In my life as a spectator, I must have seen actors smoke on stage once or twice for the purposes of a play. It’s far from common, but it’s still special. I watch the curls surround the actor, the lighting often amplifies the effect, it says something about the character’s psyche, and to be honest, it makes me want to light one up.
Whether we like it or not, there is something dramatic, photogenic and cinematic about cigarettes. You imagine the series Mad Men without the cigarette who is downright a character? There is only in the teleromans in the spirit of the CLSC fascicle where the cigarette only appears in the mouths of poor or bad characters, which makes me laugh so much it is not subtle.
I admit that I haven’t managed to quit smoking for good yet, but I’ve been in contact with a therapist at the smoking cessation clinic for two years – she’s super nice, a real coach, it helps me, I bought an electronic cigarette. I’m fed up, I’m here.
So you must think that I ripped my shirt when I heard that a judge decided that smoking a cigarette on stage “is not an artistic act” and that, therefore, no theater can escape the anti-smoking law. . Not at all. Nothing astonishes me any more on this subject, I lived all the prohibitions and saw the smokers undergo all the humiliations in total indifference, since they are plague victims. We are in the logical continuation of the fight against smoking.
While reading a little more on this news, I learned however that it was about cigarette of sage, common practice in the theater and in the cinema to recreate the cigarette without nicotine – we are not going to force the actors to take drugs. …
There, I admit that I am annoyed, because I do not know the effects of the second-hand smoke of sage. But whatever, like smoking is bad, showing a character who smokes parsley or valerian is bad, I guess. I am not obstinate.
How did we get here ? It is enough to have in the room a single spectator outraged by a cigarette of sage for the machine to engage. You have to be really zealous or a very frustrated ex-smoker.
This is how three Quebec theaters saw inspectors from the Department of Health and Social Services disembark and received fines, which they contested. The judge found them wrong, because he believes that smoking “has no expressive content” and that there are other ways to deliver “the soul of a theatrical performance”, according to an article in the To have to. In short, banning smoking on stage would not hinder freedom of expression. And good luck to the playwrights who will dare a cigarette in the didascalies.
It is very serious, the fight against smoking, if you did not know that, even when it comes to sage, because it is anything that is smoked that is prohibited in a public place. We really want to have it, our smoke-free world, and in the theater, it’s with a stool in the public that we will achieve it. If so, it may be the same spectator in all three cases, theater lover and tobacco control knight. I have heard people say that this is another proof of “wokism”, but that has nothing to do with it. We are no longer here in a culture of denunciation, one that calls for the authorities, and which has always existed.
My vice allowed me to observe profound changes in society. Smoking that was everywhere when I was a kid (even on planes) is now banned everywhere, and that’s okay.
The anti-smoking lobby has won practically all its fights, it only remains to hunt down the last holdouts and the last details until the complete eradication of nicotine.
But I ain’t never heard anything smart about nicotine, except in the book In the light of day Annie Leclerc, who kept her weaning diary. “The cigarette is the prayer of our time”, she wrote in 1979. Or at Cioran, who said to have lost his soul by quitting smoking. Nicotine has become essentially a question of morals and public health, no one questions what this drug really provides beyond its very real damage. A drug consumed frantically by people like René Lévesque, Beauvoir, Sartre or Camus, so much so that I sometimes think that the fall of intelligence in the West is directly linked to the prohibition of this substance, much more than ” with the arrival of social networks, where we seem to let off steam to fight a forgotten addiction.
When I see someone check their phone every 15 minutes, I know I’m in front of a drug addict who looks a lot like a smoker, with his constant need for dopamine. It might not emit secondhand smoke, but who knows if it doesn’t pollute the environment with toxic ideas?
I am saying this as a joke, because I have resisted the bans so much. The only time I accumulated Godwin points in my life was when smoking was banned in bars in 2006. “You know, eh, that Hitler was an anti-smoker, that it’s under the Third Reich What was the first anti-smoking campaign for a perfect Aryan race? I said, in vain, covering myself with ridicule.
Something bad is good, I haven’t frequented bars much since.
I follow the herd, I play by the rules, and I tell kids that the best way to quit smoking is to never start.
The march for a smoke-free world has long been in motion, no matter if it leads us into an increasingly unbreathable world. When you are unable to have a minimum of control over the fleet, carbon fumes, smog, global warming and the sixth mass extinction, you can at least hit smokers to give yourself the illusion of a healthy world. And even on actors who pretend to burn a real one on stage, as if it would save us. But we wonder if, to have pink lungs, it will also be necessary to wear rose-colored glasses in front of any artistic production.
Hide this smoker whom I could not see, Tartuffe would say today.