account of the often confused and contradictory mores and prejudices of a country of 300 million-plus people? And the M.P.A.A. has become an easy scapegoat for that very confusion. Critics of the association, including many filmmakers interviewed by Kirby Dick in his 2006 documentary, “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” accuse the ratings board of being more tolerant of violence than of sex, less tolerant of homosexuality than heterosexuality, and perversely fixated on shot lengths, camera angles and other technical matters that barely register with ordinary viewers.
Mr. Dick’s film, a critique of the ratings system in the name of artistic freedom, dwells on the commercially fraught boundary between the R and NC-17 ratings, which caused problems for the directors of films like “The Cooler,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and “A Dirty Shame.” But for the public — at least for children and their parents — the more embattled frontier is the one between PG-13 and R.
In actual ticket-buying practice, the difference between them is that a young-looking adolescent must be accompanied either by a full-fledged adult or by an older-looking adolescent. Otherwise it may take a practiced eye and ear to realize that a popular Anglo-Saxon expletive is acceptable in a PG-13 movie as long as it is only heard once and does not refer to a sexual act. Thus “Billy Elliott,” as wholesome and uplifting a film as you could hope for — its story about a kid who dreams of being a dancer is likely to inspire other kids with similar dreams — has an R rating because its proletarian English characters talk more or less as they would in the real world.
It is easy to scoff at that rating only if you have never received angry letters from parents or grandparents appalled by profanity. But of course the rules about specific rules allow a lot of leeway, and no one would claim that by taking your children only to PG-13 comedies, say, you would spare them sustained exposure to coarse sexual humor. Nor would a PG-13-only diet prevent them from seeing violent deaths and grisly images, including the genocidal warfare in “Avatar” itself.
On the other hand, a trip to see “It’s Complicated,” the midlife romantic-triangle comedy starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, will expose viewers to no violence, no nudity (apart from a brief glimpse of Mr. Baldwin’s buttocks) and very little naughty language. That film’s R rating came about because of a sequence in which Ms. Streep and Mr. Martin smoke a joint and suffer no adverse consequences beyond some potentially embarrassing giddiness.
The argument for the rating board’s decision, I suppose, would be that children might conclude that smoking marijuana is an acceptable, risk-free behavior. But what the ratings system, with its quantitative, literal-minded view of movie images, seems unable to imagine is that exposure to the pot in “It’s Complicated” might have the opposite effect. If your grandparents are doing it, how cool can it really be?
And what the supporters of the Smoke-Free Movies position may underestimate is the extent to which a taboo creates temptation. The audience most susceptible to the glamour of the R rating is also the demographic most at risk of starting to smoke. Exiling cigarettes to the ostensibly forbidden but easily accessible land of the R might have the unintended effect of making them seem more alluringly grown up.
More likely, bringing tobacco further into ratings decisions will create new opportunities for ambiguity and confusion, since it seems unlikely that smoking will be any different from any other vice, dubious practice or habit of speech. Smoke-Free Movies has claimed that the R for tobacco is not only right but also inevitable, and such questions, and the quarrels that follow from them, are also inevitable. As are further attempts to expand the purview of the M.P.A.A., to include other products and behaviors. What about guns? What about trans fats? What about beer and Styrofoam and high-fructose corn syrup?
In 2154, when “Avatar” takes place, it is possible that tobacco use will no longer exist. But if movies are still around, there will still be arguments about what they should be showing, and to whom. Such arguments are built into the medium and our complicated bond with it. We want movies to acknowledge what is real, but also to improve on reality, to give us a vision of a perfect world in which everything is permissible — a world that’s sexy, dangerous, scary and smoky and safe for children too.
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