Tintin Forums

("This isn't a pipe, it's a windmill")

I've got to say from the outset that I am not a smoker, never have been, and find it a noxious and intrusive habit; I welcomed the arrival of smoke-free working places, bars, clubs and cinemas, where before I had been subjected to other peoples' unwelcome exhaust...

Yet I am mystified by a story which I just read today, about posters on the Paris Metro featuring the French comedian and film-maker Jacques Tati, in the persona of his most famous character, Monsieur Hulot.

In order that the pictures do not run contrary to French no-smoking regulations, M. Hulot has had his trademark pipe (always kept clenched between his teeth no matter what indignity is heaped upon him) replaced with a bright yellow toy windmill.

Now I don't want this to descend into a "political correctness gone mad!" type rant: I am sure the regulations were made with only the best intentions, and it is all too easy to rubbish the efforts of people trying to promote education against a killer product which still seems to be entrenched in the French way of life.

However, I can't help but feel that this is a counter-productive move. In adding the toy instead of simply removing the pipe, the advertiser is seemingly thumbing their nose at the authorities, and by implication rubbishing the efforts of the no-smoking campaign, and that is a pity.

If anything the "windmill" emphasises Hulot's pipe more than ever showing it would have done - I'm sure that more children for example will have questioned parents about the inclusion of the toy than would ever have asked about smoking, or felt the need to smoke, if the pipe had been left in.

I was directed to the Tati story after reading about a similar dispute over posters of Audrey Tatou in the rôle of Coco Chanel, also shown smoking. This - to me at least - is clearly another matter.
The film was made in late 2008 and early 2009, and I think that - although Chanel was a smoker - it would have been entirely possible to shoot publicity shots of Tatou without a cigarette in her hand.

I'm aware that there may be a contradiction in my position, but I do feel that there is a difference in limiting the uses of archival images of people smoking (that the images aren't actually being used to sell cigarettes or tobacco, and are merely depicting an historical figure in an accurate representation of them in life), and asking that new images to be displayed in public do not include smoking.

I see this as similar to control over items made of ivory, or tiger skins: those already in circulation prior to legislation remain in circulation - but we just don't allow anything new to be created.

I think the situation would be even better served if there were rules which said that, in the case of old pictures like that of M. Hulot, they could be used with pipes etc. intact, but that a health warning be displayed on the poster.

Ironically, as I see it, you couldn't use Van Gogh's painting of a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its jaws - a potent (if perhaps inadvertent) anti-smoking image if ever there was one - on a poster which would be displayed on the Metro! Using the skull and putting an anti-smoking slogan on it, would be far better than a skull with a windmill held between its teeth.

Anyway, the reason that I brought it up here - other than to bring it to the attention of those on the boards who might enjoy the work of Tati - was to say that this obviously has implications for the use of Captain Haddock and his pipe in any advertising of exhibitions, the museum or the film...!

"The only valuable historiography is the history of historiography", I've heard.

Past is always rewritten again, and quite often the history books (or posters, in this case) tell more about the time they are written, not about the past they try to explain.

While I do understand the counter-reaction against the decades of cigarette advertisement, the first thoughts on this aren't anti-smoking. "PC off the rails" -rant seems tempting, but I'll resist as well.

But indeed, Jock (and René Magritte) are right: the power of images is enormous, and you'll get caught if you try to pre-determine what the audience should see.

I agree that it's wrong to censor past images of fictional and factual life as it was lived. It's wrong for reasons of preserving historical truth, and also because it's bonkers. Watching Jacques Tati films as a child never made me want to smoke any more than watching Tom and Jerry cartoons made me want to hit anyone violently with a variety of household objects.

That said, I believe there is a sinister history of cigarette companies paying film-makers to place their filthy products into films as as a way of advertising their brand (and promoting smoking generally) without the audience even being conscious of being advertised to. I doubt this was often the major factor in making young people want to try smoking (compared to family habits and peer pressure) but it probably was a factor, so I think it's probably right that unnecessary smoking should probably be handled with some thought in films for children, and "promotional" smoking avoided.

But where does that leave smoking in new films based on historical source material, such as Haddock's pipe in the forthcoming new Tintin films? On one hand, the Tintin books are a record of the mid-20th century; on the other hand, Haddock will be seen simply as a hero's sidekick by children who are barely aware of the historical context.

