Rest easy, America. The MPAA is on the job, keeping on the lookout for any cinematic preversions* and branding them as such. Why, just this week, they prevented yet another evil sex movie from getting the opportunity to prevert your children's minds. What film, you ask?
Why, Ang "Gay Cowboy movie" Lee's latest film, entitled
Lust, Caution. You might have heard your 9-year-old talking about it for months now, begging you to take them to see it. And it's understandable. I mean, a movie set in Shanghai during World War II, entirely in Mandarin AND WITH SUBTITLES?! Is it even possible for them to try to draw the kids in any more than they already have?
But what the
action-packed trailer doesn't tell you is that the movie has lots and lots of sex in it. I'm not talking about regular man-on-woman sex. I'm talking about man-on-woman preverted sex! Like in positions much different from (and more acrobatic than) the one you were in when you conceived your little darlings. If not for the steadfast vigilance of the Motion Picture Association of America, your children might have been exposed to this preversion, thus dooming them to a lifetime of sexual deviance and venereal disease!
I've always known this but every time it happens, I get a smack-in-the-face reminder of just how absurd the MPAA is. Kids who sneak into R-rated movies can just as easily sneak into NC-17 movies. But this is a moot point because most kids have zero desire to see movies that end up getting NC-17 ratings. Showgirls and Orgazmo are quite possibly the ONLY exceptions to this. I was in the eighth grade when Henry & June, the first NC-17, came out in 1990. I don't remember anyone wanting to sneak in to see that. No one in my junior high school was plotting out how to get in to see The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. It just didn't happen. We were more concerned with seeing Die Hard 2 or the latest Nightmare on Elm Street, both of which had the more kid-friendly R-rating.
So if the content of the average NC-17 film isn't appealing to the average under-17-year-old, then what purpose does the rating serve?
Two, and neither one justifies its existence.
The first is pretty simple: it exists in order to keep the R-rating in check. If a movie gets more complicated to explain than a health class sex-ed video, the MPAA can threaten to give it an NC-17 rating, which will limit its audience and keep it from making as much money as it could with an R-rating. So the producers usually take it back and cut the offending material (which could require entire scenes or just six frames of film, depending) and they get an R-rating. Everybody's happy. But why should it matter if it's R or NC-17 if kids aren't supposed to go to see it either way? Well, that brings me to my next point.
The other reason the NC-17 exists is, plain and simple, bad parenting. I have witnessed couples wheeling strollers into a theatre showing Kill Bill Vol. 1 at a 12:30am showing, as well as toddlers given free reign to run up and down the aisles during Apocalypse Now Redux (yes, the 3 1/2 hour long version!). What asshole parents do that? More importantly, how is this allowed to happen? Obviously, it's all financial. Kids over the age of 2 require a child admission in most theatres. And many parents won't go anywhere without their children. So rather than common sense prevailing, the theatres will do whatever they can to make sure that they don't lose any more business than they already have and allow children into R-rated movies with their parents.
I might not be the person I am today had this rule been implemented when I was a kid, but I am of the opinion that children under the age of three have NO business in a movie theatre at all and children under the age of 10 have no business accompanying their parents to an R-rated movie; this is less for the children's sake than for the sake of the other people in the audiences. Screaming, fussy children are the last thing I want to hear in a movie theatre and distractions like that are a major reason people don't go to the movies as often as they used to.
So it's fairly obvious that, as long as children are allowed admission to R-rated movies, parents can save money on babysitters and subject their kids to as much sex and violence as the MPAA will allow them to. So the NC-17 keeps the dumbass parents from selfishly dragging their kids to see something that might require more than a one-sentence answer to the question, "Why?"
Only, in most cases, what passes with an R-rating these days is still too much for kids to handle. The torture porn that, thankfully, is on the way out manages to get an R-rating despite not only the graphic violence but peppering it with sex. I'm not going to imply that this tacitly gives kids the OK to hurt other people because I don't believe that, but I do think that it says something about this country in terms of how it handles weighty subjects. Sex is almost an unimaginable concept in cinema if the sex in question has any emotional weight to it (a notable exception to this is Brokeback Mountain, also by Ang Lee, which I still believe to have gotten out with an R-rating only to make the usually homophobic MPAA look less so... Almodovar's Bad Education got an NC-17 despite being about as graphic as Brokeback). Emotional investment is punished but superficial, visceral thrills are championed.
What I'm saying here is not new but it just brings up the point again that the MPAA has their head up their ass. The system needs to be revised. The NC-17 is nothing more than a censorship tool, which only small films with an already limited audience are impervious to. Either content is appropriate for kids to see or it's not. If it is, then what does the degree matter? If it's not, then why let them see it at all?
I applaud Ang Lee for swinging his Oscar-gilded balls around and refusing to edit Lust, Caution (one of the films I'm most excited to see this fall) to avoid a rating that will have no bearing whatsoever on the film's success in the United States. It's always nice to see someone trust that there are intelligent, mature adults - the only audience something like this ever intend to have - that will find their way to a movie theatre to see their film.
And they don't need a restriction to know to leave their kids at home.
* - Yes, preversions.