Watching the trailers before Chef on Friday night, I was reminded by the smirking comments of viewers around me that the “This Motion Picture is Rated…” screen before a preview does as much, if not more, to intrigue viewers about the violence, language, or nudity included in the film than it does to dissuade anybody, or to warn parents about the content of the film.
It’s been obvious for decades in the way the announcer on television says “Viewer discretion advised!”, his sinister tone laced with salacious glee.
The ratings system… what’s a society to do?
I can feel the disappointment in the majority of moviegoers around me whenever a trailer begins with “This Motion Picture has been rated G” or “PG” or even “PG-13.” Tell us that it contains something that people consider dangerous, taboo, or and you suddenly have twice as much of our attention.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re all perverts. My friend John Medina — a world-renowned expert on the brain, and the author of Brain Rules — says this:
We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me?
To some extent, we can’t help it: When we see that “Rated R” warning, we respond because we are, on some level, anxious about what the danger might be. We know that we’re not in direct, life-threatening danger, but still, something in us wants to know what kind of monster we’re dealing with. We lean forward and ask, “Oh really? Violence? What kind of violence? What’s going to happen”” Or, something in our chemistry responds to the possibility of sexual arousal: “Will this turn me on?” Our hearts beat a little faster. Our body chemistry changes. “What are we really talking about here?” certain parts of our circuitry are asking.
I’m not making excuses, saying we have no freewill in what we do about the suggestion of lurid big-screen material. But I am saying that the suggested planted in our minds by the warning that says “This Motion Picture is Rated ‘R'” activates our attention in a way that other ratings don’t. And many, if not most, moviegoers will be far more likely to investigate an R-rated film than a PG-rated one.
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the ratings?
I remember the day I lost all faith in the rating system. Ladyhawke, a fairly innocuous fantasy film (which I still adore, despite its famously annoying soundtrack, which I also love), earned a PG-13 because of a scene in which a man was  impaled by a sharp object. Less than year later, Top Gun, with its hot-and-heavy, Berlin-soundtracked sex scene and its exciting simulations of American fighter pilots blasting their enemies out of the sky, got a PG rating.
Today, I’m reading The Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison, and I get eloquent confirmation about those green-screen warnings:
“The warning, as ever, is also a promise: ‘This program contains subject matter and language that may be disturbing to some viewers.’ It’s a promise the same way an ambulance is a promise, or a scar, or a freeway clogged around an accident.”
There’s go to be a better way of giving people information that will help them make informed decisions about movies. I’m not sure if it was ever a good idea to preface previews with big warnings signs, or to develop such a simplistic letter-code system that really doesn’t tell us anything about the violence, the language, or the sexual nature of a film’s content. An R-rated film’s violence might be an integral, meaningful, necessary part of the art… or it might be gratuitous and irresponsible and even dangerous.
What would be a better solution than G, PG, PG-13, and R?
Anybody have any ideas for a more effective way to rate movies? Or a more effective way to protect young viewers from content that could be damaging without putting destructive restrictions on artists?
Jeff,
I totally agree with you in the this article. My friends and I are lovers of movies and have a small group in my church. But we constantly discuss the disparity of the ratings system as it is right now.
We have come to rely on sites like plugged in.com to let us know what’s going on and exactly what to expect in a movie that is coming out as far sex/language/violence etc. They spell it right out and the amount of each so we can better determine if it is something we need to go watch.
Maybe if we did away with an actual ratings system and did just that. Have 4-5 categories and list what the movie has in it. That would be more helpful to the average movie goer than anything else. You can have a rating that even says “R”, but what makes that an “R” movie may not necessarily make it a “bad” movie. For instance, a war movie might have violence in it that you would actually see in a war if you were there. But because of that it is an “R”. That doesn’t bother me or taking my 2 MS boys as they both love war history. But if it’s an “R” because of sex/language, yeah, I don’t think so.
You will probably never get it right because of the way society is right now. But I never tend to pay much attention to the ratings. I instead look upon a good objective review to let me know whats REALLY in there.
Jon, we independently came up with a similar idea. I suggested a more compact coding system that’s still more informative than what we currently have. Of course, it assumes one can trust the MPAA to deem what is and isn’t appropriate for x or y age.
Going off of what Jon said about pluggedin.com — like Movieguide, pluggedin lets people know the content of a movie.
But unlike Movieguide, pluggedin seems to take movies, and art, seriously.
A good example of pluggedin’s approach to movies would be to look at their review of “District 9.”
Here is the link to the review: http://www.pluggedin.com/videos/2009/q4/district9.aspx
While they do point out that there is much violence and swearing, they acknowledge that “District 9” is not to be dismissed outright, and that the movie does have a timely message.
Really interesting that you mentioned that it restricts artists by judging the art by the content! I hadn’t really thought of it that way before. And how the mere rating of a movie can turn on or off people or make them want to see the movie. I’m still turned off whenever I see the rating R for a film, though I have seen clips of many “R” rated films that looked like they could have been good. I’m sensitive to the sight of violence, so I tend to get uneasy and scared whenever the sign “Rated R for violence etc.” shows up before a movie trailer in the theater, although reading your books kinda helped me get over it a little.
I saw an interesting review of Taxi Driver by Siskel & Ebert, discussing that question. Siskel, not a Christian movie critic by a long shot, was criticizing the violent ending scene as gratuitous and “senseless,” while Ebert argued it was artistically necessary. Although I see Ebert’s point that the film had been building inexorably to a violent climax, I also agreed with Siskel that there comes a point when it’s clear that the director is appealing to the gut. C. S. Lewis calls this “creating men without chests.” Siskel’s phrase was “the low.” Interestingly, he was getting at something similar to Lewis, despite the fact that they were approaching art from very different backgrounds/viewpoints.
I don’t really think it’s possible to come up with a “ratings” system that accurately reflects content appropriateness while being flexible enough to accommodate individual variations. But it’s easy to see where the current system fails embarrassingly. For example, NC-17, the most restrictive rating, implies that such a film is “OK” for people over 17, when this is almost never the case for a film that’s earned that rating. And of course, as people have noted, the different kinds of objectionable content are not on a par. This is how a wonderful film like Midnight Run, rated R solely for its 119 f-bombs, can be mechanically placed in the same “category” with sexuality-laced garbage.
And yet at the same time, our imaginary better system would want to acknowledge when heavy language is used, assuming parents want to use discretion about that sort of thing with their kids. But simply lowering a Midnight Run to PG-13 seems mechanical too—many parents would reasonably feel their 13-year-old wasn’t ready to sit through a script barraging them with quite that much profanity.
Perhaps a coding system could be developed with separate age recommendations for each objectionable content category. Say L (language), V (violence), and S/N (sex/nudity). That way, we could re-rate Ladyhawke like this:
L-10, V-12, S/N-11
Meanwhile, Top Gun would get an S/N-18, while Midnight Run might get an L-18 or L-17, but an essentially general audiences rating for violence and sex. This would make it clearer what’s really going on.
It may seem a bit involved, but hey, I’m taking a break from type-setting this week’s linear algebra proofs. I’m in a notational mood.