Hollywood stars tell us to eat healthy, showing us toned bodies we're supposed to emulate. So, why do they want us to smoke?
The depiction of smoking is becoming even more frequent in top-grossing movies -- a jump of 80% over a year's time.
[newhouse.syr.edu/faculty-staff/robert-thompson]Pop culture professor Bob Thompson says it probably isn't fair to call this hypocrisy.
“If I'm a great actor and I get the opportunity to be in a movie and play King Lear,” Thompson says, “that doesn't mean I believe in killing people to stay in power, even though that's exactly what King Lear is about.”
Thompson thinks the Golden Age of Hollywood killed many Americans because they didn’t show explicit sex scenes in the 40s and 50s.
“You couldn't show sex,” he says, “so you had to show things that were kind of sexy and sexual to imply it and one of those things was smoking cigarettes. Think of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.”
he can't stop chuckling at the consistent anti-gun messages from movie stars -- when every action movie shows more gun fire than most of us will ever see in real life.