Personally, I think Haddock's pipe should stay, along with his alcohoism. The point about Haddock is that he's a flawed character and children are quite capable of understanding him as such (which is why it was always stupid for the early US publishers of Tintin to have the scenes of him actually swigging from a bottle redrawn). Although nicotine addiction wasn't seen as an equivalent flaw to alcoholism when Hergé was working (Hergé himself was very often photographed with a cigarette, in a way that children's authors never are today), Hergé still avoided ever having Tintin smoking.

In intelligent fictional work, such as Tintin or Jacques Tati films, things like smoking habits are specific to character (Herge's quite particular about which of his characters do smoke and which don't), rather than shoved in as product placement. So I don't think blanket censorship of smoking, drinking or violence make sense, even for children's films. It's an approach that assumes that children are stupid and will want to copy everything they see portrayed in fiction regardless of context. If that attitude prevails, it'll destroy the whole true purpose of fiction and art.

It'll be interesting to see what Spielberg does with Haddock's pipe in the film. On one hand, Spielberg can be an intelligent film-maker with respect for the truth of the past. On the other hand, he digitally airbrushed all the policemen's guns out of his recent-ish anniversary re-release of ET, and had them all digitally replaced with ludicrous mobile phones and radios.

My completely uninformed guess is that Haddock will smoke a pipe in his early scenes when he's still an uncontrolled drunkard, but will smoke it less as he becomes a more relatively sober and respectable individual. But we'll see.

Given the advertising restrictions Jock raises, it seems safe to assume that the pipe won't appear in any film posters.

It looks more like a pinwheel.
But the image's still strange, what with a wheely thing in Tati's mouth, and so random, too.

The toy windmill looks so obviously cut and pasted that it does look as if advertisers were actually trying to highlight the tobacco advertising prohibition. Why didn't they just simply cut out the pipe altogether?

This reminds me of when they decided to switch Lucky Luke's trademark ciggie for a piece of straw, back in the 80s. This wasn't because of any law I believe, but due to an anti-smoking campaign running at the time. Unfortunately, it didn't just apply to stories written after the ban, but retrospectively too. In fact, it's all a muddle now; my English copy of Dalton City, (originally written in 1969, published in English by Glo Worm in the 90s) has the ciggie, but I noticed the recent Cinebook version has the straw.

I don't think it is "more like" a pinwheel, it is a pinwheel. It's just another word for the same thing: a child's toy like that is called a "windmill" in the U.K.

Oh quite so, and that is obviously the effect that the designer was going for.

I should emphasise here that I don't believe that the French system demands that the pipe had to be replaced by a bright yellow windmill - I just think that there is an obligation for the image to have elements of smoking removed or obscured. By placing an object so completely random over the pipe, the designer a) conforms to the law, and b) shows its limitations.

I'm sure that there is an interesting experiment to be had out of this. I wonder if they had just removed M. Hulot's pipe entirely, allowed people to walk past the picture as they might on the Metro, and then asked them to describe it, how many people would still have said that M. Hulot had a pipe in his mouth - just because that is what was expected?


I quite agree, but to be honest, I've nothing to base this on. I think that there is such a fuziness over what does and doesn't affect people in what they see, especially children, that it is hard to fathom exactly what the outcome will be.

An example of this is that film- and TV-makers especially seem to want to have their cake and eat it: they defend images of graphic violence, saying they do not influence how people behave; however they continue to make "educational" and documentary programmes which they say should influence how people think.

In what way the brain is meant to know not to accept "negative" images and accept "positive" images is never adequately explained, at least not to my satisfaction...

In Tintin, we happily like to accept that children will pick up the tenacity, honesty, integrity and other aspects of the characters which are deemed "positive", but won't adopt the duplicity, arrogance, selfishness and violence of the "baddies".

Context as you say will have a lot to do with this - Tintin and Haddock find a fortune through their endeavours, and the gangsters get dragged off by daemons to Hell after losing a fortune they stole; but what of Roberto Rastapopoulos?

He's successful and rich and famous, characteristics which may have been seen as superficial in Hergé's day - especially when "new money"! - but are often now seen as the only objectives in life.

Will modern readers see him as something to aspire to? I don't know.

Yep, I think context has everything to do with it, and not just in terms of the outcome for characters, but also in terms of a character's likeability and role within the moral framework of a well-told story. Even if Tintin and Haddock always ended up broke, and Rastapopoulos always escaped with his riches, I think most readers, including children, would want to be more like Tintin than Rastapopoulos.

