Sunday, September 03, 2006
Review: This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Kirby Dick is a punk rocker. How else would you describe someone who, while making a documentary expose about the MPAA ratings system, hires a private investigator to stake out the MPAA headquarters and find out the top secret identities of everyone on the anonymous ratings board, captures the whole process on film, then submits it to the board for a rating, and adds that process to the film?
This Film Is Not Yet Rated is about as entertaining as documentary filmmaking gets. As a satire, it's scathingly funny, and Dick employs many of the tricks that Michael Moore used to be able to pull off so well before he became more interested in his own self-promotion than in making great movies. Following Dick's team of investigators is as engrossing as any detective movie, and made all the more compelling because it's "real" (the detective story actually got several applause breaks at the Friday night screening). Even the talking head sequences are entertaining, since the heads in question belong to guys like John Waters and Kevin Smith, some of the most entertaining speakers on the planet. But beneath the entertainment value, there is a dizzying amount of information conveyed.
Some of you are reading this and thinking "The MPAA is fucked up. How is that news?" But even the cynical will find their heads spinning at some of the revelations regarding the ratings assignments (Boys Don't Cry gets an NC-17 for a too-long female orgasm) the appeals process (the filmmaker is not allowed to cite precedent. As John Waters asks, "What else is there?"), or the make-up of the appeals board (entirely made up of representatives of major studios, distributors and exhibitor chains, plus two priests who may or may not get a vote).
This last point leads us to what Dick called "the real story," which is corporate conglomeration. The MPAA represents the interests of the six companies that control 95% of the movie industry (and, through their parent companies, 90% of all media in the U.S.), and it actively works towards keeping any competition (ie, independent films) out of the market. Meanwhile, the MPAA's primary job is to lobby congress to pass harsher anti-piracy and copyright-extension legislation (speaking after the screening, Dick mentioned that the MPAA had made a copy of his film, thus committing piracy by their own definition--he quipped that he might sue them and film it as a sequel), much like the Recording Industry Association of America's willingness to bow to pressure from the Parents Music Research Center in the 1980's, and put warning labels on rap albums, in return for congress passing a tax on blank cassettes. The documentary doesn't mention the RIAA/PMRC fiasco, but does link this situation back to the studios compliance with the House Unamerican Activities committee in the 1940's as a method of union busting.
The most interesting question raised is what, exactly, constitutes a PG-13, R or NC-17 rating for sexual content. There seem to be hard, fast rules governing language (fuck as exclamation = PG-13, fuck in sexual connotation = R) and violence (you can kill as many people as you want, just don't show blood and guts), but sex seems to be a mystery. At various times in the film, it is posited that the raters are set off by gay sex, female pleasure (that long orgasm), "unusual" positions (and the fact that doggy style is apparently considered an unusual position should clue you in to the mindset of these people), or a certain number of pelvic thrusts, but the answer actually seems to be the same as with violence: if it bears any resemblance to the real world, it's out. Bloodless mass murder is OK, but showing the real effects of violence is verboten. Similarly, as long as sex is treated as an adolescent fantasy, camped up and removed from real emotional experience (as in the American Pie and Scary Movie franchises), it's acceptable. But real, adult sex is treated as something that will cause mental disturbance, like viewing the pages of the Necronomicon.
So, in a way, the ratings are functional. Movies made for teenagers get PG-13, movies made for adults get NC-17. Unfortunately, most exhibitors won't show NC-17 movies, and studios do anything they can to avoid them, so we live in a world where the medium of film is entirely aimed towards teenagers. And, since the theater chains are all owned by big, profit-driven corporations, it's senseless to expect them to show NC-17 films, which are automatically less profitable because they exclude a huge percentage of the audience from seeing them (it should be pointed out that this is not even a legal ban--there's no law saying a 16-year-old can't go see an NC-17 movie, and such a ban could not pass the constitutionality test in the courts). IFC, the producers of the film, have set up an excellent website, complete with a petition calling for reform of the system. While this is an admirable and necessary effort, an entrepreneurial solution might be more effective.
I mentioned punk rock at the beginning of this review. In the 1980's, punk rock was completely underground in America: not played on radio, not courted by major labels, not supported by mainstream media, but there were punk bands playing in garages in every town in the country. So a network sprung up of independent labels, distributors, zines and venues to fill the void.
Right now, we have a strong, growing community of independent filmmakers. We have indie distributors, and a network of blogs and websites that function as an information network, but we don't have a functioning network of indie exhibitors. Now, I don't know much about the business of running a theater, but I have to think it would be less of a hassle than running a punk club: the movies don't spray paint their names on the walls, and the audiences don't consider it a rite of passage to trash the bathrooms. If entrepreneurial film lovers began buying up abandoned theaters and turning them into art houses run for the love of movies, then it wouldn't matter what rating the MPAA gave a movie. That's a goal we can all work towards: making the threat of an NC-17 irrelevant.
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I had a nice big post all writ up and then Blogger had to go be a giant Seaward.
How does the film address societal aspects of the MPAA's ruling? It seems to me that they're a large part of America's continuing childishness when it comes to sex in the public domain.
"sex in the public domain" -
A Denny's carpark? LOLZORS!!!
It doesn't really address that directly, but that's definitely the conclusion I came to. The MPAA is complicit in making America a society of adolescents. Actually, it does address this a little in terms of violent content, the idea that these bloodless mass murder movies like True Lies are practically conditioning for the military.
It's like in the UK. Every film is viewed and rated not just on how it will affect adults but on how it will affect children. So the decision to cut stuff is usually motivated by "Oh, what will it do to our poor children if they perchance get a hold of this?"