Matt Hobbs- Film is not yet Rated
Matt Hobbs
Weekly Blog #15
Franklin, when he states that there exists, “some fairly well-established guidelines to the assignment of ratings, [and thus] film makers can now predict with a fair amount of certainty what their films’ ratings will be…” (153), is both (generally) correct in this statement and misleading. We see this exemplified perfectly in the film when we examine the interviews with the directors.
On the one hand you have directors like Matt Stone (and Trey Parker), who filmed a scene they knew would be censored and so sent it off with an over exaggerated scene so it could be condensed down re-edited. This is often sued in Hollywood cinema right now, especially as it concerns Hollywood horror films. Every Saw film has been re-edited from an NC-17 cut, which if you watch the director commentaries they tell you that they knew it would occur. The director of American Psycho also comments that she expected problems with the MPAA over specific scenes in that film. However there is a flip side we see in the interviews with the directors. The director of the film Boys Don’t Cry expressed extreme shock and disappointment over the rating that film received, due to the fact that in our current industry, a rating of NC-17 is considered the ‘kiss of death’ to a film.
This is the problem with that statement from Franklin. While it is, to an extent true, it can be obvious when a director is crossing a line, it doesn’t define that line very well at all. When Jack Valenti states, “I don’t think parents are going to fret because they can’t see a sex orgy” (This film has not yet been Rated) we see the entire extent of the problem with the MPAA rating; there is no context for the ratings that are given. Is Valenti commenting that in every case an orgy is inappropriate and any person engaged in one is a deviant miscreant? Does he also mean to say that photographing an orgy, not only has no lace in cinema, but that there is no context for any cinematic meaning behind an orgy.
The entire problem with the rating system of the MPAA, and Franklin’s comment, is that the fundamental ideas behind the reason it was established and the actualities of what is going on has an incredible disconnect. It’s easy to say that this is done for the typical American parent, but then as David Ansen points out, “what is this mythical American parent” (This film has not yet been Rated). At that point we have to ask ourselves, who is this real American parent and what is the actual target goal of the MPAA?