• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, May 8, 2023

Cigarettes made great cinema, and actors loved holding them,  and cinematographers loved photographing them. The whole era of noir cinema essentially feels like one great big cigarette ad.

But then the data started leaking out. Cigarettes weren’t sexy or healthy, they killed you. And slowly media companies determined they would no longer take cigarette ads, Hollywood directors would no longer include them in their films, and writers would no longer use cigarettes as a prop to make actors look mysterious or sexy.

Still, it wasn’t easy to get smoking off the big screen. The U.S. banned advertising of tobacco products in the 1970s after federal reports on the health hazards of smoking. But tobacco companies turned to product placement in popular entertainment until 1998, when the Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco industry outlawed the practice in TV, film, and video games. But between the ’70s and 1998 is a long time.

And so we arrive at today. The news out of Allen, Texas is horrific -- but no more horrific than the news out of Henryetta, Oklahoma or Louisville, Kentucky.

Malls, schools, movie theaters, churches, nightclubs. You can feel the media struggling with how to report another story of a mass shooting. What is there to say about the motive? The victims? The shooter? The stories seem hauntingly similar and equally horrible.

So it’s Friday night, and we decided to go to the movies for a little bit of escapism, some popcorn and overpriced soda. We don’t want to see anything that reminds us of the news out of Texas. We decide to see “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3,” which we expect will be a silly Marvel adventure series about a heroic raccoon and his superhero friends.

It’s hard to overstate the sheer volume of violence in this film. The characters are entertaining, but the number of gun battles with “bad guys” being mowed down by machine gun fire from our heroes is difficult to comprehend.

The theater is full of children, as the film was rated PG-13, so 13 and older were allowed in. I suspect many younger children are there, too, as theaters hardly check.

Common Sense Media reports on "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3": 

- Massive destruction. Many weapons (guns, bombs, blades, and more) are used to blast, threaten, harm, and kill. Characters are shot, incinerated, and decapitated, with gore and skeletal remains visible.

- A character is attacked, and his face is left a bloody mess. A character's skin-covered mask is taken off, revealing a bloody face below. Many people die when a person made for killing terrorizes and kills others.

- Children are held captive.

- A character pries something out of someone else's bloody head after that person dies a violent, revenge-fueled death.

- And, the film presented long, very long, scenes of animal torture and young children held in cages.

People shake their heads in disbelief at the rising tide of mass shootings and seemingly random acts.. But how are impressionable young people able to separate horrific on-screen violence that celebrates murder, from the real images that flash across social media and news? 

To make my point, consider Drax the Destroyer in the movie.

Drax the Destroyer says he wants to kill people, Peter Quill -- the Star Lord -- says no, and Drax counters by saying he'll only kill one guy who is very lonely and won't be missed. Peter rebukes him. But in the end, Drax goes on a murderous shooting spree.

Explain how that decision was made, Marvel?