The Motion Picture Association of America announced last week that it will now consider cigarette use when assigning ratings to films, noting that "depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context may receive a higher rating." If you're one of the hardy few who still take the MPAA seriously, now might be a good time to reassess your position.
For years, the group epitomized a lot of the problems with the "family values" crowd -- generally that they are more than happy to pass judgement on everything under the sun but get righteously indignant if folks start looking into their own families and values. In one breath, it's "Hey, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have no problem with us checking out you out" and "How dare you drag my personal life into this?" the next.
The MPAA is among the worst offenders, because one of its major functions is literally to judge what is appropriate for America's children to see and hear. From mpaa.org: "The (Ratings) Board uses the same criteria as any parent making a judgment: theme, language, violence, nudity, sex and drug use are among content areas considered in the decision-making process."
I have several cheap shots permanently locked and loaded in case I ever meet a board member (The opening salvo would be "If you guys really have your finger on the pulse of the healthy American family, how come a third of you are divorced?), but I think it's more interesting to try to consider the group logically rather than immediately branding it offensive just because I don't agree with its vision.
Simply put, I think the board or someone in charge of them is stuck in the 1950s on every topic except smoking. Horrible violence can easily clear the board as long as there's no visible mammal blood ("Alien vs. Predator" and "Pearl Harbor" both pulled PG-13 ratings in theaters but went up to R when red gore was reintroduced on DVD), while relatively benign movies about sex or politics routinely get hammered ("Kung Fu Hustle, "American Pie" and most of Michael Moore's movies all got Rs, and "An Inconvenient Truth" got a PG for "thematic elements.")
That's hardly news, however. Many people, including movie critics Roger Ebert and David Ansen, have argued that the system appears to be run by homicidal nationalist prudes. Ansen claims the rating system is geared toward looking at trivial aspects of movies (he has repeatedly noted that the board tracks how many times and in what context certain expletives are used; for instance, the f-word can be used up to three times as an exclamation in a PG-13 movie but never as a verb) rather than at the general theme of the picture (for example, if realistic consequences of violence or substance abuse are shown). I agree, and my favorite example was when the MPAA rejected a trailer for "Teaching Mrs. Tingle" that showed a dog licking a wine bottle on the grounds that it "promoted underage drinking." In all fairness, though, there's no way that dog was 21.
But lately, things have been getting downright surreal. The board famously took issue with the (relatively tame) orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," demanding that some of the actors' special areas be digitally obscured before they would even give the thing an R. Meanwhile, Kubrick's earlier feature "A Clockwork Orange," which contains perhaps the only graphic rape scene in all of cinema to be considered high art, also pulled an R with 30 seconds worth of edits -- most of them to a depiction of consensual sex and none of them to the rape sequence. What's the message here? That a bunch of folks enjoying non-missionary sex is just as offensive as gang rape? That's not a leap I'm prepared to make just yet.
What ties it all up for me, though, was the movie "The Descent," which I saw for the first time last week. It was a great movie, maybe one of my top 25 ever, but that doesn't mean I ever want to watch it again. In case you're not familiar with it, it's the story of a group of six Gen X women who go caving in the Appalachians and run into some serious trouble in the form of cave monsters and unresolved personal issues. By the end of the movie, you're a lot more afraid of some of the women than you are of the carnivorous freaks, all of whom seem to be male. Call it the ultimate chick flick.
On top of the fact that it's well-filmed, well-acted and well-choreographed, I liked it because it was deep as hell and "the descent" into the bowels of the earth parallels one woman's character arc. When did you last see a big-time movie with actual character development? This one's a winner and you should check it out.
Still, it's harrowing throughout and depressing in some of the conclusions it draws about human nature. Major characters die slow and hard, and keep coming back, not as zombies you can hate, but as real people bleeding out from horrible injuries, regretting their life's mistakes all the way. It's hard to watch and the movie deserved its R rating. Still, the message is well worth the arduous trip.
But you can feel the MPAA's hot, reptilian breath all over this masterpiece. In a film where the combat is scary realistic, where people actually fall down when struggling in slick conditions and the untrained do not fight at all like like Bruce Lee, where everyone and their mom is wielding a blade or a set of claws, no article of clothing is ever torn, because a pretty lady showing too much skin might send the wrong message. Several other scenes are as careful to show naked women only from the neck up as later scenes are to show their entire bodies as they are disemboweled.
Even when one character tumbles into a giant pool of blood and has a total epiphany and it would be absolutely appropriate to have her emerge freaked out and naked, in both the psychological and literal sense, she splashes out wearing only a Sigourney Weaver grimace. I can only assume that the MPAA was afraid that someone might get a jolly or two if she realistically shucked off her disgusting top layer of clothing before soldiering on. But I think I speak for most guys when I say that it's hard for me to get too fired up about a blood-soaked woman when I've just seen several of her friends devoured by shrieking trolls.
What the MPAA needs to realize is that the average person has a much greater chance of seeing a member of the opposite sex naked than they do of seeing someone shot through the heart or punched in the face, and so they're protecting us from the wrong things. I am by no means a fan of smoking, but I see it for what it is: a self-destructive personal choice not unlike heavy drinking, excessive film watching or moral crusading. If seeing a person smoke in a movie is the worst thing a kid sees this week, I count him lucky. He could be watching the news, for God's sake.
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