When I was a kid I was allowed to
watch Rated R movies. For the people that write on this blog, the terms
“Liberal” and “Conservative” weren’t thrown around often in our childhood, but
Liberal my parents were. My mother was a punker and in her later years a
modern goth. Heck, I was sung to sleep as a baby to Alice Cooper and cut
my teeth on Motorhead, Bad Company, and GWAR, so naturally Rated R movies were
not something they hid me from either. There was only one movie that my
father ever kept me from for reasons I never understood, and that was Harlem Nights.
It was an F-Bomb laden twenties-era romp, and it later became one of my
favorite movies of all time! But Dad would never let me rent it. I
thought, “Dude, I am TEN, and you let me watch Basic Instinct. I can’t
watch THIS? What is wrong with you?” Granted I don’t let my kids
watch Rated R movies, but I look back and inventory many of my favorite R rated
horror/thriller flicks and realize something horrible; half of them my teen can
watch now legally. PG-13 is the new R. What the heck happened?
Desensitization is the word dejour
for this piece, people. We all know what it means, but for journalistic
integrity, I’ll define. Desensitization is defined as “The elimination or
reduction of natural or acquired reactivity or sensitivity to an external
stimulus.” In short, we’ve been exposed to it so often we’re numb to its
effects. Granted, Cosplayers and con-goers attend so many workshops and
behind-the-scenes panels that the blood and gore loses its punch in most horror
flicks, and those that watch a lot tend to be able to know when the token party
guy is gonna lose is head or the slutty cheerleader is gonna get killed by the
garage door…but is it because we’ve been around the block and are numb to the
genre’s powers or we live in the Cosplay/convention world? Oooo…food for
thought, isn’t it?
Anyway, back to the subject of film
ratings. When Michael Keaton’s first Batman film came out in 1989, it was
given an R rating because of the dark/grim nature of the film. It change
quickly after to PG-13, but there was no missing the initial brand; it was
there and they gave it. The current write-ups on The Killing Joke
advising that this will be the first Rated R “Bats” movie are thereby
incorrect. A scary thought that something as simple as a dark and grimy
landscape could raise the rating on a film. There are some hallmarks that
will always keep a movie rated R; the nudity in Friday The 13th and
some of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (remember the girl in the waterbed?)
for example. No matter what we do, those movies will remain branded as
Rated R except on the “edited for content” cable channels. But what makes
a movie change its rating over time, such as Batman? Granted it wasn’t a
horror flick, but it’s an example of a movie that changed. How have many
of the horror flicks being released today made it to such a low rating when, as
you watch them, you know without a doubt that we would never have been allowed
in the movie theater when we were children without a parent or legal guardian?
The rating system was originally set up with a basic
system in mind. Extreme gore and
violence? R rating. Nudity?
R rating. Anything above the
“G-D” and “F-Bomb” usage? R rating. All well and good and makes total sense. Most of our favorite horror flicks from the
past have an R rating for this very reason and there is no way that you can get
things like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday The 13th, or Halloween
to be rated anything less than that unless they put em’ on cable channels and
edit out all of the parts that make them…well…viewable. Nowadays, however, there is more gore and
violence to be found on procedural cop shows on network TV channels. Words nearly as bad as the F-Bomb are dropped
on NCB and ABC regularly and are regularly dropped on shows such as Game of
Thrones. Shows like Buffy and Angel were
getting away with pretty graphic sex scenes-minus the outright boob and butt
nudity- before things really got hinky (or kinky, depending on how ya look at
it,) on network/cable channels today.
Things have been steadily changing, so how does this affect the rating
system?
Chris Klimek wrote a wonderful online article on this
very subject titled, “”The Ongoing Failure of The PG-13 Rating,” that hits this
subject so perfectly on the nail that it drives it straight through the
board. While discussing his own history
in R-Rated video sneak in glory from his childhood years (a kindred spirit) he
goes into the various ways that, while the rating system is set up in specific
parameters, it does not seem to be sticking to them as years go on. In the article he breaks down various movies
from the eighties that bordered on R rating (or were initially given one) and
were changed later on. Klimek discusses
some of the different aspects of the rating system and what they use to gauge
it and how it differed then to now, plus examples of movies that fit the bill
for the border between R or PG-13. And
he discusses my point in this article as well in regard to the confusing nature
of the MPAA’s tolerance for more and more of the things that in our childhood
you would never have found in a PG-13 flick.
Let’s look at the Friday The 13th
movies. More nudity than you can shake a
stick at (oh, get your mind out of the gutter.
Just because I said nudity you heard in your head a DIFFERENT kind of
stick. Ya pervert.) Drug usage was prevalent as well as alcohol
usage. Language was far from trimmed
down. That is what earned one of our
most beloved horror franchises a permanent R rating. The rating system used by the MPAA state that
PG-13 ratings will allow nudity briefly as long as it isn’t sexual in
nature. They will allow moderate
language, but more than one use of a strong expletive such as the F-Bomb grants
the movie an auto-R rating. Violence is
acceptable as long as it isn’t “realistic” or “persistent.” Now as we have seen with Mr. Vorhees, arrows
through the head, an axe through the back, boffing your naked girlfriend while
screaming repeated F-Bombs mid-orgasm…yeah, you won’t get anything less than R
outta that. This type of behavior was
what got the rating during the days of parachute pants and Michael Jackson,
however the above listed details are the updated MPAA guidelines. Things have changed. You take a movie like “The Grudge,” “The Woman
In Black,” or even “The Ring,” and place in the middle of the break-dancing era
and I would be willing to bet that anyone under seventeen wouldn’t be allowed
to set foot inside. Why is that?
We’re back to the whole desensitization word
again. Society has morphed over the
years. Where it was once safe to walk
down the street as a child you can’t even do that as an adult without mace, a
cell phone, and a loaded Glock. Registered
sex offender lists and online stalkers, increased attention to terrorist
attacks and an increase in public safety…the world we live in now isn’t the
world we lived in when Krueger haunted our nightmares. They are showing dramatic videos on the news
from bombings in foreign countries and the snuff films from executions of
hostages; real world violence has become so mainstream that the fake stuff just
doesn’t do it for us anymore. And since
the MPAA is made up of a voting committee of regular humans that are just as desensitized
as the rest of us that confirms that Chris’ article holds some serious
weight. You have to wonder, however,
which side of the coin is the right one to flip for? Is the MPAA failing because they are
tolerating more in modern day society that they shouldn’t, making horror movies
a bit too accessible to the nightmares of children? Or are those that sit on the MPAA committee just
as desensitized to the violence, gore, and mayhem as we are, and they are
simply watching and rating the movies with blinders on?
For those of us that have grown up and now have kids,
it just makes it that much more difficult and means that we watch the same
movie twice, even if we didn’t like it the first time: Once to screen the PG-13 goodness to see if
it is appropriate for the kids, and a second time if it is to take them along
for the ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment