DISQUS

V · 2 years ago

The rating system only prevents 16-year-olds from buying tickets to an R rated movie. I say 16 because anyone younger needs a ride to the theater anyway.

With that in mind, what 16-year-old isn't resourceful enough to get into an R-rated movie anyway?

Essentially then, if some theaters (doesn't even have to be a majority) started picking up NC-17 movies, there'd be no problem at all. It might even be a way for small theaters to compete with big chains.

Eric · 2 years ago

I think you're being a little disingenuous here. You present it as a choice between "private ratings" and "government censorship" - but why do we need either?

As you point out, there are innumerable other sources of ratings, as well as movie reviews, movie news, etc. I don't think anyone can really argue that there isn't enough information about movies out there that a five-tiered letter rating is useful. So if it simply disappeared... would anyone really miss it?

In either case though, the only real issue in my mind is that movie theaters are often contractually barred from showing NC-17 movies, and thus there's a chilling effect on movie producers - an NC-17 film just isn't commercially viable. Get rid of that rule, and let producers and theaters show whatever's commercially viable, irrespective of the rating.

Adam Thierer · 2 years ago

Eric.. I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, it's not. If there was no official industry ratings system, there would be enormous pressure put on the industry and film makers by government officials at the federal, state and local level. There would be efforts to directly censor, of course, but equally problematic would be all the indirect pressure those officials would put on the movie industry.

Of course, one could argue that the industry could have just fought off such regulatory attempts by taking the government to court and mounting a First Amendment-based defense. I thought Kirby Dirk might raise this point in his film, but he did not. It's an interesting question to debate, but even if the industry could have won those cases, I think there were other good reasons for them to have a private ratings system. Specifically, you also asked if anyone would miss the system if it disappeared. Yes, I think many would, especially parents. Keep in mind, an industry's official ratings system is important because it rates ALL the movies that the industry releases, not just the most popular ones. As great as some of those independent sites I listed above are, they don't rate everything. Moreover, there is no guarantee that those independent sites will be in business forever. And the movie's official ratings system establishes a sort of baseline for all other ratings systems. The public, and parents in particular, can use it as a rough proxy for whether or not it's OK for their kids.

Video Gamer · 2 years ago

Looks good! Rated or not

Eric · 2 years ago

Well, I'll grant that as a pragmatic matter censorship is a real possibility - I'd just love to live in a world where it wasn't. It's sad that we have to worry about it in a country that explicitly protects free speech. The fact that the movie industry feels it needs a ratings system to avoid government censorship is pretty troubling in its own right.

On the ratings itself, I just think that there's enough *other* information about movies out there that the 5 tier rating system is pretty marginalized in terms of utility. It might have been necessary in the 60's given the relative sparsity of information out there. But today, there are untold numbers of professional movie reviewers and bloggers that cover movies. We have entire newsprograms dedicated to entertainment news and movie reviews. Newspapers features a movie section. Movie trailers are available online and on TV. We have IMDB. And Google pretty much puts anything else you could possibly want to know about a movie at your fingertips. What's an "R" rating according to that?

Try as I might, I just can't construct a scenario where those ratings are useful. You'd have to assume that some family managed to make it to a movie theater, knowing *nothing* about any of the movies playing, and deciding to take their kids based entirely on a movie having a "G" rating. Which seems kind of ridiculous to me.

For a more plausible scenario, I know that there are a bunch of "Christian movie" sites out there that rate and rank new releases based upon Christian evangelical values. I would imagine that the authority of those sites weighs a lot more heavily on an evangelical than the MPAA rating. And even if that site that family uses for reference doesn't review every single movie, so what? I'm sure it more than suffices for that family's purposes.

Meanwhile, someone like me pretty much ignores the ratings altogether anyway and sees movies based on buzz without worrying about their content - I just want to know if it's good or not, and MPAA ratings don't tell me that.

Were I a parent, the MPAA ratings wouldn't even serve as a "rough proxy" for me, because they're so ludicrously skewed towards the aforementioned conservative christian values anyway. Your typical "G" rated movie is jam packed with violence and consumerism, and a host of other things I'd rather not have my kids exposed to. I could care less if my kid hears "dirty words". So the utility of those ratings to me? Still pretty much nill.

Which highlights the real error with "one ratings system to rule them all" - it presumes a common set of values which just doesn't exist. Eliminating that and letting multiple independent bodies come to fill the vacuum would cure it. The conservative christians can have their own raters and I can have mine, and meanwhile the free market is the thing deciding what goes into movies and what gets shown.