Here’s Why 007 Is Such a Fine Role Model: Seat Belt Usage

OK, Maybe I’m a Little Safety-Obsessed. But Why Can’t TV Learn More From James Bond?

When James Bond chased a villain across the top of a speeding train, leaping from car to car as the locomotive wound through a mountaintop in the opening scene of Skyfall, I approved. But when 007 climbed into his classic Aston Martin with M, the steely commander of MI6, en route to face a sadistic villain in a shootout, and he—and she—buckled up, I swooned. Yes, they put on their seat belts. The most job dangerous job in the United Kingdom just became a little safer.

Of course, the rest of the movie wasn’t bad either. Daniel Craig should snag the “Sexiest Man Alive” award in his body-hugging gray suit. But we all have our priorities. Mine, as any of my friends, colleagues, or family members will tell you, is seat belts.

Imagine, then, my disappointment and outrage when a week later I spied two teenagers in the über-popular TV series Homeland sprawled across the backseat of the car with nary a seat belt in sight. “Why aren’t they wearing seat belts?” I sputtered to my husband.

“It’s a limousine!” he answered, his objectivity clearly obliterated by loyalty to his favorite show. “People don’t wear seat belts in limousines.”

Well, aren’t limousines cars?

He did not answer.

Only days later came outrageous behavior on ABC’s Scandal. And I’m not talking about the president’s steamy affair with his former press secretary. No, the real scandal was when the president and the pregnant—pregnant—First Lady pulled up to his 50th birthday party in a limo and—you guessed it—were unencumbered by seat belts. Of course, the president had bigger problems when he subsequently stepped out into an assassin’s gunfire, but he couldn’t have known about that when he chose to shun his seat belt. He could have been in a car accident on the way and spared his assassin the trouble. He could have been flung like a projectile into his wife and injured her and the unborn baby. Hasn’t he seen Red Asphalt? People who don’t wear seat belts endanger everyone else in the car. Not to mention they threaten the livelihoods of gunmen for hire. Stupid and selfish.

Americans watch an average of four and a half hours of TV a day, and research shows that the behavior of onscreen characters influences us, particularly children. That’s why consumer brands vie to have their products placed within the shows’ plots. And when TV cavalierly disregards public matters of public health, those shows can be a bad influence, like a ne’er-do-well friend of your child’s. That’s what drove the powerful push against smoking in movies and on TV.

When it comes to seat belts, only 62 percent of characters on the most popular primetime television programs were portrayed using them, according to a 2006 study in the journal Injury Prevention. It could be far worse: only 9 percent wore bike helmets.

As it happens, TV commercials do a better job of portraying seatbelt use than TV programs do, particularly in advertisements selling cars. Seatbelts were worn 92 percent of the time in commercials selling cars, compared to only 68 percent in all other commercials, according to the Injury Prevention study.

When I got in touch with Neal Baer, who was executive producer on NBC’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and ER and is executive producer of CBS’s Under the Dome, he told me that the broadcast networks’ “standards and practices” require actors to wear seat belts in cars (unless not wearing a seat belt has a negative consequence and teaches a lesson). But that’s in ordinary cars. “In the limousine, that’s a little different,” Baer said. “Probably somebody didn’t think about it. For anything I’ve ever done, it’s pro forma to wear your seat belt.”

Nevertheless, primetime TV-land still seems to lag behind Americans’ actual safety habits. About 80 percent of us do wear seat belts, according to a National Highway Transportation Safety Association study. But 20 percent still don’t.

That’s why I’m on seat belt patrol, whether you’re a passenger in my car or an actor on my TV screen. When my single-dad neighbor drove into our driveway with his young children bouncing around the back seat of his Saab, I scrambled to find a polite way to convey to this otherwise attentive father that we’re not in the ’70s anymore. If memory serves, I believe I gently reminded the children about the law: it’s against the law in 32 states to ride in a car without a seat belt.

Not that my concerns are purely terrestrial. What about spaceships? The officers on the Starship Enterprise were regularly bounced from their perches on the bridge every time the ship encountered an asteroid or a Klingon ship—as if no one had ever anticipated a galactic bump. Captains Kirk and Picard, however brilliant they were at hurtling through space at warp speed, seemed clueless when it came to learning anything from Volvo.

We’ve come a long way from the days of Knight Rider, of course, but there is still a sense among some—be they TV writers wanting to convey the coolness of a certain character or teenagers wanting to mimic those cool characters—that there is something uncool about lowering the risk of death by buckling up. Which is idiotic, of course. Take your cue from Bond. Jump from train car to train car all you want; cling to the bottom of an elevator and ride up 80 stories, and blow up Scottish manor houses. But when it’s time to wrap things up and head home after a busy day’s work, do Marla Paul a favor and buckle up.

Marla Paul is the author of The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore (Rodale, 2004).
Primary Editor: Andrés Martinez. Secondary Editor: T.A. Frank.
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