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Fuck Censorship: A Critical Analysis of the MPAA’s Death Grip on the Film Industry

Censorship. To some, it is a valid and important practice that protects society from exposure to immoral and inappropriate material. To others, the artists and those who love the arts, it’s simply a nuisance. The censorship that I am primarily focusing on is that of the MPAA. The MPAA is the Motion Picture Association of America and their task is to simply apply a rating (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) to a film. That is all. They are just supposed to place a letter and sometimes numbered indication of what the film will contain and brush their shoulders off and walk away.  In theory, it’s a useful system. There should be some sort of label or warning on films that advises of crude content. It’s a useful tool and guide for parents to know ahead of time what a film may contain content-wise. That is not the MPAA’s issue. The issue is that this group of people who are supposed to just assign labels is actually attacking films and forcing films to buckle under the weight of their mighty rating. Filmmakers are essentially being bullied into censorship.

The MPAA ratings board claims to consist of a group of normal, everyday parents that rate the films based on how they feel it would interact with established family and social values. This is presented so that parents feel a sense of trust and a connection with those rating the films their children will be viewing. The problem is that this group of parents actually aren’t the parental demographic that they appear to be. Instead, most all of them have children that are fully grown and most have grandchildren. This being known, it would seem that they would be more lax with films they rate but for some reason, this group feels it is their moral duty to stop certain films from being seen as they are meant to be seen. In his documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick explored and exposed many of the flaws that the MPAA’s system houses. He hired private investigators to gather some background on those who compose the MPAA board and discovered it to be rather difficult. The organization is extremely secretive with all of their information often times simply proclaiming, “We don’t’ give that information out” to many of the questions asked. It’s strange that this group is in charge of rating most of the films that we will see in our life yet, we aren’t allowed to know who they are or what their backgrounds are.

“It’s just all over the map and the reason is there [are] no written standards,” Dick says in an interview with About.com, “As far as we know, the number of thrusts is a rule. Whether the word fuck is used in a sexual context will put it into an R category. Generally, more than one fuck in a nonsexual context puts it into an R category, although a few films have got through on that one. But they count the fucks and they count thrusts. There’s a lot more to analyzing a film and getting information about it than just that.” That’s right. The MPAA counts the number of f-bombs and pelvic thrusts in films and those can make the film an automatic R regardless of content. Shouldn’t films be rated on deeper issues than the number of times one character humps the other?

Douglas M. Beaumont also discusses this topic in his book The Message Behind the Movie. He takes a stand from a Christian viewpoint and though I do not fully agree with a lot of what he says, he does make an interesting point regarding how films are being rated without the message of the work being taken into account. He details two films with film A being rated R due to the presence of profanity, nudity, and depictions of violence and film B being described as a “family friendly cartoon with no nudity, cursing, or violence” and with that illustration, the decision should be pretty clear about which one should receive the R rating but Beaumont, like Dick and myself, believes it should be deeper than that. He goes on to detail that though film A has these more graphic qualities, it promotes much more positive, historically accurate, and anti-racist views while film B doesn’t portray history accurately and teaches untraditional (aka anti-Christian) beliefs. He then reveals that the two films are the R rated Schindler’s List and the G rated Pocahontas (50-51). Though I do not particularly agree with his views that films should promote only Christian views, I do support that compelling and truthful storytelling should be more important in the rating system than the use of profanity or nudity.

Then there is the dreaded NC-17. When a film is given a rating of NC-17, it is practically a death sentence if the filmmaker/studio decides to keep that rating. It may not be universally known but mainstream theatres will not release films with such a rating and most stores will not carry the film on DVD. Also, most publications will not allow the film to be advertised if given an NC-17 rating. While I do not oppose films getting this rating, the MPAA seems to make it a point to “uphold moral tradition” with their ratings. In comes the sense of forced censorship. Filmmakers either fit their films to the MPAA’s strict standards or risk not having their films seen and marketed. A prime example of how wrong the MPAA actually is can be seen when comparing films that they have rated. The film Boys Don’t Cry is a dark and deep true story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered teen who desperately wanted to be a male. The film depicted a homosexual relationship and sexual interactions that were tastefully executed and not too graphic in presentation and simply due to the act being between females, it was slapped with an NC-17 and director Kimberly Peirce was forced to edit the film down to receive the R rating that would allow distribution and a mainstream theatrical run. In opposition, the film Sideways depicts a deadbeat who graphically has sex with a married woman and the MPAA saw nothing wrong with this and allowed the film to earn an R rating with no cuts. This one instance proves that the MPAA does have a bias. While some parents may agree with the bias, others will not and the MPAA should do their best to keep bias out of the equation and simply rate all films on the content equally.

