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Before letting their kids see a movie, there's one thing that almost every parent does: check the rating - that ubiquitous box on nearly every movie poster that gives parents at-a-glance data that generally categorizes films. The ratings, which are assigned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), have been the de facto classification and guidance for nearly half a century.
As a parent, it is important to know about film content. This, according to MPAA ratings head, Joan Graves, is the primary purpose of the ratings board. "The ratings system exists for one purpose: to inform parents about the content of films," she has said. Yet, when PG-13 films contain half a dictionary's worth of profanity, nudity, and more violence than R-rated movies of the past, can you actually make an informed decision from a simple MPAA rating about which films are acceptable for your child to see?
Over the years the PG-13 rating has become a muddled landscape where movies include both acceptable family fare and films that could just as easily have been labeled R. Parents can generally tell if their kids are ready for R-rated movies and PG movies are generally OK, but PG-13 is where the grey area is.
As many parents have long suspected, there has been a movement of R-rated violence creeping into PG-13 movies for some time. A recent study published in the Journal of Children and Media confirms that PG-13 movies are significantly more violent than those a generation ago. And besides the shootouts and slugfests, PG-13 is also where the money is; most box office blockbusters are found in this category. In 2011, there was more box office money from PG-13 movies (roughly $5.5 billion) than all G, PG, and R movies combined.
Consider the recent hullabaloo regarding the documentary, Bully. At first, the movie was rated R, a rating that outraged many proponents who knew the rating would prevent what they considered an important film from being seen by the highly valued younger teenage audience. An intensive campaign followed by reportedly editing the sound from three words, which earned the movie a PG-13 rating. If three words are all that separates a PG-13 from an R rating, how much can parents really rely on the MPAA for guidance when selecting movies for their children?
The Importance of Ratings
Ratings are important.
For some parents, the rating is the only piece of information they consider when deciding if their children can watch a film. While this shortcoming is certainly the parents' fault, it is understandable that some hurried parents simply refer to this easy indicator to decide which movies they let their kids watch.
Unfortunately, MPAA ratings don't tell the whole story. A simple PG-13 or an R glosses over the true content of a film. This is an imperative distinction to make because, while this criticism does not advocate censorship in any way, it is important for parents to be aware of all of a film's content. Children mature at different times and a dozen different twelve-year-olds may all be at a dozen different levels of maturity; some capable of dealing with the subject matter of a film while others are unprepared.
The MPAA rating is important in other instances, as well. Community centers, day camps, and similar groups are reticent to show anything higher than PG to mixed crowds. The same rule of thumb applies to schools, who do what they can to shy away from controversy. One of the very few exceptions to this rule is the movie Schindler's List, which is rated R, but has enjoyed many school viewings and even a network television broadcast.
The backlash against movies with higher ratings applies commercially, as well. Films that are unrated or saddled with an NC-17 can often find it difficult to be shown in many theaters. Many newspapers and television stations will refuse to advertise NC-17 and unrated movies, for fear of backlash from some of their audiences, who perceive these movies as not worth mentioning. Finally, after a movie's theatrical run, movie studios look to the home market and DVD and Blu-ray sales. Unfortunately, there are some national retailers and renters who refuse to stock unrated and NC-17 disks. It can safely be said that a movie that falls outside one of the four accepted cryptic boxes (G, PG, PG-13, and R), faces some formidable challenges.
But the most important responsibility a MPAA rating has is to inform responsible parents about the content in a film. Most parents are responsible and are concerned about what their kids see. And, because we can't preview every movie before our kids see them, the rating is vital in decision-making. Unfortunately, the MPAA rating is antiquated and doesn't provide parents with enough information to make good decisions. Revisiting the Bully movie, we can see that the movie was originally rated R for "some language," which could be seen in the rating's descriptor text. But reviewing more detailed information, we learn that there are more than three dozen incidents of intensely threatening and or violent scenes in the movie. Depending on your child's maturity and your family's principles, the violence might be far more offensive than a handful of profane words, but you would never know about that content from the MPAA's rating.
