Thoroughly mixed into the cultural Kool-Aid of the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system — consisting of “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R” and “NC-17” — is one of the most effective tools of censorship and content control in the movie industry. These ratings ostensibly inform parents of a movie’s suitability for children of different ages, but they have a far greater impact than whether or not a rebellious 12-year-old can watch “Anchorman.” Just ask Kimberly Peirce, the filmmaker of “Boys Don’t Cry.” She was surprised to hear from her studio that her film was in trouble because it had received an NC-17 rating. “I thought, well, all of my favorite movies are NC-17,” she said, “but the studio told me they wouldn’t release it because of [that].” Peirce is in good company: Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky and many more notable filmmakers have all been subjected to the same process. The difference between NC-17 and R could mean millions of dollars in revenue for a film, and such a loss presents a strong incentive to alter or simply never release a movie.
Jointly comprising close to 90 percent of the US film market share, the six largest players in the American movie industry — Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal Studios Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. — make up the trade organization that holds internal regulatory power over films: the MPAA. When the MPAA was formed in 1922, it served as an internal regulating force in the movie industry, preempting a concurrent political conversation about whether obscenity in film required government censorship. With the idea that a self-regulating movie industry would stave off censorship, the organization took on the role of devising the guidelines commonly known as the Hays Code. Until the Supreme Court reversed a prior ruling that films were not protected by free speech, the Hays Code put ascendant censorship boards at ease by assessing films before they hit the market. But even after the Supreme Court case extended First Amendment protection to films, the MPAA continued to champion ratings for film content, efforts that manifest themselves today as their rating system. The sad irony of the organization is that in its continued attempts to protect films from censorship, the MPAA has become the film industry’s biggest censor.
The ratings apply to all movies produced by filmmakers from MPAA studios as well as virtually all other filmmakers who want their movies to stand a chance in mainstream theaters. While there are no individual legal repercussions for ignoring ratings — say, allowing minors younger than 17 into R or NC-17 rated movies — most theaters, especially small ones, follow these informal guidelines with strict adherence. The reluctance to bypass the MPAA stems from the fact that while theaters are under no explicit obligation to enforce MPAA ratings, the MPAA is also under no obligation to allow theaters to show its movies. Neither must the MPAA subject its rating decisions to any oversight or even to any external scrutiny, lending its board of directors significant private power in deciding which films are shown to wide audiences and which will gather dust because of their warning labels.
Perhaps this power wouldn’t pose the tyranny that it currently does if the MPAA possessed an open adjudication process for its ratings system. But that’s not the case. The MPAA’s internal procedure is almost as obscure as the NSA’s — and perhaps even more so, given that there’s much less political capital in trying to demand clarity from the MPAA. Up until this year, a totally anonymous panel of 10 reviewers, accompanied by a varying number of members on the appeals board, composed the full set of individuals deemed qualified to determine the ratings of almost every film shown in American theaters.
The sheer obscurity of the process and the indecipherable reasons behind rating decisions impressed strongly upon Peirce. During the review process for her movie, she received edicts from the board to cut a number of specific scenes, including one of a female orgasm declared “too long.” In an interview for the 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” she wryly wondered: “I do all these terrible things to Brandon [her main character] — I shoot him in the head, there’s all this violence — and that’s fundamentally okay…Since when has an orgasm that was too long hurt anybody?” Peirce believes that the board is not just wrong on the distinction it draws between violence and sex, but also discriminatory in rating obscenity of sexual material, giving harsher ratings to nonheterosexual or female-focused sexual experiences and generally applying its policies inconsistently across films with content that doesn’t match traditional expectations. Indeed, there is evidence that is difficult to reconcile with claims of consistently applied standards: While movies like “American Pie” receive R ratings for explicit sexual content that essentially lasts the length of the movie, films like “But I’m a Cheerleader,” a movie about a lesbian sent to a gender-correction facility, receive NC-17 ratings for their homosexual spin on similar themes. But even these are among the better outcomes for filmmakers — oftentimes, the board delivers sweeping indictments based upon “thematic content” and “harmful themes,” leaving the film almost impossible to edit to the MPAA’s standards. Facing such judgments, filmmakers find that removing the offensive parts of a film has become far more difficult and often confront the choice of appeasing the MPAA or maintaining artistic integrity.
The MPAA’s strongest claim to legitimacy — that it assigns movie ratings for the benefit of American parents — remains doubtful. In “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” a filmmaker hires private detectives to track down the identities of the MPAA film review board and finds that the board is not necessarily representative of American parents. Many review board members have children of college age or older, but some have never had children. On top of this, the MPAA has never released any of the internal studies it uses to claim authority in discerning the preferences of parents, raising serious questions about their methods.
The steps that the MPAA has taken to improve its rating system are of scant comfort. Upon the release of “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” the MPAA announced that it would release the identities of its top three panelists online, limit hiring to panelists who fit the profile of the average American parent and clarify the standards for ratings. The MPAA has also agreed to allow producers to bring up examples of other movies during appeals, though it has tempered this concession with the note that the MPAA can give no guarantee that comparisons can help the producer, since its decisions are based on the context within the movie itself.
However, these improvements still don’t change the perverse structural incentives behind votes on ratings. First and foremost, simply being a parent and living in Los Angeles ought not to be the primary qualifications for deciding the fates of thousands of films in the United States. Beyond its flagrant lack of diversity, the panel remains unaccountable for explaining why an aspect of a movie is unacceptable. But the most important harm is that there’s no overarching incentive for the panel to negotiate with individual movie directors, even those who work for large studios — the panel has all the leverage, no oversight and the final say. A realistic appraisal of the situation makes two things clear: The MPAA will never voluntarily relinquish its power, and heavy-handed policy restricting their actions would be more or less infeasible. The MPAA is a trade organization with enormous influence and financial resources. There’s very little will amongst the powerful to ban it or abolish its existing structures, including the ratings system.
Still, it’s unclear whether the MPAA is even necessary, given that audiences can largely self-regulate. General audiences do not have the most nuanced and sophisticated tastes, but this is not because of individual poor taste — individuals tend to hold specific and complex pleasures, but they are more likely to share primal preferences, like sex and violence, with the masses. And even if large audiences ultimately reject films about personal expression and experiences outside of the brutal and the banal, they are free to do so. This doesn’t justify an external body imposing its own will on the industry. The marketplace of ideas will continue to determine which movies succeed and which get stabbed behind the shower curtain. But whatever the true preferences of audiences might be, it does not appear that large groups must or do hold their preferences in line with the MPAA system.
It’s important to note that while the MPAA makes the ultimate determinations on American films, other film industries face different standards and systems. Largely the opposite of their US counterparts, European films tend towards leniency on sexual content while cracking down harder on cinematic violence. Many Europeans are surprised by the US movie industry’s alacrity to display violence coupled with its puritanical crackdown on sex, demonstrating how social and cultural standards have become essential components of deciding what content is valid to display and what content is taboo.
All this underscores the reality that MPAA ratings hold little to no inherent value. It is unthinkable that parents particularly concerned with the entertainment material their children might see could get all the information they needed from a few letters and a few more cryptic phrases. Furthermore, in the age of such open and readily available information, it seems dubious that the majority of parents who can afford to take their children to the movies are unable to find a synopsis or review online — that they can’t determine suitability for themselves. Yet the movie industry continues to grant enormous power to the whims and sensibilities of a select few to make decisions that calcify a set of ideals that do not represent the interests their audiences actually hold. Perhaps the MPAA’s regulations seem like something out of a slasher film, but frankly, my dear, moviegoers shouldn’t give a damn.
Art by Kristine Mar.