Parental Guidance Suggested: The Score of the MPAA

Christopher Bryan

English 102 – 5:00 pm

Dr. Sonia Apgar Begert

Parental Guidance Suggested: The Score of the MPAA

A movie where children and teenagers are forced to brawl to the death for entertainment, in a fantasy world (Hunger Games), is rated PG-13; whereas a movie where children are bullied by other children, in the world we live in, is rated R (Bully). A few movies such as Bully and The Kings Speech were given the R treatment not because of an over-saturation or glorifying of these features, but because of foul language. In past cases of R ratings appealing to PG-13, such as Gunner Palace, “fuck” was permitted 47 times. By the end of this paper, you will hopefully recognize that the MPAA is a faulty and crooked system for evaluating movies with bias to content and value; due to Dismissal of Proper Surrogate Parenting, “Ratings Creep”, and How the Public Resents It.

Dismissal of Proper Surrogate Parenting

For an association considering parents, reviewed by parents, it’s important that the MPAA itself is acting as a valuable tool for parents bringing children to cinemas. Just how well have they maintained that purpose? How much do the parents their selves care about the system? From a study by Robert Ableman and Jean E. Gubbins concerning supervision over gifted kids versus 'normal' ones, both parties leave much to be desired. Published in Roper Review of 1999, when television's rating system was being questioned, both Ableman and Gubbins concluded that “To date, the MPAA television advisory system has not been a resounding success. Just over a third (34.7%) of parents were reported using the age-based rating system to guide their children's viewing (Bash, 1997; Mifflin, 1997) and many parents found the ratings counterproductive to decision-making (Cantor & Harrison, 1996; Krcmar & Cantor, 1997) and relatively useless (Greenberg, Rampoldi-Hnilo, & VeT Steeg, 1998).” This is not to say that movies themselves are to be undervalued to parents, as a guide supplied by Thomas P. Herbert and Daniel R. Hammond shows that movies can be a great tool for helping children cope with situations they may encounter while growing up. “Films available for use with children and teenagers present many affective issues that teachers may want to address, such as friendships, identity development, gender issues, peer-group pressure, and parental and family expectations. Sharing these movies with young people can reinforce prosocial messages that are incorporated into the curriculum, while simultaneously enabling a teacher or counselor to meet curricular or guidance objectives (2004).” Of course, the guide also supplies what movies are suitable for children and which to show for what reasons. When left to their own devices, as presented in another study executed by Marina Krcmar and Joanne Cantor, they might choose content unsuited to them for the sake of rebellious nature. The study, which placed parents and children to choose movies to watch, then separated the child, shows an overall result that “Parents also make mostly negative comments about advisories and "PG-13" ratings whereas some children, especially older children, made positive comments about advisories and "PG-13" ratings… For example, chidren [sic] used more positive affect when discussing "PG-13" rated programs. In fact, a large majority of their statements about "PG-13" rated programs were positive (1997).” Once again, it's important to stress that the movies themselves are not at fault here, but rather the system that classifies all forms of content into five age groups. As stated well by Barbara J. Wilson, “Perhaps more important than the sheer volume of violent actions, though, is the way in which even a small amount of violence is portrayed. The context of violence is a critical determinant of whether a particular portrayal will have a harmful effect (“What's Wrong”).” Ratings alone cannot describe or prepare the parents for the “Context of Violence,” such as “Reward and punishment... Reality of violence... Justified violence...” and “Perception of character (“What's Wrong”).”  The brief statements made by the MPAA don't serve the movies or the parents, especially considering what content is deemed accessible to children. Between 1996 and 2004, Keliah A. Worth, Sonya Dal Cin, and James D. Sargent reviewed box-office hit movies for smoking. They found that smoking had died down in every rating, “R” being the most and “G”/”PG” being a close runner up, but PG-13 staggered to follow the standards of every rating (2006).

