THE MOTION PICTURE RATING SYSTEM: SELF-CENSORSHIP?
Ever since the 1960s, when the Motion Picture Association of America under director Jack Valenti first established the system of labeling movies according to age and suitability for specific audiences, filmmakers and critics alike have criticized the rating system as ineffective, inaccurate and often meaningless. The MPAA's Classification and Rating System was initially restricted to a four-tier system of G (general audience, suitable for children); PG (parental guidance for children suggested); R (restricted to adults, usually defined as anyone over 18); and X (explicitly and graphically sexual in a manner likely to offend those opposed to pornography). The problem lay mostly with the X rating, which came to be outdated with the introduction of increasingly graphic sex scenes in otherwise mainstream, non-pornographic movies. Directors and producers complained that studios and backers were reluctant to finance film projects likely to earn an X rating for perhaps a single explicit sex scene, and argued that their scripts were in effect being "self-censored" by the inability (or unwillingness) of most filmmakers to forego financial backing and wide distribution for the sake of artistic freedom.
If the MPAA had left the X-rating system intact and simply permitted "experimental" filmmakers to forego a rating if they wished, the entire matter of film censorship and X-rating might well have been left dormant. Other critics have attacked the new rating system for the opposite reason, claiming that in fact the NC-17 label "removes restraints on filmmakers" by legitimizing graphic sex and violence (Wall, 1990: 891). By the 1970s, however, the mildly pornographic displays of pubic hair, feigned intercourse and dirty language that made I Am Curious, Yellow so shocking to art movie house audiences in the 1960s became commonplace in more widely-distributed films, works which were clearly intended for mass consumption. The prospect of a return to the state censorship boards of thirty-five years ago is now looming large on the nation's movie screens. The social and economic stigma imposed by the X rating for graphic films led some filmmakers to push for the overthrow of the X-rating system, but in an increasingly conservative social and judicial climate, the MPAA felt obliged to respect the publicly-expressed demands for some form of rating of extremely graphic films. Indeed, one of the films that provoked the switch to the NC-17 system, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, was freely distributed to about 90 theaters in urban areas in the U. Nothing has changed in the highly literal interpretation of film sexuality as indecent, filmmakers argue, and the most graphic scenes of violence, dismemberment, and torture are deemed acceptable by a system that frowns upon the mere naked human body and the simplest four-letter word. without a rating after "Miramax Films, the distributor, simply rejected the X and released its film 'unrated'" ("X, Y or Z," 1990: 87). Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1973) provoked scandal largely by showing Marlon Brando's bare backside, and visually suggesting rape and sodomy as sexual pleasures. In the 1920s, following the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal and the death of matinee idol Wallace Reid from a drug overdose, threats of censorship from Congress and religious leaders led the film industry in Hollywood to form the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a precursor to the MPAA, in 1922. Director Kaufman saluted the new rating system, commenting that "there should be freedom to make the film you want," thereby implying that the NC-17 rating had given him this freedom ("The Debut of NC-17," 1990: 18). The problem is what an X rating implies to the public. By stirring up a controversy centered around a few foreign-made or "art-house" films such as Henry and June and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, the industry has focused renewed attention on the larger issue of local censorship, local obscenity laws, and (worst of all) local ratings boards. Such laws have generally not been applied to motion pictures since the groundbreaking distribution of the Swedish film I Am Curious, Yellow, a mildly erotic film of the 1960s which is strikingly tame by today's standards.
Common topics in this essay:
Tie Tie,
York Times,
Marlon Brando's,
Henry June,
Curious Yellow,
Rating System,
Mast Movies,
Hays Office,
Catholic Church,
X-rating York,
rating system,
nc-17 rating,
adult films,
movie houses,
henry june,
obscenity laws,
motion pictures,
hays office,
x-rating system,
1990 87,
adult films serious,
films serious nature,
local obscenity laws,
applied motion pictures,
rating system appears,
|
Acceptance Essays