The issue extends beyond the theater, as well. Kids seem more mature. Maybe it's that the 24-hour news cycle and the constant bombardment of media from television and the Internet have left them more seemingly calloused than previous generations. Hollywood - either because of this or as the cause of this, depending on your perspective - takes advantage of this situation by marketing PG-13 properties to children far younger than their own ratings recommend. Stroll down any toy aisle and you'll see a slew of licensed toys based on PG-13 movies, yet marketed towards very young children. Lego has a Pirates of the Caribbean set called "The Cannibal's Escape" with a recommended age of 6-12. Fisher-Price sells a Green Lantern Jet that's aimed at toddlers as young as 36 months. Both of these movies are rated PG-13, yet the licensed toys are marketed at much younger children. Similar examples are seemingly endless.
How Ratings Work Now
Movie ratings have been around since the early 1920s. At first they existed as state censorship boards that sought to prevent the showing of risqué films in their jurisdiction. Legislators went a step further, introducing laws to prevent the spread of what many at the time identified as objectionable. Hollywood, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to clean up their reputation by bringing in a man named Will Hays to bring morality to the movies. in 1930, Hays introduced what came to be known as the Hays Code, a set of guidelines that prohibited everything from ridicule of the clergy to miscegenation in the movies. The code, while self-imposed, was approved by the Federal Trade Commission.
The Hays Code underwent a minor change a few years later, with the creation of the Production Code Administration (PCA). The PCA was established in 1934, due to difficulty in enforcing the Hays Code and required all films to be submitted to receive a certificate of approval. Almost all films abided by the system, despite the PCA's reputation for unyielding and tough enforcement of the Hays Code. As culture began to change in the 1950s, the PCA became more difficult to enforce. Films were granted exceptions and rules were bent or ignored. In 1966, Jack Valenti deemed the Hays Code was out of date and began its revision. Two years later, the modern film rating was born and hasn't changed much since then. The modern system has seen just four significant changes in the past 44 years; the original M rating was changed to GP (then PG), the PG-13 rating was added, X was changed to NC-17, and descriptor text has been added to highlight content.
There is no legal status afforded to the ratings; but, as with the Hays Code before them, the MPAA ratings serve as protection to theater owners so they have defense against showing objectionable material to minors.
Some people think the rating board is a government agency, but it's not. The Classification and Rating Administration (CRA) that rates movies is a division of the MPAA, a non-profit organization run by the big six motion picture studios: Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. This is a huge problem, according to Kirby Dick, writer and director of the blistering (and unrated) documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a film that explores how the ratings system works. "The most important thing for a film is to get to the widest possible audience and the ratings restrict that audience. If you control the rating system, you have the control that can give your films less restrictive ratings and the opportunity to give more restrictive ratings to your competitors."
The CRA division is an anonymous group of people, made up of Los Angeles parents. Their full-time job is to watch movies and assign ratings. There are six ratings for movies: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, and UR. After a film has been reviewed by raters, it is assigned a rating. A rating may also carry a short bit of unhelpful and vague descriptive text, like "thematic elements" or "language," hinting at why the movie received its rating.
There are few hard and fast rules, but mostly guidelines. In general terms, a movie can include a single f-word, as long as it is not sexual in context, and retain a PG-13 rating. However, if the use is sexual or there is more than one instance, the rating becomes an R. Also, a little nudity is allowed in a PG-13, as long as it's not sexual - then it becomes an R. Further, if there is any reference to drugs or depictions of drug use or even a couple frames of drug paraphernalia, it is automatically at least a PG-13. Beyond that, MPAA guidelines seem a little nebulous. While these are the rules most often followed, there are always exceptions.
Volumes could be written about perceived inconsistencies, but, it might be argued that there are so few choices for ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.) that the MPAA gets close enough, often enough, that the moviegoing public becomes complacent with the system. As Dick says "A lot of online ratings are far more useful [in providing film content information]. They [the MPAA] don't [pursue more useful ratings] on purpose – it's deliberate and planned. The more minimal the ratings are, the more they are able to put their movies in a category they want."
Ratings Are Broken - The Dark Knight as a Case Study
For an example of how important ratings can be and how poorly the MPAA's CRA sometimes does its job, let's take a closer look at a movie. In this case, let's look at The Dark Knight.
