1. Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Victoria,

In contrast to the sincerity of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, our third film is the supremely cynical Thank You for Smoking.  Despite its sort-of turn in the conclusion, which I’ll get to, this movie paints a picture of humanity that assumes all (or, at least, most) of us are self-interested to a fault, and that no matter our level of intelligence, we all fall prey to bullshit embarrassingly easily.  I don’t think the movie is all that wrong, unfortunately.

I’m tempted towards a Marxist reading of this film, which would see the rhetoric and easy exchange of vast sums of money portrayed in the movie as tools of capitalistic control.  A true Marxist would point out, though, that these messages are being transmitted via a tremendously expensive (budget: $8.5 million; domestic gross: $24,793,09), rhetorically manipulative medium.  Can we trust the film to be honest, even for a second, about the nature of money, media, and power?  I think the answer is possibly, but it would be foolish to not, at the very least, put up our guard when thinking about what the film has to say.

The thing I think we can trust the film to do is to revel in portraying a variety of different types of unethical people.  There is a smorgasbord of people behaving badly in this movie, and there is a certain pleasure in simply having them pointed out.  This is because in real life, off-screen, these kinds people really do have power, and really aren’t the subject of much genuine scrutiny.  There is the protagonist, who, as a lobbyist, is the self-proclaimed “sultan of spin.”  There’s the faux-environmentalist senator; the floozie reporter; the racist, hypocritical tobacco tycoon.  My favorite of these monsters is Adam Brody’s Hollywood intern, who delightfully talks up his Japan-obsessed boss while simultaneously skewering him with lines like, “That sand won’t rake itself!” shouted at a Zen Garden artist.  In his funniest moment, he insults a fellow coworker with  a purported inside joke: “I'm going to impale your mom on a spike and feed her dead body to my dog with syphilis!”

I like this character because, though he is an egotist like everyone else in the movie, he’s an egotist that seems to be aware that he hasn’t fully ascended the power ladder yet, and that any agency he has is sourced in the power of his boss rather than himself.  This possibility of self-awareness (or hope, rather), makes him the most fun character to watch.

And, before I close, about that ending.  Nick Naylor, our lobbyist protagonist, has a quasi-change of heart and rejects the offer made by the Institute of Tobacco Studies to reclaim his rightful seat as its Vice President.  He allegedly does this because he is concerned about his son and the future of his family.  I think that this move, just like everything else Naylor says, is a kind of bullshit.  Naylor reminds his son, and us, frequently throughout the movie that to win an argument, you have to remember your audience and change the terms of the debate.  This is exactly what Naylor is doing here.  We are his intended audience, not the characters on-screen: he wants us to sympathize with him.  The way to “win” isn’t to tell anyone in the movie they’re wrong: the way to “win” is to tell us we are right for rooting for him.  This is the film being supremely cynical, and we are reminded to be delightfully skeptical of the work as a whole as a result.

Love,
Adam