Thank You For Smoking

This past weekend, my parents made the three hour journey from our home in New Jersey to attend the Blue/White football game. It was their first Penn State football game, and, even though it was not the event that it usually is due to torrential rains, they were still highly impressed. I am going completely off topic though, as football and how it relates to the American Dream is not the subject of this post.

After the game, my parents and I had an early dinner and went to the movies. We saw Thank You For Smoking. It was excellent. And it actually relate to our English class. It speaks very loosely to the American Dream, but the power of rhetoric is an important aspect of the movie (and a portion of our class).

Thank You For Smoking is a simultaneously funny and intelligent satire of contemporary morality and personal freedom. Nick Naylor, the main character, is a top lobbyist for the Academy for Tobacco Studies, financed by big tobacco itself. With increasing attacks on the tobacco industry, Naylor’s job is to protect the companies from law-suits and keep people smoking. He is good-looking, smooth-talking, and unreservedly persuasive.

It’s a tough job, so he meets weekly with the M.O.D. (Merchants of Death) squad, consisting of Naylor, an alcohol lobbyist, and a gun rights lobbyist. Naylor, and the others, seem to sense that what they do isn’t exactly the right thing, but as he says, something has to pay the mortgage.

Throughout the movie, while brain-storming ways to get kids to smoke and improve the industry’s image, Naylor strives to be a role-model for his twelve year-old son Joey. When Joey asks his father how he can argue for the patently wrong side of an issue, he replies, “If you argue correctly, you're never wrong.” Joey even begins to utilize some of his father’s techniques to get his way by the end of the movie.

“If you argue correctly, you're never wrong.” I mean, isn’t that partially what we learned in class. Rhetoric is such a powerful tool when used correctly, and Naylor has definitely perfected his argumentative skills. Somehow he manages to make a spokesman for the senator speaking about the dangers of smoking look dim-witted.

I actually really liked this movie, and appreciate its dry humor and artistic filming.