From G to NC-17

It’s hard enough to put any kind of creative work before critics and audiences, but submitting to that kind of judgment is inescapable; it’s a fundamental aspect of the creative process. It’s something else again to answer to an anonymous board that is tasked with making entirely subjective judgments about the possible offense your work might provoke in parents and their children. Everyone who goes through the process finds it enraging and maddening–all the more so because the system is an act of self-regulation by the movie business and, therefore, supposedly voluntary.

In point of fact, it’s not in the least voluntary. Many theater chains will not book an unrated film, most newspapers and television stations will not run an ad for a film if it doesn’t feature a rating, and something like 40 percent of the nation’s DVD distributors won’t stock it. And should the film be rated NC-17 (formerly X), which restricts the audience entirely to adults 17 years of age and older, most of those same rules remain in effect.

A moviemaker named Kirby Dick has now made this immensely entertaining (if ideologically deranged) documentary about the ratings process. The movie has terrific vim and vigor, and an appropriately playful quality. (After all, these are movies we’re talking about here, not life and death.) Dick offers example after example of how the ratings board discriminates against smaller independent films by judging them harshly, and then offering moviemakers no guidance about how to recut their work to earn a more lenient rating–even as the board’s members will work directly with executives from major studios to help them make necessary edits.

Why, Dick and others wonder, is the board anonymous? Jack Valenti, the now retired über-lobbyist who devised the system and set up the ratings board, decided he would staff it with ordinary people and protect their identities to insulate them from pressure. But, Dick sensibly points out, major studio executives know who some of the raters are. Indeed, the major studios that fund the Motion Picture Association of America pay their salaries. So their anonymity is merely a convenience, a way of shielding the ratings process from any kind of scrutiny.

Dick decides he is going to lift the veil. He hires private detectives to skulk around MPAA headquarters in Encino to try to divine the names of the raters. After six months, Dick and the detectives hit pay dirt–and, in the process, discover that the MPAA says things about the process that are simply untrue. It claims all raters are parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17, but Dick discovers that at least three raters have children in their twenties and one doesn’t have children at all. The MPAA claims its raters serve for only seven years, but Dick reveals that at least one has served for nine.

Once a rating is delivered, a filmmaker has a right to appeal. The MPAA has never said that the appeals board is anonymous, as it is made up of industry executives. But he can’t get a straight answer out of the MPAA about who is on the board and how they vote. In addition, filmmakers seeking to appeal a rating are not allowed to make reference to any other film and its rating. If one does so, an MPAA lawyer interrupts and will not permit him to speak further. What we have here is a classic case of a bureaucracy gone berserk–a high-handed, arrogant, and insulated bureaucracy that plays favorites and bullies the less powerful.

Dick and some of the affected filmmakers try to offer grand theories about the ratings board and its preferences, and this is where This Film Is Not Yet Rated just becomes another preaching-to-the-converted piece of leftist claptrap. In this case, Dick combines neo-Marxist nonsense and queer-studies argle-bargle into a great notion about the concentration of power in the hands of a few conglomerates that (I think I have this straight) seem to be especially fearful of the revolutionary power and mystery of the female orgasm.

The key question Dick and others pose is this: Why is it that the board goes so easy on depictions of violence while viewing depictions of sexuality as something more liable to give offense and more in need of restrictive rating? This is something that has bedeviled Hollywood for decades, and no one on the board or at the MPAA has ever explained this double standard. I’m not sure the raters themselves even understand it, which is why there’s never been a satisfying defense.

Let me try one. When you see violence depicted onscreen, what you are seeing isn’t really happening. No one is punching another person. No one is shooting another person. The blood isn’t real. The guts aren’t real. There is no injury being inflicted. It’s a highly expensive version of a game being played by six-year-old boys in the backyard.

When you see people simulating sex on screen, you are seeing something very real, even though you are not seeing sex itself. When tongues touch, those tongues are actually touching. A man’s actual hand plays with a woman’s breast. A man’s body lies on top of a woman’s, or vice versa. This may all be for show, but it’s far more true to the actual experience of intimacy than any depiction of a punch is to an actual punch.

What’s exciting about seeing sexuality onscreen is also what can be disturbing about it. It’s actually a violation of the very idea of intimacy to watch two other people in intimate relation to each other. This is why, I think, the raters remain more likely to restrict the viewing of sexually graphic movies than they are to keep teenagers from seeing fantasy violence onscreen. And if I’m right, then this reticence should not be as quickly or easily dismissed as most critics of the ratings board dismiss it–no matter how ludicrous or corrupt the ratings system might be.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.