I take your point that Rastapopoulos's morals and lifestyle may seem cool to some people today (and indeed to some people back then, looking at the crowd of admirers he's got on his yacht in The Red Sea Sharks who are knowingly turning a blind eye to rumours of his shady past). But I think Hergé always succeeded in making him too grotesque physically to be a role model for young people.

And I don't even think a likeable character like Haddock is in too much danger of becoming a role model for children. I think in the days of cigarette product placement in family-audience films of previous decades, they tended to have young good-looking people smoking cigarettes and looking cool (without any plot or character reason) and this may have made teenagers want to emulate that. But I can't see any teenager wanting to take up pipe-smoking in order to be like Captain Haddock or Monsieur Hulot, likeable though these characters are!

And it seems unlikely that middle-aged non-smoking men would be influenced by Haddock or Hulot to start smoking either. I'd guess that 90 per cent of smokers got hooked on cigarettes when they were in their teens. If you can make it through to adulthood without starting smoking, you probably won't ever do so.

I was wrong, though, to say that Hergé never drew Tintin smoking.

He puffs a cigar when he's disguised as the Japanese army officer inspecting the troops in The Blue Lotus. Maybe the disguise means this doesn't count, though I bet most children's book editors would feel they had to query that cigar these days if this was a new book!

That's a whole other can of worms right there then! Why should his physicality define his character, and why should it be "okay" to depict "badness" in this manner?
Tangentially, I was reading about Doctor Doom - the Fantastic Four villain - the other day, who started out physically perfect and handsome (in his biography, not in the comic - his back-story came later), who, after being facially scarred, wore a mask to hide his hideous disfigurement - something so awful, it's never shown, you only ever see people's reaction to him if unmasked.
This conforms to the "ugly equals bad" trope, apart from Jack Kirby stating later that he rather thought that the injury should be nothing more than a tiny scar on Doom's cheek - he was otherwise by all standards still exceptionally handsome. It was purely vanity that made Doom believe himself to be hideous, and he should have had the sense to see such, but was blind to it.

But I digress... ;-)


Quite so! Otherwise I'd be a pipe-smoking, rum-swilling ex-merchant seaman, in a gannex mac and snap-brimmed hat, living in an eccentric flat at the top of a tall tenement buiding!

As a middle-aged non-smoking man, I concur!

Oh, you will also find several images of Tintin smoking "in character" as historical figures, on the little period dress vignettes which Hergé included on the Voir et Savoir series of histories of transport which appeared in the magazine and on collectable cards, later collected as books.


I never fathomed that until you mentioned it! And as you say, it has muddied the water now! Does he now "roll" a piece of straw from a tiny bale, instead of tobacco from a pouch? ;-)

That's a very good point. To be fair to Hergé, though, I don't think it's simply Rastapopoulos's comically big nose that prevents him from being a role model. I think it's the way that the big nose undercuts his vanity and exposes his actual ridiculousness. In his roles as film tycoon or Marquis, Rastapopoulos clearly believe that he cuts a suave and handsome figure, and clearly this opinion is shared by others. On his yacht, you don't get the impression he has any difficulty attracting women. Yet the comedic nose acts as a sort of signal to readers (including child readers) that he's not really as handsome or cool as he thinks he is, and beneath his money and the glamour that brings, he's actually a bit ridiculous. So I think it's a symbolic comedy device - like a clown's nose - to make evil look silly, rather than a literal aspersion on people with big noses.

I agree that the long tradition in fiction of the evil genius who is disfigured or disabled (and often thus bitter and twisted) is a thoroughly unpleasant one. Again, to be fair to Hergé, his villains don't really tend to fall into this category. Many of them, such as Bobby Smiles, Jorgen, Columbini, Spalding etc, are actually quite good looking, yet as a reader you'd never really want to be them.

To get back to the Jacques Tati poster, I suspect that by using the yellow windmills to draw attention to the censored pipe, the marketing people responsible are not merely trying to highlight the ridiculousness of the censorship, but are actually quite happy that the media controversy about the censorship will get the posters - and thus the Tati retrospective they advertise - far more talked about than uncensored posters with pipe intact would have done. If this strategy ultimately gets more people watching the Jacques Tati films, good luck to them!

You're quite right, of course - point well made!

This is also a point well made! I'm delighted to read that there is a new Tati film in the works: an unmade 1956 Tati story is to be animated by Sylvain Chomet, the maker of Belleville Rendez-Vous/ Les triplettes de Belleville (take your pick), complete with an animated Jacques Tati.
If anyone can pull this off, I think he can - and he's making it in Edinburgh!