Ratings and Censorship by Rainer Isle
Daniel P. Franklin claims in his book Politics and Film, that “in the current environment, creative, thoughtful, and even subversive films can get made” (147). His argument supporting this revolves around the rating system put in place by the MPPDA (152). Franklin states that this rating system changed the way films were “filtered”. He explains that with the rating system, films are “no longer... be filtered for content”, but rather, audiences are “filtered for films” (152). Franklin seems to believe that because there is no industry-wide censorship, nor any government censorship, of movies, that the medium is free to be “creative, thoughtful, and even subversive”. Unfortunately this argument neglects the subtle form of censorship inherent in the rating system. This censorship can be seen in the difficulty of distribution and/or viewing for a film that is marred with a rating that excludes the films target audience.