MovieChat Forums > Going Postal (2010) Discussion > What's with the PC non-smoking stuff?

What's with the PC non-smoking stuff?


I mean, Moist crying while watching Adora Belle picking up smoking because of him, and in the end making a point of it that she quit?

In the book she smokes like a chimney. Heck, he even found out where she lived because of that...

I'm quite disappointed to find out that being politically correct is more important than staying true to the story. I actually was kind of disgusted to see that PC message being forced into the movie, forcibly tearing away the credibility and feel of a Terry Pratchett story.

reply

Couldn't agree more mate, I was really disappointed to see them adapt the story purely for the fact that they can't be seen to promote smoking and especially to the point of having her quit. If they ever make Making Money will she be a non-smoker?

Her smoking was part of her character, and if you're going to change that part of her then you might as well make her a clean-cut heroine looking for mister right.

reply

It's a family show so I had low expectations about them actually keeping the smoking. Honestly I was just surprised and impressed that they managed to keep it at all.

reply

Did it really matter though. look on the positive side. At least the success of this show omean other novels will be filmed. Even the LOTR films cut and changed massive amounts of the original text. its the nature of converting from book to film.

reply

I think Moist was upset about ruining her family overall, not just her smoking. And don't worry, a LOT of people say they will or have quit, but they don't.

reply

[deleted]


So i'm not the only one annoyed by the crowbar-ing of the anti-smoking brigades message... Adora smoked because she was cool... No other reason.

Everyone knows smoking makes you look cool and no amount of pansy, holier than thou, know what's best do-rights are going to change the fact that every awesome person, for the last century, had a ciggy in hand( Or slightly drooping from one side of the mouth if you happen to be blisteringly cool!)...

Everything that is awesome has some risk involved, and i as a smoker am right there behind Evel Knievel when it comes to pointless gambles.

People who make it there mission to vanquish smoking should realise that they are equally as annoying to a smoker as a smoker is to them... It's just the smoker is a happier person!


P.S. If you're an anti-smoking person and you drive/own/sit in/tolerate the internal combustion engine and cannot see why you're a hypocrite then this sentence will be ignored by you; so why am i continuing....






"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

reply

Adora smoked because she was cool... No other reason

No, she smoked because she was angry, bitter, and misanthropic.

reply

Nobody starts smoking for those reasons... They start because of peer pressure!






"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

reply

I didn't mean the reason the character decided to smoke, I mean the reason Pterry decided to write her as a smoker.

reply

Sorry... I don't remember the book mentioning WHY Adora smoked. I also have no recollection of ever hearing Terry mention it personally.

If i've overlooked something, that's fair enough... If not, where exactly did you find that nugget of info?




"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

reply

Look, the character is meant to be abrasive and crabby, right? So she smokes. She smokes in an angry and vindictive manner, spewing smoke into the air around her, making others uncomfortable. It's a good way of showing it through a personality trait, rather than a lot of tedious narration. I got that "nugget of info" through elementary-level literary analysis.

reply

I always thought of her as like the classic Film Noir femme fatales, and they tended to smoke.

reply

Exactly, definitive_prankster... She was a dark, mysterious and different person. It gives her an edge of danger and individuality.

Maybe your "elementary-level literary analysis" is more than likely a overestimation made by your ego... I think you're imagination is filling in most of the blanks and you're now trying to feed it to me.

You paint more into her manner than Terry ever imparts through text!





"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

reply

Sorry... I don't remember the book mentioning WHY Adora smoked. I also have no recollection of ever hearing Terry mention it personally.

If i've overlooked something, that's fair enough... If not, where exactly did you find that nugget of info?
There was nothing about why she smoked but about how:

"She smoked a cigarette as if she had a grudge against it, sucking the smoke down and blowing it out almost immediately."

And then, after a brief discription of how she holds the cigarette:

"There was a definitive feel about Adora Belle Dearheart that a lid was only barely holding down an entire womanful of anger."

The smoking was a kind of anger management/expression.

And there is a piece towards the end that kinda implies that she quit smoking. I was actually surprised to find her smoking again in the next book. In the last chapter Moist talks to her with his back turned and all the time he pictures her standing there with a cigarette but when he finally turns around she doesn't have one and there is no mentioning of her smoking again in that book.

