The Packaged War - Part 2: Someone Think of the Children

With its plans to undermine the tobacco companies' leverage of branded packaging well underway, the government has been greatly encouraged to pursue new avenues; where the superior intellectual and moral mettle of parliament can serve to remove further temptations from the landscape of excess, pervasive in a free society. Where many have expected the next target to be alcohol or fast food, the government has instead chosen DVDs, video games and other products of home entertainment to be the next commercial product to which it will legislate mandatory plain packaging.


DVDs have exploded in popularity over the last decade and begun to normalise the behaviour of watching films in the home. Removing film-watching from the context of a social activity has degenerated the wholesomeness of cinema-going and condensed its audiences into reclusive enclaves whom are more likely to remain sedentary at home rather than engage with the outside world for their entertainment. From this, the government has deemed it necessary to educate the public of the implied social, cultural and health effects of excessive consumption of home video. 

The key to ensuring the success of such regulation, is to comprehensively convince the population of a product's ill-effects on the vulnerable; children are the quintessential proxies for projecting all worst-case scenarios. By incorporating such negatives into the conventional wisdom of the populace, a government can convince people that in limiting the choices of adults, they are protecting the wellbeing of children. From there its a mere extension of reasoning that products that are bad for children are also bad for adults, and should thusly be extracted from the palette of acceptable choices. With ingenius foresight, governments the world over have spent decades acclimatising us to assess the suitability of films by arbitrary ages with rather flimsy justifications. It is from this entrenched system that the government will finally be able to pull the reins on the insidious marketing arms of the home entertainment industry.