Smoking, Nick Naylor, and Arundhati Roy
Just finished watching Thank You For Smoking…again for the nth time…and again the predictability of the frames helped my mind waver off to something else…remotely connected to the movie…rather remotely connected to the main character in the movie…sorry…remotely connected to the class of professionals symbolized by the main character in the movie.
I love the way Nick Naylor, the spokesperson for Big Tobacco in the movie, wards off any danger – no matter how remote – that could cause the slightest irritation to his benefactors. His arguments seem to bring down the sanest of reasons put forth by the smartest of people. He can complicate even the simplest of conversations, and make the most complicated of issues sound like they are the smallest of problems…”humanity should not even be worried about them!” is what you feel when dearest Nick replies using deceptively simple, yet carefully crafted, sentences to everybody’s “serious” questions.
His character suddenly reminded me of something written by Arundhati Roy in one of her essays (or was it a book?) titled Power Politics.
As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. ‘Language is the skin on my thought,’ I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me. At the Hague I stumbled on a denomination, a sub-world, whose life’s endeavour was to mask intent. They earn their abundant livings by converting bar graphs that plot their companies’ profits into consummately written, politically exemplary, socially just, policy documents that are impossible to implement and designed to remain forever on paper, secret even (especially) from the people they’re written for. They breed and prosper in the space that lies between what they say and what they sell.
This lady has some style…look how elegantly she describes these corporate creatures who make a killing by shoving us ordinary peoples as far away from reality as possible!