I think humanity should be wiped out and then we can give evolution a second chance.

reply

I think this shows it is more likely to be about anger than about being cool. Thanks P-K-One.

reply

If you don't remember it ever being mentioned then why so quick to assert the reason was because she was cool?

reply

Further evidence that smoking destroys the brain cells.
And your final sentence indicates that you are beyond hope.
Smoke as much as you want. And when you are ill, blame only your self.

reply

No. No. No. No.

We have ENOUGH problems with peer pressure as it is. If people know all the facts and choose to smoke that is fair.

People should have a right to hear facts and science more than cultural bollocks. Why does the bollocks get the defence yet the fact gets told to hush?

As soon as you openly encourage with emotive, manipulative culturally relative language and ideas you are clouding judgement and removing choice, unless the person is adequately taught to recognise and counter such behaviourist psychology. I was never much of one for falling for peer pressure myself. I spent most of my time thinking instead.


It was a comment in a bloody TV film it is NOT vanquishing smoking. Catastrophising much?

'It's just the smoker is a happier person! ' I see you don't care for factual evidence - you generalise too much.

My dad smoked, the only reason he started was because he was stressed in the first place then it made no difference because it just became habitual due to the physiological form of addition that seems to go with nicotine.

My friend in Germany smokes: he only does so to remove some stress from a life which has been and is still so very hard (rape, nearly killed by his mother, a very ill father, debts, blamed for damage to the flat he rents that he never even did - if he doesn't pay an extortionate amount, he has no home, he has to go to adult school to get basic qualifications and is trying to find a job so money is low). He is STILL depressed, anxious, angry and lacks self-esteem.

These counter your certain statement. No doubt there are happy smokers as well, I'm sure. I do not mind smokers, I even hang out with them while they smoke - I know the potential risk. And I don't drive, by the way.

I cannot believe people even took such umbrage - I barely noticed it because I hear it so much in so many different tones of voice. In this TV film it was portrayed so whimsically and light-hearted.

Have you ever tried to consider the health of the actor portraying the woman who smokes so much? Are there props that are decent enough to look like a cigarette without the health problems? I don't know.

You don't have to be anti-smoking so virulently to appreciate a comment about their affect on the health. Less likely to get PD or (in some studies - seemingly by the tobacco industry) Alzheimer's (in some studies there is an increased risk or Alzheimer's). However, there are significantly more risks from tobacco alone (if that is what you are smoking) but benzene and hydrogen cyanide sometimes added are, of course, no better for you.

You are smoking to be cool? Great. I just hope you made that decision for yourself as opposed to having it being made for you as your mind yielded to psychological games not prepared enough to counter them.

Cool, by the way, is relative. There are many forms of cool. They may differ between country, culture, sub-culture...

As long as you're happy. But why on Io did this single comment in a fictitious universe make you care so much?

reply

+1 for mentioning Evel Knievel, ha ha.

reply

I think he was annoyed about the siituation too, not the smoking part. Like he felt bad he had driven her to such despair she started smoking, not the smoking itself.

Given I would have thought they will do Making Money next (matches the times well and they will want to cash in on Moist while viewers still remember him) is she going to smoke in that I wonder? Not sure it is vital to the story, but they will be killing quite a large part of her character if she doesn't. But then she was almost cheerful at times in this, so maybe her character has already left her book version behind.

reply

Most absurdly, the vision that finally breaks Moist ("Finish it now... I've had enough!") was not the little girl's father hanging himself, or the death of Dearheart Snr - but the fact that his scams apparently caused Adora Belle to start smoking rather than stuffing her face full of chocolate! The horror... the horror... Oh, the humanity!

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars..." Oscar Wilde

reply

It bothered me too, but not as much as I thought it would (having heard about it before I watched the show). Yes, Adora buying a packet of cigarettes coming as the climax of the Dearheart family flashback was so over-the-top as to be unintentionally funny. Still, putting my rage against anti-smoking preaching aside, someone starting a hundred-a-day habit is probably the most literal way of showing the "white-collar crime shortens lives" message.

