The Ratings Farce

I just finished my second procedural essay this week, so I finally have time to write a new entry. I know it’s been a while but I hope to soon move back to a regular schedule. When I was nine years old I went with my older brother’s friend Tom and his mother Kathy to see a double feature. Mission to Mars and Erin Brokovich were both playing, and I was excited to see my first R rated movie. I remember it quite well, hiding my face throughout most of Mission to Mars, terrified of the deaths and the sacrificial suicide, and then laughing and having a good time in Erin Brokovich. That was the first time I decided that the MPAA rating system is nonsense, and I still stand by that today.
Now I do not want to turn this into an article on censorship and ethics, that is a much longer argument that I’m not prepared to enter into. The simple matter is that the way the MPAA rating system works is harmful to movies. Filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky, John Waters, David Lynch, Kevin Smith and Stanley Kubrick can tell you that they have had to compromise their artistic vision to keep their films from having an NC17 rating (or X before 1990). You might ask, well these directors target audience is already people over 17, so why does the rating matter so much, which is a fair point until the problem of advertising arises. NC17 rated films cannot be advertised on television or most other media, and the majority of movie theatres will not carry these films. This results in millions, possibly tens of millions of potential dollars lost for these films. So the NC17 rating does not only prevent children from seeing the films, but most everyone else as well.
So what makes a movie NC17? You’ve seen virtually every violent scenario played out in R rated movies, usually with gratuitous amounts of nudity. If a film like Hostel can get an R rating, what constitutes the next step? Apparently, pubic hair, female orgasms, gay sex, and straight sex outside of missionary – but not violence. It is also worth noting that independent films are more likely to receive NC17 ratings than studio films. I said earlier I don’t want to turn this into a discussion on censorship, so I’ll leave that judgment up to you, but let’s look at who in charge gets to make the ratings decisions. 

      The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was established in 1968 to prevent government censorship. The people who rate the films are not experts, child psychologists, or anyone with authority on whether or not a film is dangerous to children. Rather, it is an anonymous group that the MPAA assures are all parents with young children. Sounds almost fair enough, parents should know what’s best for children, except for the fact that everyone has different ideas on how to raise children and a private investigation in 2006 discovered that a handful of the raters don’t have young children or children at all.

This is a much more angry rant than my typical entry, which I usually try to keep informative, but this is something that I think is important to the film world. I would like to see the removal of such censorship that has fascist, homophobic, anti women, and religious overtones, and see it replaced with government censorship – normally I would not want government censorship near anything but the US government has proved in the past that it would be a lot less restrictive than the MPAA – or a new independent rating system not so closely tied to big studios, run by experts and not by parents. I recommend watching the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, which, ironically, received an NC17 rating, or any other NC17/X film that you might not otherwise be exposed to, such as Midnight Cowboy, Henry and June, or A Clockwork Orange.