As previously stated, the issue is not that the rating system exists. Films should have some sort of indication for parents as to what the content will contain. That kind of rating I find very useful and I can see it as a necessity. Now, if the MPAA did what they were supposed to do and simply awarded films with a rating and if they weren’t so integrated into the industry to where an NC-17 film was a death sentence, there would be no issue. Instead, they forcefully apply ratings that are often times undeserved and due to this, some filmmakers don’t even bother to submit their films to be rated because they know how harsh the MPAA is and can be. They instead opt to have their film released as “unrated” to avoid the sting of an NC-17. A recent example of this was when writer/director Adam Green released his much anticipated sequel to 2006’s Hatchet. Hatchet II was given the unwarranted NC-17 due to its extreme violence and gore. This is rather ludicrous. Green was interviewed by This Week in Movies and states that when the rating came back, he was shocked and rightfully so. He goes on to explain how the tone of Hatchet II is fun, silly, and over the top but simply due to the gore, was awarded the rating of death. I mean, when the audience sees a man get disemboweled and then choked by his own intestines or someone getting curb stomped on the side of a table so hard that the top half of his head flies to the other side or a nine foot long chainsaw, a fucking nine foot long chainsaw, going through two men at once, no one and I mean no one, is going to flip shit. Instead, they will exclaim, “Holy shit” while fighting back laughter. That’s the difference. The overall tone and intent of the filmmaker should greatly be taken into account.

Green, like myself, was confused about how “torture porn” films like Hostel, Saw, and Wolf Creek can take an intensely serious tone and display extremely realistic depictions of people being slowly killed and still be able to garner an R rating yet his over the top and purposely laughable gore earns an NC-17. He is not attacking those films with his statements; he is criticizing the MPAA’s inconsistent system.

So, in order fight for his artistic rights as a director, he got backing from the studio who released it (Dark Sky Films) and let the film go out unrated and managed to get it into the major theatre chain AMC but due to the pressures of the industry and the lack of films being released in this fashion, AMC pulled the film from all of its theatres after only a couple days. What is notable is that Hatchet I & II are horror films. The MPAA has always been rather hard on horror films and they especially need to loosen their grip on this genre. Fans know what they are going to see. The violence and gore is not supposed to be realistic in a lot of cases. That is why it is so over the top. It’s not meant to be a portrayal of real murders and murderers, it’s simply entertainment. The MPAA also pretty much stands alone on the content that they look down on. The MPAA puts a great weight on the portrayal of gore, sex and nudity and the use of language, pretty much guaranteeing an R or NC-17 rating for films with such content and they often times overlook violence. Violence without blood/gore, that is. A prime example of another film getting away with what critics often call the “hard R” is Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. Yes, there is an unrated version of the film but even the R rated, theatrical version is brutal, gritty, nasty, and bad natured.

Note: I greatly enjoy that film and Zombie’s other work. Just an example, folks.

Take for example the R rated Moon. This film had no suggestive material and simply used strong language a few times that was appropriate for the emotion of the scenes. The recently released True Grit earned a PG-13 rating yet it had several scenes of intense violence, one of which included a man having his fingers cut off on screen. It’s also notable that one of the protagonists is a man of authority who is an alcoholic and smokes often. This once again shows how the MPAA should craft a more efficient system when it comes to rating films so there won’t be any confusion for parents because where it currently stands, there definitely is. Just think about all the films that have had to deal with this twisted system. In Frank Miller’s Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, & Violence on Screen, he tells of how filmmaker Pedro Almodovar had issues with the MPAA over two scenes in his anticipated film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! “The actress’s sexual use of an automated bathtub toy and a lovemaking scene with the kidnapper” irked the MPAA and even when Almodovar presented them with scenes from other films that had received an R rating, the MPAA still refused to back down and the film remained as it was originally rated.

Forbidden Films by Dawn B. Sova lists two hundred and fifty films that have come under the looming stare of censorship and what I realized is that many of my favorite films have been subject to some form of hindering before its final release. Films like Boogie Nights, A Clockwork Orange, Kids, and Reservoir Dogs I can understand to some extent but going through the list and seeing Psycho, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Eraserhead on there is just preposterous. These three films have relatively no blood, no sex, little violence, and very little language. The MPAA is known for concentrating on those things so did these films just strike them the wrong way? Were the morally offensive to the raters at that time? The point being, no one knows and the system is flawed and is in dire need of a reboot.

See, even he's surprised!

To reiterate, in theory, the MPAA is an appropriate tool for parents to know of the content of a film before allowing their child to view it but the raters are often times causing films to censor themselves and that is not what the MPAA was created to do. Either they become what they claim to represent or I feel a new system should be enacted. The artists should be allowed to make art in any way they find fit without the pressures of the self appointed moral police breathing down their neck.