One of the most intriguing facts about the dystopian genre is that it did not appear until humanity had almost reached its apex in terms of knowledge and technology. The horrors of the First and Second World Wars showed that humanity would use its very best in terms of technology to do its very worst to one another, as mustard gas, hand grenades, nuclear bombs, and death camps made their first appearances on the planet. Led by such writers as George Orwell, the early practitioners of dystopian literature showed us our own future as it would be if human nature were permitted to go on unchecked. The power of the corporation was enough to make writers fear their growing power; President Dwight Eisenhower, himself a four-star general during his military career, saw enough to warn the nation of the “military-industrial complex,” in which the corporate influence would continue to grow so that war would become a permanent industry. Such films as Network warned viewers that national boundaries would soon be replaced by corporate ones, as the driving interests of the world would become corporate profits. In Cold Turkey, the Valiant Tobacco Company takes the highly unusual step of offering $25 million (which in 1972 was an even more immense sum than it is now) to a city or town whose residents could all go 30 days without smoking. While this might at first seem like a stab at the smoking industry, instead it is a stab at the weaknesses within each of us.
The most poignantly dystopian element of this story is the cynicism with which the offer is made. While it might seem like this would be an easy challenge to meet today, our own society features entire cities in which smoking in public is forbidden. In the early 1970s, when this movie was made, there were virtually no smoke-free places. Offices, restaurants, bars, homes, cars, and stores all had smokers puffing in them nonstop. While there was a building awareness of the dangers of smoking, public education had not gotten to the point where policies were being written to discourage the practice. Cigarette machines were found in convenience stores, instead of just in bars. On television shows and in movies, main characters smoked just as ceaselessly as they did in real life. The purpose of the offer was to make Valiant stand out worldwide with free publicity, and even to make the company look humanitarian. However, because of the general belief that no town would be able to stop smoking for that long, most people knew that the prize would probably go unpaid. It is this overall cynicism that has informed dystopian literature from the beginning, whether it was the belief that the government only wanted to perpetuate itself and would undertake whatever harm it could to do so, in 1984, or here, where a cigarette company would put up an immense prize, simply because it knew that it would never have to pay it off.
In the optimistically named town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, which takes the American national symbol and combines it with the permanence of a rock, and then places it in a state that is seen as synonymous with the country’s fine traditions, including farming and clean-values living. With 4,006 residents, the town is small enough to make this sort of bet reasonable to monitor, and it also allows the filmmakers to put a spotlight on the (even in the 1970s) eroding sense of small-town America. Because the economy in this small town has tanked and people are moving away right and left, there is little hope that the town will last long. The town’s minister, Clayton Brooks, takes the wager from Valiant as a spiritual call to save the town. He gets all of the smokers in town to agree to try for the money, which leads to one particularly comic scene. Mrs. Wappler (played by the great Jean Stapleton) has such a difficult time quitting smoking that she takes up eating tiny gherkin pickles instead. She pulls them out of the jar and counts each of them; the compulsion that she used to use while smoking has now passed into the white knuckles which she uses to hold each little cucumber and ponder each bite. The closeup shots of her face and of her hands during this part of the film emphasize her anxiety. The tight editing during this portion shows the strong hold that smoking has on her, because the effort to quit is so extreme that it creates this new compulsive behavior. It is sad, in a way, to see this powerful hold that nicotine has over those who use it. This is just another example, after all, of a technological advance that has ended up imprisoning those who think they are benefiting from it. Tobacco was found in the New World and ended up being brought back for consumption in the European countries that founded those colonies. Ironically, it ended up addicting (and killing) many of those who tried it. Even some parts of nature, it seems, can end up being much more harmful than one would have expected.
Works Cited
Cold Turkey (1971). Dir. Norman Lear. Perf. Dick Van Dyke, Pippa Scott, Tom Poston. Tandem Productions.
