Smoke Screen

Satire and cynicism form an uneasy alliance when Hollywood lights up, says Peter Crawley

THE anti-smoking campaign of the last Ming emperor may have been extreme, but it certainly got results. In 1638, Ch'ung-chen decided that anyone caught with a cigarette would be beheaded. The smoking rate in China dropped severely.

A few centuries later, smokers aren't so easily dissuaded. Smoking Kills. Smokers Die Younger. Smoking When Pregnant Harms Your Baby. The last warning sign was Bill Hicks's favourite. The comedian, an unrepentant smoker until his death from cancer, would hold up a pack with the inscription and say: "Looks like I found my brand."

That cigarettes have been so resilient, weathering every negative campaign, every Ming-sanctioned beheading, every steep tax hike, every cold statistic (7,000 people will die in our country this year because of smoking), every public ban, every dead comedian and every government warning, makes it odd that the tobacco industry should need a spokesman. But step forward Nick Naylor, "the Colonel Sanders of smoking", whose twinkling eyes and beaming smile are ever ready to spin the image of Big Tobacco.

Naylor is the ironic hero of an ironic movie called Thank You for Smoking. Naylor knows that he is defending the indefensible - that he is, as someone calls him, the yuppie Mephistopheles. But his philosophy, as perfectly formed and diaphanous as a smoke ring, is that "if you argue correctly, you're never wrong". And in a way he's right.

For instance, it's correct to say that cool people smoke (although it will never appear as a bold type fact on a cigarette packet). What's more, heavy smokers have greater sex drives than non-smokers. In surveys of 19-year-old college students, just 15 per cent of non-smokers have had sex. For smokers it's 55 per cent.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, surveys like these build up a very cool portrait of the typical heavy smoker: sexually active, defiant, honest, impulsive. "But they weren't cool because they smoked," Gladwell argues, correctly. "They smoked because they were cool."

No parental or governmental warning can defuse the rebellious appeal of smoking. In the film, however, when William H Macy's weasly Vermont senator pushes to replace the health warnings on cigarette packs with a skull and crossbones image, Big Tobacco goes into damage control. (It's hard to know what they're afraid of. The image, with its decaying flesh and cadaverous leer, is still only half as repulsive as the actual images that appear on cigarette packs in Australia - which has a bigger smoking problem than America).

This, for my money, is where the credibility of the film goes up in flames, and its truer, more entertaining aromas begin to waft around.

Some people will come away from Thank You for Smoking confused that it can gleefully, if ironically, defend the right to puff for 90 minutes without ever showing a single combustible onscreen. Others, following a modicum of research, will sourly note that the studio responsible (20th Century Fox) is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who for years sat on the board of directors of Philip Morris, the largest tobacco giant in the world.

But Thank You for Smoking, which, in its frame-hopping, media-collage style, resembles no film more closely than Fight Club (another acridly anti-corporate flick from the Fox corporation), encourages precisely that sort of distrust. In fact, a huge industry has grown around that sort of distrust. Let's call it Big Cynicism.

Big Cynicism may be the cultural logic of our age. It's the reason that Noam Chomsky is an international superstar, that Naomi Klein's anti-globalisation book No Logo became a global best-seller, that Eric Schlosser has quickly served up his second exposé of the fast food industry, and it's probably the reason why Michael Moore is having such trouble making Sicko, his new documentary about the pharmaceutical industry. You know that Big Cynicism can't be ignored when Pfizer employees have been instructed not to talk to "a scruffy guy in a baseball cap".

But Big Cynicism has now gone beyond the fiery rhetoric of grizzly documentary-makers and literary whistle-blowers, right into the "liberal" heart of mainstream Hollywood. Let's call it passive stoking. Big Cynicism is the real central character of Syriana, tying the strands of its political malaise together; it's the shadowy accomplice of The Insider, or the reason we suss out who the real baddie is by the second reel of Mission: Impossible III. Big Cynicism is the sane person's self-defence when faced with the invasion of Iraq, the re-election of George W Bush or another series of Big Brother.

And it's also another way that you can be duped. Thank You for Smoking, an infectious, witty snicker of a movie, is well aware of this, and you laugh along with its cool sense knowing. No acronym we hear comes without its heavy irony: "Safety" is the pro-firearm organisation, "Ego" is the Hollywood talent agency where Naylor tries to have his products placed. And in a world of probing reporters and crusading senators, who are each dishonestly honest, it's very easy to plumb for a guy like Nick, who is at least honestly dishonest.

But if the film leaves an unpleasant aftertaste when the nicotine hit of its good humour wears off, director Jason Reitman seems anxious with that realisation.

A former health education director reminded me recently of the doublethink tactics of the tobacco industry. "They've tried every trick in the book," he said. "First they denied the health risk, then they hid behind civil liberties - the freedom to smoke. When smoking became an environmental issue, they set up an organisation called 'Forest' [ the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco]. When advertising was banned, they sponsored sports and placed in movies.

"Using satire to push cigarettes would be the ultimate irony. It could be just one more trick."

A little cynicism is a dangerous thing. But for all its gravel-voiced hymns to spin, Thank You for Smoking is too coy to spark up a single cigarette. Could it be that the age of Big Cynicism has finally produced a film that isn't even sure of its own motives? Does it trust itself? Or is this satire on the power of spin and tobacco just another smokescreen?