“Ratings Creep”

How much is not enough? Or, for the MPAA’s case, how much is too much? There’s a clear imbalance of violence and language in the ratings system, due to a phenomenon called “ratings creep”. Before Indiana Jones shocked parents with a “PG” heart removal scene, restricted films were being further restricted by law. “The MPAA content rating system has been the subject of extensive litigation (Schmidt, 45, 2000).” It didn’t take long after the system’s first cinematic review that state and government fought over mature films, specifically for the rating the MPAA gave them. Sheriffs attempted to prosecute owners of “R” and “X” rated films, states tried to tax theaters with increasing costs to higher-aged based ratings, and towns began imposing fees of showing “X” rated films (Schmidt, 45, 2000). It wasn’t long until courts successfully defended the movies from the people, via protecting the MPAA’s ratings. “In sum, the main findings of the state and federal courts in nullifying incorporation of the MPAA ratings into ordinances and laws are: That prior restraint, absent a judicial finding of obscene content, is prohibited; That the MPAA rating criteria are vague; That incorporation of the MPAA ratings in laws is an impermissible delegation of legislative and judicial authority to a private “actor.” (Schmidt, 45, 2000)” Today, there’s still a struggle with movies and the MPAA. Documentaries often get different results from similar or exaggerated content. For example, Bully, from The Weinstein Company in 2011, was released with an “R” rating for coarse language throughout. A film about real children being abused by other children cannot be seen by the victims their selves. Just seven years ago, another documentary called Gunner Palace, set in war-ridden Iraq, was released into theaters as a “PG-13”. As stated in the intro, this has the most uses of “fuck” out of any “PG-13” movie or documentary—an astronomical 42 for “PG-13” standards. Yet again, critically acclaimed movies like The Kings Speech get an “R” rating for language as well. Other films, such as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, boast the highest on-screen body count in any film ever. If you noticed that “PG-13” seems to be a hot topic when concerning the MPAA, studies such as one by Priya Nalkur, Patrick Jamieson, and Daniel Romer also identify the rating too. The term referred to as “ratings creep” by many papers alike, is defined as an occurrence “…when the restrictive R category is increasingly assigned to more harmful content while a less restrictive rating category, such as PG-13, absorbs films with content that would have previously been assigned to R. This pattern would be reflected in declining use of the R category, increasing use of PG-13, and increasing levels of harmful content in both rating categories (Nalkur, Jamieson, and Romer, 2010).” The three have identified that “In fact, more than a third (37.3%) of PG-13 films were at or above the average amount of explicit violence in restricted films, a pattern that was present more recently as well as earlier in the period since 1984. However, no PG-13 films contained more than the average explicitness of sexual content in restricted films (2010).” Since its creation, PG-13 accounts for “about half of top-grossing films… Hence, youth may receive greater exposure to more powerful violence over time through popular films. (Nalkur, Jamieson, and Romer, 2010).” Not only has this study been published in ScienceDirect, but a similar study from Kimberly Thompson and Fumie Yokota, published in Medscape, produced the same results just six years before. “We found significantly higher rated content in movies as a function of time, suggesting that the MPAA applied less stringency in its age-based ratings over time for the period of 1992-2003 (2004).” By the end of the article, they provided information to parents and physicians alike, on how to address the MPAA. “Age-based ratings alone do not provide good information about the depiction of violence, sex, profanity, and other content, and the criteria for rating movies became less stringent over the last decade. The MPAA rating reasons provide important information about content, but they do not identify all types of content found in films and they may particularly miss the depiction of substances (2004).” The reason for this is provided by Abraham S. Ravid, in his article “"Managerial Objectives, the R-Rating Puzzle, and the Production of Violent Films,” published in The Journal of Buisness. “In particular, our results support the view that the production of violent and, in particular, very violent movies is consistent with suboptimal risk choices and revenue maximization motives by studio executives. This is similar to studies of other industries where executives are exposed to significant risks. (2004).” What this means is that producing a violent movie ensures a safe return in profits. In his study, he also finds the “family friendly feature” will perform better at the box office, restricted films earn less at the box office, and that “shifting resources to PG and PG‐13 films will trim the loss tail of the revenue distribution and expand the profit tale (2004).” It’s already evident that horror and torture films pay off, many of them running successful franchises for years. This can be linked to the success of Halloween, the best performing indie film of its time, and how Hollywood attempted to replicate it (Nowell, 2011). When slasher films started to become popular, the MPAA was there to assist filmmakers in securing an “R” rating—in fact, had published...

