The Abysmal State of Movie Ratings

The first R Rated movie I ever saw was “Schindler’s List.” It wasn’t even my idea and I surely didn’t watch it alone. Not only was my immediate family there but also my extended family: aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was 1994. I was all of eight years old. Now I think that there is a very good discussion to be had as to whether I was mature enough to watch that particular film. After all, I don’t recall really understanding what was going on. I’m not sure I even really understood death at that point. I certainly had never heard of the Holocaust before watching the film. To say I wasn’t mature enough though can lead to circular reasoning. What would make me mature enough after all? Would knowing about the Holocaust, its horrors, and all its deep moral implications, make me mature enough to watch “Schindler’s List”? In that case, could I become mature enough to watch “Schindler’s List” simply by watching “Schindler’s List” a masterful movie that teaches its viewers about the Holocaust, its horrors, and all its deep moral implications. In any case, what I really took away from watching that movie in complete ignorance at the tender and innocent age of eight was boobs. It would take me almost another decade after watching “Schindler’s List” again in high school to fully appreciate the movie and all it means, but the boobs I was immediately interested in. I spent most of the time thinking about that movie thinking about the boobs. It was after all, the first time I ever saw them. Yes, the first boobs I ever saw were in “Schindler’s List.”

That probably wasn’t what my parents wanted to teach me when they sat me down to watch that movie. That doesn’t mean that they did anything wrong because that would imply that they should have known what exactly was right. Surely they were not the first parents to try to educate their kid about something and have their kid go away with a completely unpredictable impression. This brings up an enormously important and controversial question: How should we educate our kids? And it is a question the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) supposedly is trying to help parents with by rating movies G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17 under objective standards. It’s official statement is this:

Movie ratings provide parents with advance information about the content of films, so they can determine what movies are appropriate for their young children to see. Movie ratings do not determine whether a film is “good” or “bad.” They simply provide basic information to parents about the level of various elements in the film, such as sex, violence and language so that parents can decide what their children can and cannot see. By providing clear, concise information, movie ratings provide timely, relevant information to parents, and they help protect the freedom of expression of filmmakers and this dynamic American art form.

It is this author’s opinion that explicitly ignoring the question of whether a film is “good” or “bad” flings down and dances upon the whole point of the ratings system: to help parents determine whether the movie is appropriate for their children to see. An objective standard is both over-inclusive (it rates arguably good and healthy movies as PG-13 or R) and under-inclusive (it allows bad and unhealthy movies to be rated PG or PG-13).  I will demonstrate how it does this, but first back to Schindler’s List and the boobs.

In 1997 the movie went into TV syndication and Director Steven Spielberg insisted that it air unedited and uncensored. That meant among other things that we would all see boobs on TV. A Senator by the name of Tom Coburn from Oklahoma thought that this was just a terrible thing saying that NBC had brought television “to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity”, adding that the film was an insult to “decent-minded individuals everywhere.” He later would rewind his statement under the pressure from fellow Republicans to state that although he still did not want the movie aired, he would have preferred that it was shown later at night when not so many kids would be watching. Perhaps he was thinking of me. There was one edit in the TV version. A sex scene was cut down to remove all the “thrusting.” Two Things. One, what Coburn did was a good thing. He had an opinion about the showing of this movie to kids based on his system of morality and he took ownership of his opinion publicly. To his credit, that is a much more courageous and constructive action than what the anonymous and amoral MPAA does. People could have a debate and did have a debate with Coburn. The MPAA inexplicably does not engage the public in debates on what is appropriate for children to watch. Second, why is “Schindler’s List” rated R in the first place if the vast majority of society considers it to be a noble and honorable work of art, it has won numerous Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been included on numerous list of the best movies ever made. My parents and high school surely were not in the minority in deciding it was worth showing to underage kids.

Violence and the MPAA

The answer is that the MPAA does not consider the context of the violence on the screen, something my parents and probably parents in general would consider the most important factor. Instead, the MPAA takes measurements on the amount of blood onscreen. A person gets shot. Do they bleed? Yes, an R rating. No, a PG-13 rating. The idiocy of this should be immediately apparent but I will give two examples that should drive home the point. 

A couple of years back a movie named “127 Hours” came out. It was directed by Danny Boyle and starred James Franco. It told the true story of a man who was hiking alone in a canyon when a boulder fell on his arm pinning him with no help of escape in a cavern. After 127 hours of doing everything he possibly could to escape and not being able to, he was faced with a harrowing decision: Cut off his arm and leave without it or stay there and die with it. So he cuts off his own arm. There is blood and it looks painful. Should this be Rated R? Of course, if all we were considering was the appearance of blood. But let’s consider the context for a moment. The scene is moral. No sins are committed as he is committing violence upon himself to save his life not end it. The scene is truthful. It happened just the way it did in real life. The scene is educational. If you were ever in the same situation, god forbid, you would be glad you saw this movie and could look to it for advice and dwell on it for strength.

