[Part 5 in a brief series about movie content and ratings. Links to earlier posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4]

Editing movies for content has been a controversial idea from the beginning.

The principle behind edited movies is fairly obvious and sound: most movies don’t really need the PSV content they contain to be effective as a story or as an art form.   In many cases, the PSV material is unnecessary, tangential, and often completely superfluous—the movie experience for most films doesn’t change that drastically with the adult material removed. 

(Profanity is often excused as ‘that’s how people talk…’  That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, though—people use profanity in part because they’re constantly exposed to movies where ‘that’s how people talk…’)

When you get down to it, how much of the PSV content in any movie today is really necessary either for plot, tone, or mood?  Thus, why NOT remove it and allow people to see the good stuff and avoid the bad?

[As an anecdote, a couple of years ago my wife and I watched the TV version of a movie that was originally R when released in theaters.  Afterwards, I got online as I usually do after watching a movie, and perused some of the reviews and online discussion, and found a large chunk of discussion revolved around the full nude scene of the lead actress.  This scene wasn’t in the TV version, of course, but as my wife and I discussed it afterwards, we couldn’t figure out for the life of us where that scene would have been in the movie we saw.  Depending on your point of view, that was either an excellent job of editing… or a spectacularly poor one.]

Editing movies is not a new thing—movies have been edited by third parties other than the original filmmakers for years, usually for TV and airplane broadcasts.  Nevertheless, when companies such as CleanFlix (based in Orem, Utah) started providing “cleansed” movies for interested parties as a legitimate business model, objections (and lawsuits) were raised.

There are two primary forms of creating edited movies:

• A company sells consumers a copied version of the original DVD, with ‘objectionable’ material edited out previously.   CleanFlix follows this model, and this method has been the primary catalyst of the adverse legal response from the movie studios and directors.
• A company sells a special DVD player with add-on filters that dynamically edit the DVD while it is playing.  In this case the DVD is the same, and can be played ‘unedited’ at any time.  As such, this method avoids virtually all the legal entanglements associated with the first method—after all, it’s essentially no different than fast-forwarding or skipping chapters on a DVD you already own—and looks likely to become the predominant format for edited movies in the future.  (See ClearPlay)

The fact that TV and airplane broadcasts are common and largely accepted by studios and directors inherently undercuts the complaints by those same studios and directors about CleanFlix-style companies “neutering” their films of content.   Nevertheless, legally defending the CleanFlix method has proven to be problematic (although ClearPlay-style editing appears to be in the clear).

Given that my wife (“The Baroness”) and I (a) like movies, (b) don’t watch R-rated movies, though, and (c) live in Utah, where opportunities to find edited movies are plentiful, one would think that we’d be prime targets to watch edited films on a regular basis.

Surprisingly, though, we never have.  Other than an occasional TV version, we’ve never rented, or purchased a ‘clean’ film.

Why?  That’s the tricky part—I expected, myself, once the technology became prevalent, that I would be a regular patron of the local companies that provide edited films, but each time the opportunity presents itself, I turn away.

There are still some concerns with edited movies—enough in my mind such that I’ve never seriously had the urge to become a regular consumer, despite believing in the general principle that most PSV content in movies is superfluous and unnecessary.  Let’s look at some of the issues:

Artistic purity:

As a movie purist, I kind of want to see what the writer and/or director originally intended, not some arbitrary subset of it determined by a third party.  If a movie happens to be dark, ugly, and violent, perhaps it should be seen in its full dark, ugly, and violent form…or not seen at all.  (There are plenty of other movie choices, after all)  This shares essentially the film directors’ primary objection to clean films in the first place.

In similar discussions, others have made the analogy that edited movies are comparable to a sanitized version of Playboy magazine with black bars painted across the ‘naughty’ parts, or perhaps pictureless altogether.  While ‘clean’, one would have to question what the point would be of creating such a magazine in the first place.  If you’re reading Playboy, your purpose is to see nudity.  If your purpose is NOT to see nudity, you wouldn’t be reading a ‘clean’ version of Playboy anyway--you’d just find another magazine. 

Likewise, if the goal is to avoid nudity or violence in movies, why spend the effort to clean the ones with nudity and violence to begin with, versus seeking out other movies without the problematic material in the first place that are just as good as the first group.

