Kyle Anderson-This Film is Not Yet Rated
Cieply mentions in the article “The Ratings System: Built to Endure” that “it was Mr. Valenti’s genius to have devised an apparatus that is not bound by precedent, changes its definitions at will and, ultimately, serves the motion picture industry by becoming, at any given moment, as permissive or restrictive as the prevailing climate seems to demand.” This governing body can, at will, decide the ultimate fate of movies by filtering what the public can see, without any outside influences or input from the public. As Cieply points out, the board says its dozen or so raters, all parents, are expected to judge films according to “factors that parents consider when deciding whether to allow their children to view that motion picture.” The irony that the film reveals, however, is that many ratings board members either have children 18 and over or have no children at all. In fact, many board's raters receive no training and are deliberately chosen because of their lack of expertise in media literacy or child development. The genius of the system is that these vaguely defined guidelines, or “moving goalposts”, basically let the board do whatever it pleases in assigning ratings. Because of what Cieply calls “muddled or moving boundaries”, film-makers face an uphill battle from the start, and those that try to go against the machine are crushed.