[Part 2 in a brief series about movie content and ratings. Links to earlier posts: Part 1]

The movie rating system has taken a lot of abuse over the years, most of it deserved.  However, it’s worthwhile to try to look at the current movie rating system objectively—considering both the pro’s and con’s—and see what the alternatives are, if any.

The Bad:

1. They are arbitrary and subjective:  how do you define an “R” level of violence, versus a “PG-13” level?  What’s the difference between “stylized action violence”, or “sci-fi violence” versus, you know, plain old “violence”?  It’s all arbitrary—entirely dependent on the personal opinions of the select group of people who happen to decide ratings. 
2. They are subject to outside influences  (i.e. major directors and studios get more ‘favorable’ ratings than independent movies)
3. They are too broad and unspecific.
4. They aren’t consistent across local cultures (i.e. internationally, where European “PG” movies can contain sex and nudity, since that’s what their culture accepts)  Unless you have a fairly deep understanding of the culture of the country from which the film came, you have even less of an idea what the film contains based on its rating than you do with US films.

#3 is the primary problem in my mind with the current rating system.  With only a few select ratings to choose from for each film, each rating ends up covering a wide variety of ‘content’, which doesn’t allow viewers to make distinctions between various sub-categories of specific content that they might care about (unless they see the film first to know specifically what it contains…and then, of course, it’s too late)

For example, a movie may contain an “R-rated” amount of violence (however that’s defined) but nothing else, and receive the same R rating as a movie that contains the same amount of violence, plus an “R-rated” amount of profanity and nudity, despite the content of the second movie ostensibly being three times as bad as the first.  The rating system seems to presume that every adult movie viewer has exactly the same attitude towards profanity, sex, and violence individually—that if R-rated levels of one category are acceptable to that viewer, the rest are, too.  If you happened to care about one category more than the other, you’re out of luck, because the rating system makes no distinction between them.

(Ironically, this only encourages filmmakers to add more “R-rated” content to their movie, since obviously if they know they’re getting an R for violence already, why NOT add a lot of profanity and nudity as well?  The rating is going to be the same, either way…)

In recent years, the MPAA has starting adding descriptive tag lines in addition to the ratings to better describe the content.  (“Rated PG-13 for crude humor, sensuality, and frightening images”)  This is a positive step, but still not that helpful.  If you see a movie rated R for “strong language, gore, and sexuality”—is the R rating due to the language, gore, or the sex?  It may have only a minor level of gore and sexuality, but the 20 F-words are what put it into the R-rating level.   It’d be nice if you knew the comparative levels of each attribute mentioned in the listing, but you have no way of knowing that from the listing itself, which lumps all characteristics together into one common rating.

Compounding the issue is the recent push to get ‘drug use’—specifically cigarette smoking—included more heavily in the rating process, with some groups even pushing for any movie with cigarette smoking to automatically get an R-rating.

That’s a terrible idea that, if it happens, would only serve to torpedo the rating system’s credibility and usefulness even further.  There’s no question that portraying smoking as ‘cool’ may have the same psychological effect on younger viewers as the traditional PSV material might, as far as influencing human behavior.   However, it’s not likely that the majority of adults care about on-screen depictions of smoking to the same extent that they would care about profanity, violence, and nudity.

Adding in one more element to the generic rating system only exacerbates the problem of discerning true content from the rating—imagine making the previously PG-rated “Casablanca” R after the fact simply because of smoking content.  Is that really equivalent to any of the R-rated gore-fests of today in the minds of modern audiences?   And yet, the ratings would be the same: a new movie viewer coming of age unfamiliar with the history of older movies would have no guidance from the rating system as to how to discern between them.

What’s Good:

What’s the positive about the current ratings system?  Let’s do a thought experiment:

Suppose you’re in a video store and browsing DVDs and see the following movie titles, all of which you know nothing about:

• Kids
• Kids in the Hall
• Spy Kids
• Swing Kids
• Kids in America
• The New Kids
• The Kids Who Saved Summer

Similar in title, but not similar in content.   As it happens, one of these movies is rated G, one is PG, two are PG-13, two are R, and one is NC-17.  (Quick quiz: can YOU match the movie with the rating?)

Without the ratings, though, you don’t have much to go on other than what you can glean from the box.

Most ratings controversies deal with borderline cases: whether a movie is a high-end PG-13 or a low-end R, etc…  What’s not controversial is that there is a huge difference between a PG movie and an NC-17 movie no matter who you ask.   If you were perusing the above movies, wouldn’t you like to know at the very least which ones are not…you know, ‘kids’ movies?

The rating system may be over-broad with only five categories to cover all films, but those five categories still provide information.  And more information is *always* good.  Just knowing the ratings (broad and arbitrary as they are) will still help you filter out 3-4 titles from the list that you know you have no interest in renting.

The movie rating system (and recently the video game rating system, too) comes under fire a lot…but of course that’s partially because it simply exists in the first place.  You’ll never hear about ‘rating controversies’ regarding books, because books have no ratings at all!  That doesn’t mean, of course, there aren’t the equivalent of PG-rated and NC-17 rated books out there, but without reading them first how would you know?  Regardless of the complaints one can make against the movie rating system, it at the very least provides some basic information about movie content, which is more than can be said about books, plays, comedy clubs, and many other forms of entertainment where discerning viewers are pretty much completely on their own to guess at what's 'appropriate' and what isn't.

More information about content is always better, and we should appreciate even the basic assistance at allowing viewers to choose what they see.

(We should note, also, that the whole purpose of organizing the MPAA was to try to standardize the ratings system, forestalling the creation of many different local rating systems by region, which would have been even more inconsistent from place to place.)

The solution:

If the primary problem with the current rating system is it is too broad and unspecific, then the simple solution is to narrow it down into different categories.

Many parental watch websites take the rating system a step further and classify the specific content into different categories.  Kids-In-Mind, for example, rates every film from 0-10 in each of the traditional PSV categories.  This allows viewers to clearly see the difference between “Whale Rider” (3-3-4) and “The Love Guru” (5-7-4) despite having the same PG-13 rating.  And viewers who care more about violence than sex and nudity have a means of analyzing content by specific categories rather than guessing based on a generic letter rating.

Something similar to this could easily be adaptable to a national system—add in a fourth number for ‘drug use’, classify each film on a 5 or 10 point scale and just include that value in the normal rating box in any advertisement.  (“The Dark Knight” rated PG-13 [3-2-7-3]--opening July 18th")   Instead of merely five categories, using a ten point system allows almost 15,000 distinct ‘ratings’ for films, an exponential improvement for information given to potential viewers.

Would this be arbitrary and subjective, still?  Of course…  Someone is still going to have to decide what’s a “4” in violence and what’s a “6”.  And, of course, there will still be related arguments about "context" and why this movie received X when it is *clearly* better than that movie which received a Y.

But any ratings system will be arbitrary and subjective—there’s no getting around that.  At the very least, this system provides more information about general levels of “objectionable” material, allowing viewers to make more informed choices.

Next:  Are violence and sex treated differently in movies?  Should they be?