Contrast this with your average PG-13 comic book blockbuster. There are countless of them but I will just go ahead and pick on Michael Bay, specifically any of the “Transformers” movies.  These movies generally contain intergalactic battles on and above very populated urban areas. Buildings are blown up and knocked over. Missiles, Bombs, machine guns, and rocket launchers, are only some of the fetishistic amount of violent machinery being bandied about. How many civilian casualties could you expect from the battle outside. Would the answer of zero surprise you? Because that is the number of people that get hurt during any Transformers movie. These movies are a marvel of camera angles and cutaways. We see people in office buildings and in the streets running away. Somehow they always seem to just make it to safety. Now we all know that if you knock down a skyscraper thousands of people will die and thousands of more will be hurt. It has happened before. So how is it okay to knock down skyscrapers in a PG-13 movie? Why is it okay if you simply don’t show all the dead and dying people? Why is it okay to show machine guns fire on large crowds if you simply don’t show all the necessarily dead and dying people? Why is it okay to show large explosions that don’t kill anyone but insist on putting an R rating on a Best Picture winner like “The Hurt Locker,” which has got to be the first movie ever made to insist on the reality of a bomb’s shockwave, not simply the flames, being able to kill a human being.

In essence, the MPAA is insisting that parents do not have to worry about showing their kids all kinds of violence if its effects are not portrayed realistically. When they are portrayed realistically for whatever reason, good or bad, parents should think twice about taking their kids to see the movie.

Here’s a good question to take with you: Should watching violence feel painful? If you were considering the impact of a movie on kids would you want them to enjoy the violence on the screen or would you rather have them cringe out of empathy for the characters that were hurting? Because enjoyment is all that would happen if they watched “Transformers” or any other G, PG, or PG-13 movie that contained violence. If the violence were painful to watch (i.e. people actually got hurt or bled) the movie would probably be Rated R.

But let’s lighten the mood now with a subject that is considerably more absurd thanks in no small part to the inclusion of comedians.

Language and the MPAA

Essentially the rules for language are such. It is confined to certain words. These words are confined only to the sound and spelling of the words themselves. What the words actually mean is not considered. For instance, the word Fuck and all its derivatives are bad even though that word has probably more meanings, surely not all of them immoral, than any other word in the English dictionary. 

In this way it is over-inclusive. Sometimes such a practice can be ignoble. For instance, if the movie takes place in an area of the country where certain curse words have slipped into the commonplace vernacular of everyday speak any movie that portrays how people who live there actually talk will always be a Rated R movie no matter how moral the movie. Great movies such as “Boyz N’ the Hood” and “The Big Lebowski” are good examples. These movies take place in certain parts of Los Angeles where people use the word ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ in almost every single sentence. I have been to Los Angeles. There are people that speak just like those characters do. What they are doing isn’t really cursing, at least not in the sense that what they are saying means what curse words ought to mean. Most of the time they just happen to be people who use these words to supplement a limited vocabulary (i.e. they happen to be poor people). To relegate all honest stories of such people to the R rating I would suggest is not a moral use of movie ratings.

Or what if there was a really good reason for a character to curse. In the 2010 Best Picture winner, “The King’s Speech,” the King of England, played by an Oscar Winning Colin Firth, is cursed with a stammer. He goes to a speech therapist to help him with his predicament. The speech therapist encourages the King to curse whenever he feels a stammer coming on because the exclamation of an epithet is one of the only things that does not trip up the royal tongue. So in this particular scene within private confines, towards nobody in particular, and under doctor’s orders the king curses: “Fuck, fuck, bugger, shit, shit!”  And this is what makes a true-life award-winning inspirational tale of courage and duty with absolutely no sex, violence, or other cursing, a Rated R movie. I think you would be hard pressed to find many people who have actually seen the movie who would not conclude it should be required viewing of any and every single child with a speaking disability.

At the same time a rule such as this, divorced from any consideration of morality or even the meaning of the word, is also way under-inclusive. For example if you used the Olde English phrase that the word Fuck originates from, “Fornication under Consent of the King,” it would not be a curse even though the word FUCK is literally an acronym of that phrase. Or you could say a word that almost sounds exactly like it. A good example of this is contained in the Ben Stiller movie, “Meet the Parents.” The main character’s name is Greg Focker. As the character is not very popular amongst his fiancé’s family, then take to calling him by his last name, Focker, and generally in a tone that sounds like they mean to curse at him. Coincidentally this movie had several sequels one of which came out within a week of “The King’s Speech.” That movie was titled “Little Fockers” and was rated PG-13. All of these movies were rated PG-13. It wouldn’t have been the first time a comedian very transparently changed the pronunciation or spelling of a curse word or more likely used a clever euphemism to convey the same meaning, gained a PG-13 rating, took all of the box office cash coming from a market that now included parents looking for movies they can take their kids to, and laughed all the way to the bank. I wonder how many parents looked at the ratings of these two movies and decided it was a better idea to show their kids “Little Fockers” instead of “The King’s Speech.” If only one parent did so, it shows how MPAA ratings can be, if taken seriously, less than helpful in pursuit of its stated purpose.

