This Film Is Not Yet Rated...

Because I roll on the three-years-late wagon, I just got around to watching “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” which was tremendously enjoyable and appropriately anger-inducing. It’s really hard to imagine this not being one of the most important critiques of the corporate film industry ever committed to, uh, film.

And many of the broad points it makes feel right and seem valid: as a society, America tolerates violence more easily than sex; and even then, male pleasure is definitely more ok than aggressive sexual behavior from female characters (or, perish the thought, the depiction of female sexual pleasure.)

But I have one major bone of contention with the film, and it happens as an aside – taking up no more than 5 minutes, maybe, of the total running time, although it’s a recurring theme throughout the movie. Namely, it’s the implication that the MPAA ratings system somehow makes American culture more bellicose and violent. To review, the MPAA ratings system was born in 1968. Here are a few other things that happened in 1968:

RFK’s assassination
MLK’s assassination
My Lai massascre
The, uh, 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

…to name but a few. And of all the things we want to single out in that hectic year, that may have left America more divided and more prone to violence – we’re going with the MPAA ratings system? The fact that some kid had to wait till he was 17 to watch “In the Realm of the Senses” is what makes America more violent?

I hate this in otherwise rational liberals. Why presume that a prudish minority is imposing some tyrannical form of censorship over the country? Sure, I have major beef with the process issues surrounding the MPAA ratings system, but I don’t presume that a group that doesn’t reflect my views is automatically not representative of America. A lot of the filmmakers spotlighted say, “Well, I’m a parent too! And I don’t have a problem with my movie! Why do they?” And aside from the solipsism inherent in that argument, it's worth noting that this is just a nihilistic line of thought that leaves no room for any kind of representative committee, because everyone is always going to disagree with something a committee does.

Why is it presumed that the individual’s relationship to culture is a one-way street? In this linear worldview, our cultural beliefs are dictated by the MPAA. We blindly accept the norms dictated by our MPAA overlods and become more violent. But isn’t it just as likely that the individuals on the MPAA ratings board were influenced by something that was already prevalent in the culture - a prudish and socially conservative outlook when it comes to bedroom matters? And that, in turn, the individuals on the board are reflecting back broader cultural norms that they themselves didn’t create, but absorbed just the same as we did? Sure, the MPAA board reinforces certain ideas, but did these people create those norms? Please. And just because a few of us don’t share in those norms doesn’t make the norms any less real. America is, by and large, fairly conservative. Remember that it took a very enlightened Supreme Court justice for Ulysses to be published in America - 10 years after it was released in Europe.

And the conspiracy theory then has to build: that the MPAA board is somehow a cabal of union-hating villains as opposed to well-meaning but naïve and misguided self-righteous people. Does anyone who knows the DC area think that a set of their neighbors from Montgomery or Fairfax county would come to different conclusions than the MPAA board??

To be fair to the filmmaker and to the directors interviewed in the documentary, I get what they’re saying – and I think it’s infuriating. These people count the number of pelvic thrusts in a sex scene, or they disproportionately object to female sexual pleasure over that of males. Sure, this has some kind of impact on children. But only a filmmaker would be arrogant enough to think that real-world violence could have been prevented if more teenagers had easy access to “I am Curious (Yellow)” over your standard-issue action flick. If it were that simple, why would societies that are notoriously more permissive than the U.S. also have problems with endemic violence? (Helloooo, I watched “Caligula” on prime time tv when I was 13 – in a city where a bad weekend can mean 100 homicides.)

Other than that minor quibble, the film is spectacular, and if you don’t know much about how movies get rated PG-13, R, or NC-17, go watch it – three years late. Just like me.