“... A revised code of self-regulation in 1977, two years before Friday the 13th was produced (reprinted in Lewis 307–14). The document catalogued numerous elements that could result in a filmmaker failing to secure an R-rating. “Restraint shall be exercised in the taking of a life,” it warned, “detailed and protracted acts of brutality, cruelty, physical violence, torture and abuse shall not be presented” (310). It was important for Friday the 13th to avoid an X-rating even if it failed to attract an MPAA-member distributor because a significant portion of Friday the 13th’s target audience would be excluded from theaters if the film was released X-rated (or without a rating from the Classifications and Ratings Administration, or “CARA”) [Nowell, 33, 2011].”

Not only has the MPAA become less stringent on films, but they’ve also assisted their profitableness by allowing children and teenagers inside theaters for extra tickets.

How the Public Resents It

Before you read this paper, how much attention did you give the ‘green cards’ before trailers? Even then, were you deterred by the description, or did it advertise the movie further? How many children have you seen in PG-13 features—R features? If the MPAA stands to protect movies from government intervention, enabling its first amendment rights, then we also have a right to talk about how we’ve felt about its role in society. It wasn’t very popular or seen positively, even in its heyday. In the February 1970 publication of Stanford Law Review, Roy E. Bates published an article on the “Private Censorship of Movies.”

“The MPAA’s claim is simply that no censoring is done: The producer (or distributor) is free to leave any scene in his movie, as long as he is willing to accept the consequences—a restrictive rating. However, state and federal courts have consistently reiterated that they will look behind the form of an arrangement affecting first amendment rights and focus on its substance. Although the program purports to be merely a classification scheme with no censorial overtones as to material available to adults, a realistic appraisal of the overall effect of the ratings leads to the conclusion that a form of covert censorship in fact exists. Of course, the X rating itself involves a form of direct censorship in that children are totally denied access to X films. The rights of adults are simultaneously affected through pressures on producers to eliminate themes and scenes not meeting Code standards (637).”

This argument applies all the way to 2014, where movies are still struggling to secure proper ratings for their content. Tierney Sneed addresses in US News that the MPAA was never disconnected from controversy—and before then, there still was controversy over the systems regulating the content in movies. “People have always been complaining about MPAA ratings, and before that they were complaining about the production codes" says Jonathan Kuntz –a UCLA professor of American cinema history – referring to the system of censorship that the ratings code replaced in 1968. "It's something that's been going on for 100 years.”” Sneed also observes the statistics provided by articles investigating the “ratings creep,” specifically the bias of sexual content in comparison to the rise of violence. “When not being accused of being too easy on violence and too hard on cursing, also dogging the MPAA is the rating board's treatment of sexual content, where some see a double standard – that scenes showing sexual pleasure as experienced by women or those in homosexual scenarios having a tougher time with the ratings than portrayals of sexual pleasure experience by a heterosexual male.” There are theaters out there that sympathize with this claim, as reported by Jake Coyle on The Huffington Post, “Some have chosen to opt out of the MPAA's guidelines. When the sensual coming-of-age story "Blue Is the Warmest Color," which features a lengthy lesbian lovemaking scene, opened in theaters last month, a handful of movie theaters, including New York's IFC Center, chose to allow "high-school age patrons" despite the MPAA's NC-17 rating. The theaters felt a movie about teenagers deserved to be seen by teenagers (2013).” Coyle also recognized the violence in comic book films as a shortcut to “... many more ways of putting (violence) on the screen than there were two decades ago (2013).” In fact, “PG-13” movies are now presenting genocide, but as Miriam Krule summarizes from A.O. Scott, “... the movie gets a PG-13 rating because there’s no blood. On the other end of the spectrum, some indie movies get an R rating just because teenage characters smoke pot or have sex, common occurrences in many young adult novels (2014).” As discussed before, Bully has gained controversy from critics and public alike for its rating from the MPAA.

