Thank You For Watching

Thank You for Smoking may possibly be the greatest movie a student of speech, rhetoric, and public address could ever watch….with the possible exceptions being Wag The Dog and of course Dude Where’s My Car. This movie teaches so much about the power of words and debate it’s down right scary.
Take the scene in which Nick talks to his son about never being wrong and uses the ice cream analogy. This is taken right out of debate 101. It’s not my job to prove I’m right but rather that your argument is flawed. The whole idea of dictating an argument’s direction no matter what the circumstance is an extremely powerful tool and is tediously practiced in debate, courtrooms, politics, and even when trying to convince a parent to loan you the car Saturday night. That what’s so great about this movie: it transcends the lobbyist/political world and can be used in nearly every situation of discussion imaginable.
Another interesting dynamic of the movie is the struggle that Nick faces in teaching his son his philosophies about spin and persuasion, which are not the same thing contrary to popular belief, without destroying the ethical building blocks of his son’s young, innocent life. It’s easy to say that Nick is just a liar but that wouldn’t be accurate. Anybody can just flat out lie but in the end they will probably be proven wrong. The character of Nick on the other hand simply brings arguments to the table. Now some might say, well they are stupid arguments and shouldn’t even be dignified with answers, but if this where the case, then why is it that he connects with the audience, both in the movie and the viewers of the movie? Why is it that every time Nick makes a case for Big Tobacco, which the majority of people today believe is an evil, money grubbing, merchant of death, do we find ourselves smiling and laughing a little bit? We should be outraged like William H. Macy’s character is, yet, we aren’t really. No, actually whether we like to admit it or not, we are actually quite impressed at the quick wit and oratory skills of Nick even though we are completely against everything he stands for.
Even in the end when Nick testifies in front of the national committee about the dangers of smoking he turns the argument into that the real danger in this country is cheese. Good God Man, are you serious? Yet this claim makes a valid point. So on the one hand, you want to strangle this corrupt jerk, but on the other hand you are sitting back and wondering how he comes up with this stuff, and this, my friends, is the million dollar question. Now you may be asking yourselves, wait, what am I learning from this movie? Is the only lesson here that the only winners in life are corrupt manipulators? Nice guys must always finish last while the tricksters and flatterers control the huddled masses to agree with their evil ways of deceit? The answer to this is of course not. I’m not Plato; I don’t believe that rhetoric is the tool of the deceiver and manipulator. It is simply a tool, and it is one all should be well versed in. You see just being on the “right side” isn’t good enough. First of all who is to say without a shadow of a doubt that they are completely and undoubtedly right? If you believe in something, then take a stand for it. Don’t just sit there and rely on the fact that you believe you’re right. This simply doesn’t cut it. You must fight with every tool at your disposal; your case deserves to be fought for. It’s not Nick fault that he is good at what he does, it’s the fault of ours that we couldn’t come up with better arguments. It is our fault that we allowed him to flaw our argument. It is our fault that we did not have a better understanding of debate, persuasion, and most of all the study of rhetoric in general. We must not simply write off what our enemy does as evil or nonsense. We must learn from them because even though we may not agree with somebody that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from them.