In the final scene of Muriel’s Wedding, Muriel and Rhonda drive away for the last time from the bleak detritus of their past at Porpoise Spit. As they head triumphantly into their future and the tears of joy roll down our cheeks, Rhonda, in close-up, commandingly lights a cigarette.

No heavily identifying teenager watching could be left in any doubt that smoking is meant to fit as naturally with freedom, cutting the parental chains and the Authentic Discovery of Self as tomato sauce on a meat pie. Yet the director always had a choice: smoking is no more or less natural to such endings than if the heroes had flashed an Amex card or shared a Kit-Kat. The power and hope of the ending could have been choreographed in a thousand different ways, with the cigarette option one that, even amid the concern about rising teenage smoking, is being taken by only one in five kids today.

But in many cases the crafted apposition of smoking with you-name-it is not a director’s whim at all. For instance, in April 1983, Sylvester Stallone pledged himself to use Brown & Williamson’s tobacco products “in no less than five feature films” in exchange for a fee of US$500,000.

The tobacco industry has long understood the value of product placement in movies. This year the US Federal Trade Commission released its annual report on cigarette advertising and promotional expenditures for 1992. After coupons and retail value-added promotions, “promotional allowances (paid to retailers and any other persons . . . to facilitate the sale of cigarettes)” was the second leading area of promotional expenditure, totalling US$1.5 billion (A$2 billion) – 29 percent of the second-largest advertising budget after cars in the USA. No breakdown was given for how much of this was paid to movie and television producers to ensure that cigarettes appeared in movies.

Throughout Muriel’s Wedding, practically every character smokes. Herald letter writers have made the same comment about the ABC’s Janus. In both Janus and Muriel’s Wedding more unattractive, gormless, spivvy or violent characters smoke than do the heroes, so what is the balance of the message that comes across about smoking, particularly to the youth market – the future clients of both the tobacco industry and oncologists? Might not more directors be trying to make the point that it’s losers who smoke?

There are murmurings in some health organisations about the possibility of film classifications based on whether or not a film portrays smoking in a positive light. In the same way that films depicting illicit drug use are now rated M or R, health groups are beginning to argue that tobacco – which kills more Australians every year than all other drugs, alcohol, road trauma, murder, AIDS and breast cancer combined – should not be seen as a trivial, ordinary behaviour. Whatever superficial appeal this argument may have, it will invite a very legitimate debate about censorship being the wolf in the sheep’s clothing of healthism. By the same argument, should car chase scenes be kept from children? Shoot-outs? Gluttony? Plainly, that would be ridiculous. A director’s judgement that smoking is important to a character or a film is one that could only be curtailed by the most totalitarian of governments.

So how should this debate proceed? Is the depressing answer one of open slather for the tobacco industry in films? Will the bad apples of advertising emerge as the innovators who pioneered the end of much stand-alone advertising, showing how product placement can work the same sales magic, immune from government control? Has the successful struggle during the 1970s and 1980s to ban tobacco advertising in Australia been a hollow victory?

If film and television producers are unashamed about assisting the tobacco industry in its ambitions by scripting positive smoking scenes in return for cash, then there should be no opposition to bold declarations to this effect in the credits. Being a willing sponge to tobacco dollars would become part of producers’, directors’ and actors’ profiles in community debate, rather than allowing them to skulk behind noble virtues like freedom of artistic expression.

A central consideration must be whether or not the appearance of tobacco films has been commissioned. Commissioned product placement is obviously intended to be a form of tobacco advertising and is therefore almost certainly a breach of the Tobacco Control Act (1992) when such “advertisements” are “published” in Australia (imported films with tobacco product placement would be exempt, as is the case with magazines imported into Australia that contain tobacco advertising).

At the ninth World Conference on Tobacco and Health held last month in Paris, Professor Richard Peto of Oxford University reported that smoking now kills about two million people each year worldwide, half in middle age (35 to 69). This number is increasing rapidly as women’s death rates reflect the historic increase in their smoking and as populations grow larger. Peto estimates that, in 2025, ten million people will die of diseases caused by smoking. Many will be the teenagers who are today watching films showcasing smoking.

Rupert Murdoch is very interested in movies. He’s also very interested in selling lots of cigarettes – he’s a member of the board of Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company. In the rush of excitement in the Australian film industry caused by Murdoch’s Showground film studio initiative, it would be tragic if Australia turned a blind eye to what is a ballooning loophole in its internationally acclaimed tobacco advertising laws.