“The R-rating is based on a handful of swear words used by students in the film who, by the MPAA's standards, wouldn't be allowed to watch recordings of themselves, with a side of popcorn, without the company of an adult. Alex Libby, the student bullied during this scene, spoke at the rating's appeal hearing, when it failed to be overturned by a single vote. His message was simple: Once my reality has been filtered through a camera lens, I'm not allowed to see it? This is the strange truth behind the MPAA system: Isn't real life filled with violence, language, and sexual content? Why does turning this reality into art or entertainment suddenly render it unsafe for underage eyes (Kehrber, 2012)?”

There is an alternate view point to this censorship however, as discussed by David Franklin, a film professor who limits his students ideas. He writes that the challenge of a limited scope helps focus the film and “In fact, free speech is often used as a marketing tool to sell products in all branches of popular culture (26, 2012).” He then presents something thoughtful about what the MPAA has done. The possibility that they've narrowed down what the public actually wants to see. “The ideology of free speech as an intristic good obscures the fact that the operation of the free market results in a very limited set of themes for mainstream movies (33, 2012).” If this were true, why have petitions for mature films been made? Why have art films started in obscurity, then grown in popularity? Why would we watch horror movies with twelve year olds or get a group of adults together to drink beer and watch The Lego Movie? Crowd-funding movies are sure presenting an entirely new market that cannot be tamed by the MPAA. In summary of the MPAA, passionately written by Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune, “I’ve had it with the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings and classifications board. It has become foolish and irrelevant, and its members do not have my interests at heart, or yours. They’re too easy on violence yet bizarrely reactionary when it comes to nudity and language. Especially language (2010).”

Conclusion

With review, statistics, and criticism, the MPAA is clearly a faulty and crooked system for evaluating movies with bias to content and value; due to Dismissal of Proper Surrogate Parenting, “Ratings Creep”, and How the Public Resents It. Although its efforts are admirable and it has brought in a more liberal age of media, the system's age shows and it continues to plague movies that are valuable to our culture and children alike. The end result is a limp noodle of censorship that bothers more than protects. Maybe another system can come in one day to replace it and properly prepare parents for the content of the movie, without restricting children. Maybe the system is still salvageable and can be reinvented from the ground up to meet with today's liberal media. Whatever happens to the MPAA, it needs to be change, because the system flat out doesn't work. To wrap it up is a quote from the late movie critic, Roger Ebert, who had lived since the inception of the MPAA up to today's controversies.

“The MPAA should have changed its standards long ago, taking into account the context and tone of a movie instead of holding fast to rigid checklists. In my debates with Mr. Valenti over the years, he told me many times: "We can't be movie critics. It's not our job to evaluate the quality of a motion picture. We are simply providing guidelines for the parents of America." He loved that phrase, "the parents of America," and assumed that they agreed with him about such matters as cursing, nipples and what we have taken to calling "junk." The ratings system wasn't really invented to counsel parents, however, but to head off the threat of local censor boards in many cities and states. As studios began to release films in many markets at once, it was impossible for them to trim prints on a city-by-city basis. The turning point may have come after a Chicago policeman, testifying in an obscenity trial, was asked how a movie made him feel. After long thought he confessed, "It made me feel like I wanted to be with my wife (2010).”

Work Cited

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