Why The Dark Knight? Because it's been out long enough that many people have seen it and if you're a geek, there's a higher probability that you've seen it repeatedly. What's more, there was some controversy surrounding the movie's content and rating when it was released. In fact, in other countries, The Dark Knight was prohibited for children under 16.
When The Dark Knight was released in 2008, the MPAA gave the film a PG-13 rating for "intense sequences of violence and some menace." That's all of the information parents really had to go on. A parent might have also seen a preview or a movie and ascertained that Heath Ledger's chilling portrayal of a homicidal Joker might foreshadow some pretty mature scenes.
If we dig a little deeper and review the Parents Guide for the movie at the Internet Movie Database, we can see that in addition to the violence, there is a scene of some people caught in a sexual situation, a decent dose of profanity, and a scary scene of drug use, among mature scenes not mentioned in the MPAA rating. These omissions are principal in the argument that MPAA ratings are outdated. They simply do not provide enough information.
The secondary argument and the one that is more subjective is that the ratings are inaccurate and there is too much inconsistency in how they are applied. While your kids might be mature enough to handle the violence and mature themes of The Dark Knight, you should be able to recognize that other kids of an equal age may not be. Before parents expose their kids to these stories, it would be helpful to have adequate information to make that decision. Information that's already being compiled by various outlets.
A number of Web sites offer movie ratings for parents, supplying information that's actionable for parents. Sites like Parent Previews, Kids-In-Mind, and Common Sense Media are all providing great information for parents, as is seen in each of their ratings for The Dark Knight.
How Ratings Can Be Improved
As seen on the sites mentioned above, the information is out there. Everything a parent needs to make an informed decision is available ... if you know where to look. But, even with smart phones that can pull up websites, the information isn't as accessible as would be ideal.
When Harvey Weinstein announced that the movie Bully would forego an MPAA rating (before the minor edits led to the PG-13 rating) he said the movie would carry a Common Sense rating. The rating would be "Pause 13+," denoted by a yellow 13. In Common Sense parlance, the 13 denotes that the movie is appropriate for kids 13 and older, but the yellow color tells parents that some material may not be right for some kids. This is great, but again it requires more information-finding by parents.
"Bully is an example that shows that the MPAA rating system is inadequate when it comes to looking at movie content through the lens of larger issues," says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, one of the best ratings alternatives available. "Context is incredibly important when looking at entertainment products and stories. Common Sense Media ratings provide a deeper dive into the content to allow parent and educators to make much more fully informed decisions."
What if you've arrived at the theater and the movie you want to see is sold out? How can you tell just from looking at a poster if the content is appropriate for your kids? One possible solution is featured below. Since the nutrition label is something most of us are familiar with, it's not a huge leap in educating people how to read it. Additionally, a rating should operate similarly to food's ingredients; it should tell you the elements that make up the movie. There could be a recommended age, indications of the amount of most common mature content, along with an "ingredient list" of items parents (and moviegoers) may want to be made aware of.
Creating a label like this would easily fit on a movie poster and the information for a label like this would be easy for raters to compile. It wouldn't be a difficult change; the question is will we see it? Steyer is optimistic. "When we first started out [in 2003] we talked to the MPAA and the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) about it. At the time, we didn't have the scale and the MPAA was violently opposed to it. But the world is changing and it may happen."
Kirby Dick is less enthusiastic. "Even if there was another rating system, you can't have it run by the people who make the films. It has to be an outside agency because these are corporations and their mission is to make as much money as possible. They are obligated to their shareholders to rate their films in such a way that they can make the most money possible."
Does the plight of Bully represent a tipping point? Will we see real change from the MPAA? We live in a world where we routinely condense complex information into 140 characters or less. Why should it be any more difficult to provide parents with enough information to make an informed decision about the content of movies? In a innovative data-driven society, refusing to change could make the MPAA's ratings as irrelevant as the Hays Code and the PCA. For parents, the message to the MPAA is simple: Give us the information; let us make our own decisions.
Note: The MPAA did not respond to requests for interviews for this piece.
