I was 10 years old when the PG-13 ratings started. Two things happened: the famous ripping-a-beating-heart-from-a-chest scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the homoerotic heartplug scene in David Lynch’s Dune. I saw both of those movies, in 1984, at the theater, accompanied by my parents. The heart scene in Temple of Doom didn’t bother me much—a lot of movies were gory back then, as the studios were experimenting to see who could come up with the grossest special effects. But that Baron Harkonnen scene in Dune gave me nightmares for weeks. And if anyone wants to hear why I thought the latest Dune was a dud, it’s because the bad guys, the Harkonnens, were stupendously boring. In the 1984 version, they were fucking psychos—some of the best bad guys in movie history.
So the beards at the Motion Picture Association of America thought they might want to create a rating that would go between PG and R that would capture these sorts of films that were a bit too intense for adolescent children. Thus, the PG-13 rating was born. Nowadays, the PG-13 rating has ceased to have all meaning. The studios want a PG-13 rating, because a PG movie is thought of as a kids’ movie, and an R rating is an economic death sentence. So all the big superhero movies end up as PG-13—Batman, Avengers, and such.
Here is my interpretation of today’s rating system:
G: Cartoon
PG: Cartoon with fart jokes
PG-13: Superhero violence with one F-bomb
R: Anything goes: F-bombs, nudity, violence, except:
NC-17: Boners
The NC-17 rating was another disaster. The MPAA thought that the X rating had been stigmatized and associated with pornography, so it rebranded it as the NC-17 rating. Problem is, most theater chains wouldn’t show X-rated movies, and they ended up not showing NC-17 rated movies, either. Most of the time a movie will go without a rating altogether rather than be damned with the dreaded NC-17 rating. Aronofsky refused to compromise on Requiem For a Dream and released it with the NC-17 rating. It made practically no money but earned a cult following on video. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Requiem, which practically nobody saw, until years later.
Those discussions started around the 1987 release of Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet. 10 seconds had to be removed from that movie to avoid the dreaded X rating. I saw it, in high school, and it was exactly the delicious medley of sex and violence that the MPAA abhorred. Also, Lisa Bonet naked! Very scandalous for the eighties and the squeaky-clean image of The Cosby Show. If only we knew then what we knew now. Since 1990, only 79 movies have been released with an NC-17 rating, and only one was intended for wide distribution: Showgirls. These days, if you manage to see an NC-17 movie in the wild, you are guaranteed to see an erect penis and/or semen, which doesn’t really make me want to see an NC-17-rated movie. Having said that, there have been some movies that have been rated X or NC-17 for violence. George Romero’s Day of the Dead was one of them. Evil Dead 2 was unrated, though today it would almost certainly be PG-13, owing to the hilariously bad special effects. A Clockwork Orange was rated X in 1972 for non-stop, though bloodless violence, though there was one outrageous beaver shot.
I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you’re sitting on the couch with your kids and some 80s comedy like Sixteen Candles comes on. Gather around, family movie night! Big mistake. I bring up Sixteen Candles for a reason, because that movie featured full-on female nudity, an F-bomb, unironic discussions of things like rape, and racial stereotypes that clang. Literally, there is a gong that sounds every time the Asian guy is on the screen. If you showed Police Academy on TV today, unedited, it would cause a violent insurrection, and I’m not kidding.
So the goal of the MPAA is to protect children from harmful material, or something. I never saw much harm in the nudity. The first time I saw boobs or butt in a movie was when I was five years old, watching Clash of the Titans in the theater with my pal Kyle, who was seven. We were both completely unsupervised. I wasn’t exactly scarred by that experience, though it did make me want to see more of it. I’ve never been much worried about the coarse language, either—kids are going to hear it eventually. You just try to delay it as much as possible. Honestly, I’m much more worried about violence in movies than sex or nudity. And we went through a period of time in the 90s with ultraviolent films, Pulp Fiction probably being the best example, where a guy gets his head blown off, clumps of his brains sticking in Samuel Jackson’s afro, and they play it for laughs—in a movie that is not a comedy. I don’t like Tarantino, because I don’t like violence. I remember seeing Oliver Stone’s temper tantrum Natural Born Killers in the theater in 1994, and let’s just say that I’m glad that period of entertainment history is behind us. I was never scarred by boobs or simulated humping when I was a kid. But I’ve seen violent imagery that stuck with me for a long, long time. These days, if I hear a movie is violent, I will refuse to see it, no matter how good it is, Hacksaw Ridge being the most recent example.
Some people are weird about nudity, though. I had some family at the house a couple of years ago and I suggested putting on the Ex Machina DVD. “Is there nudity?” my brother asked. “Robot nudity,” I responded. I was vetoed, and we ended up watching something from Pixar. My nephew told me later that his parents went to great lengths to make sure he never saw nudity in a movie. When I was a kid, I was trying to catch the split-screen images of the Playboy Channel after my mom went to bed.
I have also never had a taste for horror movies. I remember watching Friday The 13th: Part V at a friend’s house in grade school. I don’t get it. I have never understood how people derive entertainment from watching simulated images of people being tortured or killed. Some of the early horror movies I watched as a kid fucked me up pretty good. Carrie was one of them. Another was Damien: The Omen 2. The fact that I am writing this 40 years later tells you how much of an impact these movies had on me. Tellingly, they were both rated R when they were released, and edited for TV. Still scary.
In any event, I’m not sure why we are so prudish about sex in movies when stuff a million times worse is right at your fingertips on your phone. I think it is a matter of decorum. We’ll watch unsimulated sex in the privacy of our homes, but there is something just too weird about watching it in the theater with a bunch of other people. I saw Shame recently, starring Michael Fassbender, a movie about sex addiction, which is something that a lot of people probably need to see. It was released unrated to avoid the NC-17. Nonstop sex and nudity throughout. But it’s not lascivious, which I think is the difference between art and porn. Years ago, I also saw Color of Night, starring Bruce Willis and the super-hot Jane March, where we are treated to a brief glimpse of Bruce’s boner. There was a lot of sex in that one, and it was lascivious. Incredibly, it was rated R, when it clearly should have been rated NC-17.
In case you were wondering if a movie could ever be rated NC-17 for language, the answer is no. The Wolf of Wall Street had 569 F-bombs and was rated R. I didn’t see it, though, because that’s not Wall Street.
Anyway, MPAA ratings might have meant something at one point in time, but they don’t today. And the game is so stupid that producers will actually insert a strategic F-bomb just to avoid the PG rating. What a goat rodeo. People are actually inserting profanity on purpose so people don’t think it’s a kid’s movie. One last one: I saw Animal House, unedited, when I was eight. A lot of it went over my head, including the rubber glove handjob joke. I think if you see Animal House when you are eight, you end up writing dirty essays as an adult.
Dude you gotta see Wolf of Wall Street - it's one of the funniest movies ever made. It wasn't billed that way, and a lot of people misunderstood it to be some kind of satire - but it's flat out hilarious.
Just saw Babylon - still not sure if I loved it or hated it - maybe both - but how in the hell it didn't get an NC-17 is beyond me. No boners - but absolutely everything else you can think of, like straight out of an early John Waters' movie.
Wasn't there a a scandal with Color of Night, that they really "did it" - and Jane wasn't into it, something like that.
Blazing Saddles. Wonder what it would be rated now.