I’m going to include here a completely PG scene, according to MPAA standards that is, which is all about…well, see if you can’t figure it out.

That should put us in the mood for sex.

Obscenity and the MPAA

At least in this subject the MPAA has a guiding light to help it make its decisions on some sort of relevant basis: the Supreme Court of the United States. Upon the other subjects, the Supreme Court has generally given free reign to speech in artworks (as opposed to say inciting a riot on a city street) but there are limitations imposed on obscenity. Roth v. United States says this: Material utterly without socially redeeming value that deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interests.  Prurient material means material with a tendency to excite lustful thoughts. A good example of that is child pornography. No socially redeeming value? check. Prurient material? check. There is very little to debate there. But when you get into the realm of consenting adults everything gets a little hazy. A very enjoyable definition can be found in Jacobellis v. Ohio in which Justice Potter Stewart remarked:

““I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

What is Justice Stewart getting at? In essence, he is promoting the idea that whether the obscenity has socially redeeming value heavily depends on a consideration of the artwork as an entirety.  What a wise thing to say. Let’s speculate on how the MPAA could make rulings based on the wisdom of the US Supreme Court. They could watch a movie that contained nudity or sex. They could then take an honest vote as to whether any of them were aroused during the movie. If a majority raised their hands, then check, the movie has prurient material. Then they could have a frank discussion as to whether the context of the obscenity was socially redeeming or whether the movie taken as a whole was of such socially redeeming value that it outweighed the obscenity contained within. It might be an awkward conversation but that would be the honest sane way of going about it. I probably do not have to tell you that the MPAA does no such thing. Instead they take mathematical measurements of how much genitalia is shown and for how many seconds it is visible on the screen. Now surely the absolute tips of breasts on a large screen are not a magical boner maker and surely one does not need to see the absolute tips of breasts in order to get a boner. So in what is becoming a regular refrain in this article, the MPAA rules gives R and NC-17 ratings to movies that everybody should see and PG-13 ratings to movies with no socially redeeming value.

Here are a few examples of inexplicable R ratings given for obscenity. The 2002 movie Amelie is a romantic comedy about a painfully shy yet highly imaginative waitress in Paris. Inspired by a freak happenstance she starts going on covert missions of good will, helping unknowing people in the neighborhood. It is probably one of the most moral movies I have ever seen. It does however contain a character that works in a sex shop. And for about 30 seconds as he is talking to his boss about something totally innocent, you can see dildos in the frame. Or how about the movie Love, Actually, which like Amelie is about good people doing nice things and falling in love. One of the scenes shows bare breasts so it got an R rating even though it is considered the number one movie to watch with a new girlfriend/boyfriend as the pick shows good taste, a sense of humor, and a healthy and respectable attitude towards sex and relationships. I have heard more than a few people express about how these ratings are a shame and why couldn’t the movies simply cover those breasts in that one scene in order to get a PG-13 rating. Here’s a better idea: How about the MPAA does its goddamn job and starts helping parents? Because here is a scene their ratings system, in all its infinite wisdom, defines as PG-13. Oh Behave!

What should be done?

It is rather simple. The MPAA should do what Tom Coburn did. Take ownership of the opinion publicly and explain it. In an ideal world, they would write a reviews that are not anonymous much like a Supreme Court ruling authored by one particular judge that cites the reasons why they are ruling the way they rule. There can even be dissenting opinions if the entire MPAA board does not agree. I don’t particularly care what is their stance. As a private organization and not a government entity they have no authority to impose censorship upon artwork anyway. Everything they say is merely an opinion. But as it is a respected opinion, it does no help to anyone if it is not an opinion at all which I have argued an objective rating system cannot.

In essence, the MPAA is that parent which scorns a child, “You can’t watch that!” and when the child asks why, exclaims once again “Because I said so!” This behavior limits conversation on a subject that sorely needs it, why something is moral or immoral. When an authority acts in an unexplained and easily refutable manner it can put into the mind of an individual the sense that perhaps they do not know what they are talking about. And if that authority is discredited on one particular topic then why can’t they be discredited on all topics, especially if each and all topics have the same non-explanation. This would result in the exact opposite of purposes: the existence within the individual of no moral direction at all based on a distrust of an obviously hypocritical authority.  

I will end with a couple of quotes. One is from Justice Brandeis in Whitney v. California. 

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to aver the evil by education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

And here is another from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

            “Children will learn. The only question is where?”