Can I Offer You a Light?

The American Medical Association wants to change the movie rating system so that movies with cigarette smoking would be rated "R."

I am shocked about what gets only a PG-13 rating these days. My kids know my triggers and they are quick to tell me that the movie is rated PG-13 for "strong language" which they know doesn't bother me. Sex and nudity bother me, but not as much as violence. The most recent Star Wars and Harry Potter movies were PG-13 and the kids had to beg me to see them. I went with them and I was left cringing at the violence in both of them. My kids have friends who can't watch The Simpson's, due to the language, but can go to a violent movie (melting faces and dying children) with no concerns.

I feel like things are all off-kilter and I am somehow out of touch. I think about "Casablanca" with the suggested sex and the suggested violence and I try to imagine it with more graphic sex and violence added and the cigarette smoking deleted. They could add a lot and it would probably only be rated PG-13. You could see someone's head blown off or blood and guts and Ingrid Bergman's body and all of that's ok as long as you don't see someone smoke a cigarette.

"Ingrid Bergman was a wonderful actress, and yet she kept all of her clothes on," I said to Anna while we were listening to a report about this suggested movie rating change on the radio.

"Mo-om!" said Anna. "You're so old fashioned. Cigarette smoking is a drug like wine or cocaine."

"It's not a drug like cocaine," I said. "And I thought we were talking about nudity in movies?"

She sighed. I sighed.

This parenting stuff is enough to make me take up smoking.