Use the F-word twice in a movie? That’ll cost you. Don’t remember to count the number of pelvic thrusts you showed? Now you’re in trouble. Showing full frontal female or male nudity and don’t have good distribution? You’re done before you even started.
Hollywood’s rating scale is broken. The MPAA’s system of G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 has meant increasingly less since it came into use in 1968. For years there have been cases of major studio pictures with obscene stretches of violence passing as PG-13 to boost summer box office receipts, while the harmless Oscar winner The King’s Speech was slapped with an R-rating for fear children would be corrupted by hearing Colin Firth use profanity.
Even the little used NC-17 rating has seen controversy in recent years, with movies like Shame, Blue Valentine and last year’s Blue is the Warmest Color being effectively slapped with a death sentence to not be shown in most theaters. At the same time, an Oscar contender like The Wolf of Wall Street allegedly skated by after the MPAA bended a rule and said Leonardo DiCaprio’s lurid sex and depravity could fly under the R-rating because he was doing it with his wife.
After news that The Expendables 3 would be released as a PG-13 movie, Gabe Toro over at Cinema Blend proposed a solution: do away with the PG-13 rating.
Now, studios use PG-13 as a creative tool, not a restriction. Films are designed to specifically be PG-13, based on what is rumored to be the MPAA’s approach towards the ratings…So here’s what we do. We lobby to eliminate PG-13. What this does is force the MPAA to look at content differently. That means, no more arbitrary rulings or beliefs about one breast versus two, one headshot versus five. Whatever they think is a movie for “adults” will earn an R-rating. This means that anyone making a movie with a decent amount of violence and sex is going to get an R. Rather them limiting their audience (which is b.s. because tons of theaters don’t enforce the ratings, and many teens or kids will still see an R-rated film with older people), the studios will see this opportunity to actually engage with adult ideas and concepts. A superhero film can actually still be thrilling and feature politics and romance. A comedy can be as naughty as it wants to be. And The Expendables 3 can be filled with exploding heads everywhere.
Toro is certainly on to something, and in dividing the rating scale three ways by removing that nebulous middle ground of PG-13, he’s emulating something Roger Ebert wrote back in 2010, arguing that movies should be rated “G” for young audiences, “T” for teenagers and “A” for adults.
Over at Rope of Silicon however, Brad Brevet points out the likelihood that such a system would ultimately limit filmmakers, and a movie like The Expendables 3 might not get made at all.
His suggestion is to eliminate MPAA ratings entirely, but what neither Toro or Brevet point out is that we’ve played this game before. As Toro says, ratings have always been used as a creative tool, and less of a restriction.
Before the MPAA scale we currently have in place today, movies had to be approved under the Hays Code, a collection of often perplexingly silly bylaws about what a movie could and couldn’t do. Psycho famously fought over the right to depict a toilet being flushed. Movies about gangsters and criminals couldn’t allow the audience to sympathize with the protagonists, and they had to get punished in the end for all their wrong doings.
But the reason they had such an arbitrary system in the first place, and similarly why Hollywood needs one today, is that it was a way for the movie business to police itself. Demonstrate that you could self-censor, and you could keep government censorship out of your hair altogether, freeing up more opportunities to make more movies and more money faster.
To eliminate the MPAA scale today and say that people can figure out what’s appropriate for them misses a whole lot of gray area.
What’s more, movies that didn’t initially meet the Production Code were often provided script doctors and consultants who could help “save” the picture. Hollywood was and is in the business of getting movies made, and it’s not unlike why we see rating scales fudged today.
The irritating thing about the MPAA is their lack of transparency. They act on behalf of consumers, but exactly what lands a movie a particular grade can be vague and unhelpful.
Take the two cases of The Wolf of Wall Street and Blue is the Warmest Color as an example. Wolf is rated R “for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.” Maybe that’s enough info to tell your kid probably shouldn’t see it, but it hardly paints the whole picture. Blue on the other hand is rated NC-17 “for explicit sexual content.”
Is it obvious that “explicit” sexual content is that much worse than “strong”? And does either description really provide a full understanding of what you can expect?
Parents have to do their homework and read film critics to get a strong idea of what’s actually in a movie and whether or not it’s appropriate. But film criticism is less and less a practical, consumer service to help people decide what to watch, and yet it often serves parental guidance that much better than the agency designed to do just that.
If critics serve any purpose, it’s in putting a film and its content into context, something that neither a letter grade nor the MPAA has been able to accomplish.