I still wish they'd left her smoking habit alone.

reply

I'm of smoker fro 30+ years. Been reading Pratchet almost as long. I'm happy to accept the change.

reply

Actually I thought it was deliberately over the top in order to be intentionally funny - all of those black-and-white insets were overly sentimental like silent movies. The guy hanging himself because he'd disappointed his daughter over her present of a horse made me laugh anyway ...

reply

I despise smoking, but this felt so forced it was laughable (hopefully that was the intention). Also both arguments seem very plausible

By the way, I hate smoking because I have Asthma and my Grandfather died a painfull death of lung cancer aged only 58. I've had to put up with the smoking-makes-you-cool brigade since early school and i'm ever so slightly fed up with the accusation, that the fact I'm still around spoils your fun.

reply

[deleted]

Oh dear. Fancy giving a non-smoking message. Terrible really.
In "A Touch of Frost" David Janson changed the character to a non-smoking one, because he did not want to to be seen to encourage smoking. In the book Frost smokes all the time.
My question is, what is that smokers are so ashamed of that they cannot bear to have their unhealthy habit criticised.

reply

Smokers aren't ashamed of anything. They find it tiresome that society insists they should be.

As for the 'being annoyed at the non-smoking message', it's more the nanny-state patronising that's irritating. We know smoking is bad for us now. We also know that plenty of people do it anyway, for a wide variety of reasons, not least of all that smokers might actually enjoy it. They're not all brain-dead semi-coherent morons who need to be told that they're indulging in an unhealthy habit before they can see the light. These trite anti-smoking messages pretty much treat the audience as being incapable or immature enough to realise this.

Still, it annoys me less in an obviously family-oriented thing like Going Postal than it would in, say, an 18-rated action film. It's a different story when kids are involved.



And it's David Jason. I dunno who David Janson is. Wasn't he in the New York Dolls?

reply

Yeah, perhaps she should be giving up the ciggies.

Also Schwarzenegger and Stallone type characters should make a point of being non-violent and all car chase sequences should stay within the speed limits while driving with due consideration for other road users.

When filmmakers take up those policies then they have a right to propose altering such a major character feature so as not to give a bad influence to the viewers.

Would filmmakers even dream of portraying Rambo not carrying enough armanents to flatten a town, it defines the character. Adora Belle is not Adora Belle unless she is holding a lit cigarette. If they make 'Making Money' I hope they note this.

reply

Oh, how the hell did people even pick this rubbish up?
I noticed the comment, I didn't think it was 'PC gone mad'. Get over yourself. I don't smoke, don't mind if others do, but I acknowledge that my choice to hang around them when they are smoking has the potential to affect my health. I also understand that what they are doing is a form of pollution (I don't drive either). The adverts try to push more green cars if you've noticed. They are trying, but no, I don't drive.

I thought it was just a casual comment - seemed comedic. You hear it everywhere in all sorts of tones. To say people can't say that is restricting speech. Someone saying it isn't going to stop you having a cigarette.

Sometimes parents don't teach their children that smoking isn't good, there are many bad parents out there. Does it really hurt to have a tiny mention?

Also, this isn't a book, it is paper and print, it's with real people - actors. Do we not consider their health as well especially if the character smoked like a chimney. Maybe there are cigarettes substitutes to use that only carry certain problems, like smoke inhalation as opposed to those with all the extra chemicals. I don't know. I don't know what they have to hand props-wise.

reply

God that sure was bizarre, in America we're not as oober PC about that. When I first watched the scene I originally thought they were going to make her smoke them because those were dad's favorite cigarettes or something. You know like a poignant grieving scene, making it "anti smoking" was just comically weird.

But I suppose that's a societal double standard, if she were shooting up we'd be horrified, but cigarettes are like nothing to us.

None the less, I enjoyed the movie regardless of that and the cheesy nosferatu vampire.

reply

i agree. it's really annoying. In the book, she is just a heavy smoker, there's no maudlin backstory to explain it. one of the most irritating things about this film.

reply

Yes. I wish they'd cut that flashback scene of her taking up smoking. It was ham-fisted and cringeworthy to watch.

reply