Hollywood Should Buckle Down on Buckling Up

When it comes to seat belts, films are flimsy, says study

FRIDAY, Aug. 31, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- After Clark Gable took off his shirt and stood bare-chested in the 1934 classic comedy It Happened One Night, sales of undershirts in the United States plummeted.

American movies have been blamed for lots worse than that -- degrading the morals of youth, encouraging tobacco use, as well as drug and alcohol use -- by portraying those nasty habits in the sexy hands of movie stars.

Now researchers claim Hollywood is failing to do some important belt tightening. A new study shows that seat-belt use in American movies didn't reach 10 percent until 1987, when it topped out at 32 percent. Many states didn't pass seat-belt laws until the mid-'80s.

"We found that to be a disappointingly low figure. Since 1987, the rate [in the movies] has fluctuated from between 10 and 30 percent, despite increased enforcement [of seat belt laws] and strengthened public education," says lead study author Heather Jacobsen, a research coordinator at Saint Louis University's Health Communication Research Laboratory in St. Louis, Mo. The study, which appears in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health, covered 1978 through 1998.

"There have been numerous other studies that looked at the effects of risky health behaviors, like smoking or alcohol and the movies, and I think that correlation has clearly been demonstrated -- some star smokes a cigarette and some kid wants to emulate it," says Jacobsen.

"But very few studies have looked at protective health behaviors, like seat-belt use, to see how they are portrayed in the movies," says Jacobsen. "What we know is the majority of people do wear seat belts in real life -- that's a statistic from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). What we would like to suggest from this study is that the lack of seat-belt portrayal in movies tends to distort viewers' perception of social norms."

To check if Hollywood was buckling up, Jacobsen and her colleagues studied just nearly 200 top-grossing American movies made over 20 years. "We excluded cartoons, anything that didn't have a human in it, X-rated movies or movies that took place in another time period," she says. "We concentrated on movies in the present time, movies in which car use was prominent, movies like The Deer Hunter from the 1970s or National Lampoon's Family Vacation or a movie from 1998 like Lethal Weapon 4."

"I don't think we expected seat-belt use in movies from the '70s to be high. We were just trying to figure out what the pattern may have been over a 21-year period," she says.

Currently, 49 states and the District of Columbia have seat-belt laws, but only in a third of those states can police pull over a driver for not wearing a seat belt -- called primary enforcement. Most states allow police to ticket drivers for not wearing a seat belt only after the driver has been pulled over for another reason -- secondary enforcement.

NHTSA says the average seat-belt-use rate in primary-law states runs about 77 percent. In secondary-law states, the average use rate is 63 percent.

Jacobsen says, "I don't think that it's malicious intent on Hollywood's part. I think they probably have restrictions while they are filming. They're trying to get a good camera angle, and a lot of the time, the actors aren't even in real cars."

"But the study does lead to some questions. Since seat-belt wearing is a normal part of everyday life, why isn't it portrayed in movies? Hollywood is missing a very subtle opportunity to get a very important safety message out. Every little bit helps," Jacobsen says.

"If that's the case, why is seat-belt use so high in Canada?" asks David Kelly, the deputy director of the National Safety Council's Air Bag and Seat Belt Safety Campaign in Washington, D.C. "They see the same movies as we do."

He says, "Seat-belt use greatly varies from state to state. For instance, California has a 90 percent seat-belt-use rate, and that's where they're making the movies."

"Sure, it would be responsible of filmmakers to have people buckled up, but to tell you the truth, its not going to make a substantial difference," Kelly says. "We believe very strongly that there is a three-legged stool for increasing seat belt use: strong laws, well-enforced [laws], well-publicized [laws]. What's going to make a difference is that three-legged stool."

What To Do: For more on efforts to encourage seat-belt use, see State Legislative Fact Sheets or the National Safety Council.

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