Supporting the ‘enemy’:

Buying an R-rated DVD, or buying an edited DVD from someone who had to buy an R-rated DVD in the first place in order to edit it and sell it to you, looks the same on the movie studios’ gross income reports.  If the intent is to financially encourage movie studios to create cleaner films through consumer pressure, being a patron of edited films doesn’t really work.

Like that edited version of Playboy, you may feel morally superior for finding a way to get some value out of a product without wading through the ‘smut’…but you still end up being one of many financial supporters of that ‘smut’ in the long run, right?  In that aspect, edited films may actually be counter-productive…

The appearance of evil:

Say a high council speaker came to your ward and spoke on the topic of avoiding debt.  In the middle, he says, “An article in last month’s Playboy magazine discussed some statistics about worsening economic trends…”  Would the ward members be a little surprised?

Perhaps in his mind he’s thinking, “Of course, I only read the edited version of Playboy.  If anyone in the congregation is thinking otherwise without taking the time to find out the truth, that’s *their* problem…”

Does he have that luxury, though?   Do any of us have the luxury of controlling exactly how other people react to things we do and say?  Wouldn’t that speaker be running a great risk of losing credibility amongst a fair number of people in the congregation, despite it being ‘their fault’?   Wouldn’t the wiser path be to avoid potential stumbling blocks and misunderstandings by not presenting a situation where you have to hope people are giving you the benefit of the doubt?

The principle of ‘the appearance of evil’ gets mocked regularly in the online community, with a number of people seemingly of the opinion that one can take a can of Coors Light, dump it out into the sink, fill it with orange juice, and take it out in public without any consequences.  (“Hey, if anyone misunderstands without finding out the truth, that’s *their* fault…”)   Do you have that luxury?

Likewise, if you’re on a date and start casually quoting or referencing “Pulp Fiction” or “Sin City” do you have the luxury of assuming your date won’t assume you just revealed something about your standards in movies?

Short of speaking “defensively” all the time (“I was watching the TV-edited version of “Braveheart” the other day, and…”, “There was that scene in Goodfellas—it was the edited version with all the violence and profanity removed, by the way—where…”) which is just going to sound awkward and self-righteous anyway, it may be valuable to actually appear to have standards, if, in fact, you actually do have standards for movies.

Perhaps there is value in not trying to be ‘in’ the R-rated world, while not ‘of’ the R-rated world, if you’re among people who aren’t going to be able to tell the difference…

“Hey, they’re just movies…”

My wife and I are movie fans, but we keep things in perspective.  Movies are movies, they are not religion.  Not seeing any one movie really makes no difference in the end.  There are no movies that MUST be seen, even to the extent that you have to accept an edited form if you must.  We just go on to something else.

During my time at BYU and in Utah County, there have been two cultural ‘controversies’ regarding movies.  The second of the two, “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004, was discussed earlier.  The first was “The Matrix” in 1999.

Now, lots of BYU students watch R-rated movies:  in my highly informal and unscientific analysis, probably 75% of the guys I knew had seen “Braveheart”, and 75% of the girls had seen or owned “Pretty Woman”, even though most of them didn’t speak about it openly.  “The Matrix”, though, was the first movie that brought the R-rated issue right out into the forefront.  Because (1) It was said to be a ‘light’ R, and (2) it was the “IT” movie of the year, and you *had* to see it if you were anybody.

That was then…  Now, in 2008, if you didn’t happen to ever see “The Matrix” or either of the sequels, does it really matter?   No one cares.  What seems to be the “in” thing at the time will almost never matter in the long run.

A co-worker of mine doesn’t watch PG-13 movies, and so skipped the Lord of the Rings series in its entirety.  He may have felt out of place at the time, but now, just a few years later, does anyone care?   Does it make any difference at all in the quality of life he leads, versus those of us ‘unwashed heathen’ who did?

Is it impossible to have a true and strong testimony of the Atonement of Jesus Christ without seeing “The Passion…”?  Hardly…

Movies just aren’t that important, and skipping a movie that’s getting great reviews because it doesn’t meet your standards of content is not a big deal.  Another movie that's just as good is right around the corner.

In short, while I believe edited movies have a legal right to exist, I don’t believe they are strictly necessary for movie-goers who care about content.  And, their existence may be counter-productive if the intent was to encourage the creation of better films.

Next: Books vs. Movies -or- "If the Bible were a movie, it would be rated R..."