After the first week of classes, I went with three of my friends, whom we’ll call Lamie Jovette, Klison Ae, and Suth Rilcoff (to preserve their anonymity) to Regal Cinemas to watch War Dogs. This was the only film playing that seemed remotely bearable—let’s face it, if you liked Suicide Squad, you probably also liked Star Wars Episode VII.
As I’m going to buy my ticket, they ask for my ID, which I happily provide them, along with a reminder that their policy on enforcing MPAA ratings was archaic and forced conservative values down my throat (more on that later). Unfortunately for me, Klison decides to take that moment to loudly state she was only 16 (she was worried about getting in trouble—not everyone is good at lying about these things). The mustachioed ticket vendor, who clearly takes his job very seriously, refuses to sell her a ticket to the movie. So, assuming, as one should, that this was a policy no one took seriously, we just had Klison and Suth buy a ticket for a different movie. There was no real intention to be subtle; we assumed if we gave them an excuse to let us slip by, they wouldn’t care. However, as we’re about to walk into the theatre itself, a disgruntled Regal worker lay waiting for us. It was at this point that she refused to let us in, and I lost my cool. What ensued was a five-minute-long rant in which I condemned the MPAA, accused Regal Cinemas of supporting homophobic bigotry, and got to watch the ticket vendor lie to me about federal censorship law (when I asked where I could file a complaint, he told me to write to my congressmen, and when I asked him if the policy was mandated by the government, he told me it was voluntary). Once we had our tickets refunded, we left. I will never go back.
So why am I so up in arms about the MPAA when I can just torrent the movie at home? To me this is a matter of morals. The MPAA, or Motion Picture Association of America, a private organization responsible for rating movies in the U.S., is not only terrible at its job in terms of giving movies fair ratings, but supports homophobia, sexism, sexual repression, and censorship.
First, some basics: The MPAA is a political group that originated in the 1920s, with the goal of actually preventing censorship. The idea was that if the movie industry self-policed, they wouldn’t need to worry about local governments doing it for them. The original rules they used to determine if a movie was fit for viewing included a ban on any criticisms of religion, to give you some idea of the organization’s stringent “moral” standards. Since then, the MPAA has morphed into an advocacy group that largely fights against piracy; it financially backed the controversial Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts (SOPA and PIPA), which, had they been passed, would have allowed copyright holders to shut down web content without a court order. The ratings board itself, the Classifications and Ratings Administration (CARA), is run by the MPAA, and is responsible for doling out those all-important letter ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17). The CARA is made up of completely anonymous, non-democratically elected members who have absolutely no accountability for their votes. Ratings are based on sexual content, nudity, language, violence, and drug use.
On its premise, I find the idea of any organization deciding what is “acceptable” for children to watch to be fundamentally flawed considering the immense subjectivity of such a decision. What exactly is the harm of having kids see or know swear words? Everyone eventually gets exposed to them, and in most cases this exposure is usually not traumatic. Violence, while slightly less controversial, seems to be an incredibly subjective subject indeed. Cartoons such as Tom and Jerry depict incredibly senseless violence, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks the shenanigans of these animated characters should be censored from children’s eyes. Likewise, nudity and sexuality seem to be so culturally relative that to give a rating to these is to force certain values upon an audience. In some cultures, a woman so much as showing her hair is akin to nudity in another. Should such movies receive an R rating? Of course not. Even more questionable is why the MPAA chooses to differentiate male and female nudity (this is a hard question, but the answer might rhyme with “sonservative cexism”). The same can be said for sexuality. There was a time in this country when showing a man and a woman in the same bed together was taboo. The line between hand-holding and sex is a gradual one, and to plot a point at which viewing it becomes traumatic is nothing short of impossible.
More importantly, creating these ratings demonstrates incredible naiveté on behalf of the raters. The theatre industry is forgetting the immense power of the Internet. Today, kids can watch hardcore pornography as soon as they learn to type and parents can do very little to stop it. Even websites as benign as Wikipedia contain stories that are graphically violent, sexually charged, and profane. A simple search for “profanity in english” will give you results worse than anything you’d find in an R-rated movie, and if you want some disturbingly sadistic content, read up on a guy named Albert Fish. Likewise, you can find plenty of nudity and sexual content. Most kids can access this kind of content, and yet Wikipedia has no need to censor their content, provide ratings on articles, or ID people that want to read on their site. There once was a time when the theatre represented an opportunity to see things that only aired on the big screen, but that time is long over.
And guess what? Nothing bad has come of this! Kids aren’t being corrupted, they’re not dropping out of school en masse, and they aren’t all suddenly becoming sex addicts. Nor are they becoming any more violent. This isn’t just my observation—the data agree. In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma that examined a sample of 355 young adults, the researchers found that violent media consumption had no impact whatsoever on actual, real-world violence. The findings for porn (discussed in my June 2016 article on the subject which can be read at ihstattler.com) are equally fuzzy, fluctuating between claiming that porn increases and decreases sexual desire, without causal evidence of any sort.
Worse is how the ratings system impacts the movie industry itself. MPAA ratings are far from optional for movie producers (you’d be hard-pressed to find a theatre that would play an unrated movie), and an R rating cuts down the possible audience dramatically. The result is many movie producers trying to get their movies to fall in the PG-13 sweetspot so that it can be viewed by a wide audience, yet still be exciting or provocative. Some producers go so far as to send in a version that contains all sorts of disgusting content so that they can cut it out when they go for a second rating and seem tamer in contrast. Also keep in mind that each rating can cost upwards of $25,000, which prevents smaller movie makers from having their movies shown. This PG-13 bubble prevents important artistic freedoms on the part of the director. Take the movie Bully, a documentary that received an R rating for using too much profanity. In capturing the reality of how terrible some bullies can sound and using appropriate diction to make an impactful point, the movie triggered the MPAA to prevent high-schoolers—their target audience—from seeing the movie. The rating was only lowered after public outcry when people realized how stupid the rating was. The fact of the matter is that sometimes a swear word can be potently characterizing, violence can be emotionally moving, and nudity can be a powerful humanizing tool. There’s a reason nude portraits are common in classical art.
The MPAA also demonstrates homophobia in their censorship of homosexual intimacy.
The British film Pride was given an R rating despite only containing incredibly mild intimacy (pretty much limited at kissing). Peter Tatchell, an LGBT advocate in the UK, described the rating as “outrageous, knee-jerk homophobia,” in The Guardian, going on to say that “there’s no significant sex or violence in Pride to justify strong ratings. The American classification board seems to automatically view any film with even the mildest gay content as unfit for people under 17.”
This all brings us back to Regal Cinemas and why I hate their policy of enforcing MPAA ratings. In trying to “protect” kids from seeing “inappropriate” content, they choose to do a job that ultimately should be the responsibility of a parent. If a company started spanking kids for swearing in their stores, people would be outraged. It is fundamentally wrong for Regal to be making parenting decisions for their customers based on traditional bigoted values. If a child’s real parents have concerns about them watching a certain film, maybe they shouldn’t leave the kid to wander the mall unattended, but it should be no business of the theater itself.
They’ve lost my business until this patronizing policy is changed, and I recommend they lose yours as well.