#15 This Film Is Not Yet Rated

There's just something in me that giggles in anarchic glee when information about people in high hidden places get some secrets revealed. I mean my first thought about the whole Wikileaks thing, was YES! this is what the 80-90s hacker movies have promised me. Who could have known that the soundtrack to top secret leaking would be Lady Gaga instead of Prodigy? I know it's juvenile, I know it's a tendency of a culture that lets our judgments about people's tawdry side get in our way of being able to judge their fitness or non-fitness for public office. And we have paid for it. But I'm not saying I don't still giggle about it.

You can definitely tell that the director Kirby Dick feels the same way while tailing possible MPAA raters with his hired private-eyes. It is written all across his face "oh my god, I'm tailing a car, with a private detective, with a lesbian private detective, oh my god, my life is so cool."

In all fairness, who could feel differently?

I feel like it's all summed up with a simple fact. Jack Valenti doesn't want child behavior specialists on the board. Not, like that he doesn't exclusively want child behavior specialists, he doesn't want them at all. He just wants regular folks with kids. He doesn't want people who have done studies on children's reactions to what they see in the media, and can argue their points based on studies they have read, or tendencies they have observed in more than a few instances. Just people who have at one point (most of the raters they found had children long grown out of the 13-17 range) had children and knew what they personally wouldn't have felt comfortable with them seeing.

And their decisions are sometimes a little on the suspect side, letting major studios get away with more than independents, and no wonder, the agreement creating it was designed by all the major studios of the time, and the appeals board is staffed heavily by those from major studios, plus a few clergy members, and most pointedly, in the area of what sort of violence is allowed to be shown, and what sort of sex is allowed to be shown.

I wonder if this reflects America's confusion on this idea, or if it perpetuates it.

On one occasion, when I was working at a movie theater, a mother comes up to the window with her about three of her early teenage-years looking kids, the oldest probably 15. The movie in question? Freddy vs. Jason. Fuck, I don't care if she buys the tickets for her kids and goes in with them or sneaks down the hall to see Legally Blonde 2. She's buying a ticket too, I don't get in trouble for selling to underage kids, and I'm not about to pretend I'm not grateful to clerks who let me into see such 90s cinematic gems as Scream 3 and Urban Legend. But before she surrendered her kids to a fate no worse than them spending the afternoon on HBO and porn sites, she just had one question for me.

Does this movie have nudity?

First off, does this slasher flick have nudity? I think the real question would be how many people die while naked? Is it like just the one topless chick, just one couple that was screwing while surprised by Freddy or Jason, or do the villains wreck more than one date night?

But other than that, I was a little dumbstruck that it concerned her more that her teenage kids might see some B-movie star's rack and feel a little randy, than that they could see some hideous decapitations and bisections that would give them nightmares. Good thing I didn't tell her there was lots of pot humor. Then she'd have been real pissed.

I believe my response was "Nudity? You want to know if it has nudity? Ummm, probably, I'm not sure, think they're too busy with the murder." Sure I let 'em in. Sure I went to see it myself a couple of weeks later and hooted and hollered at the pure ridiculousness of it all.

I'm definitely not saying I don't enjoy some entirely unrealistic Freddy Krueger style violence as much as the next chick, but this sort of double standard isn't exactly encouraging.

The dichotomy is pretty undeniable in one instance that the Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce pointed out from her struggle to get rid of the NC-17 slapped on her movie. The MPAA board had no problem with the lead ending up getting graphically shot through the head after being beaten and raped but objected to Chloe Sevigny's having an orgasm from oral sex that was "too long." The director sighs in exasperation "I mean, no one's ever died from having an orgasm that went on too long."

For whatever reason, what makes them uncomfortable are things that happen in real life, being shown in a way that approximates reality, while not necessarily being played for laughs. Ladies seeking sexual pleasure? Good god, no! People talking frankly about sex? Men and women? Oh my.

But they have little problem with you seeing things that don't happen that way in real life. After all, shoot dozens of faceless henchman near-bloodlessly in a Bond movie, you get a PG-13 (although, as wikipedia pointed out they had to cut Halle Berry moaning in a sex scene first) , show graphic war carnage in Saving Private Ryan, you get an R. It's kind of weird that people are more okay with little-consequence violence being shown to kids than the gory kind. But shit, I ain't gonna pretend I didn't watch every second of R rated movie that I could between the years of 12 and 17, and I still think it comes down to the individual kid being able or not able to recognize the difference between fantasy and reality. But the kinds of people who have those kinds of double standards, probably raising some kids with some issues anyway.