Looking Back

Many people look at the rating of a film before viewing it. But who are the people behind the ratings? The documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, from filmmaker Kirby Dick, gives people an inside look at the MPAA or Motion Picture Association of America. This group pays panels of what they call “average parents” to watch and rate films according to their content. It is comparable to an exclusive club, where public accountability is overseen. Dick points out the controversy over this process in the following questions: Who is an average parent? Why are the rater’s identities kept secret? And finally, why are there so many double standards in the ratings system?

As for the first question, Dick interviews several filmmakers to explore the issue, many of whom are parents themselves. One woman points out that she is a filmmaker and parent, as well as a lesbian. She poses the question “Is there any parent like me on the panel?” After a short pause, she concludes, “I highly doubt it.” After watching this film and learning more about the MPAA, I highly doubt it as well. The MPAA seems to have conservatively set up standards for which they choose the parent raters. As a rule, a rater must have children between the ages of five and seventeen. Raters are also supposed to stay on the rating board for only around five years. However, Dick may have discovered that the MPAA does not follow their own rules. After identifying the raters, it was found that some had adult children living out of the house. And others have served as raters for far more than five years. Hypocritical inconsistencies like these may be one of the reasons why the MPAA chooses to keep the raters unidentified.

Speaking of, the next question relates to the identity of the raters. The raters are given complete anonymity in their jobs in order to “feel secure to come to work everyday,” according to the head of the Classification and Rating Administration for the MPAA, Joan Graves. What sort of threat would it pose the raters if their identities were publically known? Is the job really so dangerous that people must be kept under wraps? Dick implies that the identities are kept from the public because the MPAA has too many inconsistencies in its standards, that it would only cause distrust in the entire ratings system to have the names revealed. In the film, the main plot-driver is Dick’s quest to find out the names of these illusive raters by means of hiring a private investigator. By the end, the current raters are successfully identified and Dick submits his documentary to the MPAA to be rated. This must have been quite an upset, as it showed the MPAA how easily these people can be identified.

One of the most probable motives for the MPAA to feel uneasy about drawing up specific guidelines for what deserves each kind of rating is that there are so many double standards. Dick provides many case examples in which two similar scenes are compared from different films, but given different ratings. When it comes to sexual pleasure, it seems the MPAA raters feel more uncomfortable when being presented with female pleasure over male. Most seem to be uncomfortable with any kind of pleasure, but males are still heavily favored. In this double standard, we may see that Americans in general are not comfortable with female pleasure, especially when it is resulting from masturbation or lesbian sexuality.

Yet another issue raised, if only briefly, in this film is how violence is rated compared to sex. Violence seems to have been overlooked as a bad influence, and sex has been pushed to the foreground. A movie can have as much gunfire as it wants, as long as there is no blood, and be a straight PG-13. This instills in young viewers that violence is non-consequential. It is desensitizing younger generations to violent actions, surely not a goal of the MPAA. It seems you simply can’t win with the MPAA. It would be quite interesting to see what would happen to the MPAA if another rating system were to appear. People assume that the MPAA is necessary, and while it does serve a resourceful purpose in theory, it does not need to be in place. It is a voluntary system and not enforced by law. Films that choose to not be submitted are classified as “Not Yet Rated”, but many large theaters and distributors will not carry the film. Does this implicate that there is some sort of political pull between the MPAA and large film corporations? Even if this were true, I am not sure anyone would favor the option of having the government take over the ratings system. The most optimal solution is to either reform the MPAA or create a new system in which there is a clear list of guidelines to follow. Remove the secrecy and make the process behind ratings publicly known.

It is easy to say what would be best, but in order for that to happen the issue has to be called to the attention of more people. Once the public is aware of the MPAA and its inconsistencies, a movement to put a better system in place will surely follow. I personally have not looked at film ratings the same way since viewing Dick’s film. It is strange to look back to when I blindly accepted a film’s rating, unaware of the people who chose it.