Film flam

Worried about teen violence? Maybe it's time for some new movie ratings.

by Alissa Quart

When I was a kid, I watched R-rated movies like most kids ate their Kix. Both my parents were film critics, and by age eight, my eyeballs had taken in a lifetime's worth of pornographic German cartoons about cats and Fluxus films featuring Yoko Ono, pendants, and nudity. I weekly endured the celluloid décolletage of French heroin-using teens; I gazed upon working-class British women's pasty-adorned bazooms.

So I was interested to read the recent news that 65 percent of American theater owners (whose organization, National American Theater Owners, strangely bears the acronym "NATO") have agreed to check IDs at R-rated movies. The crackdown is intended to safeguard America's youth from "cultural pollution." So now movie-theater ticket sellers will inspect kids' IDs, barring all those pimply-faced boys from watching Jennifer Love Hewitt scream -- and ensuring that they'll go home and download hot pics of her off the Web instead.

I was curious about what teenagers thought of the new NATO agreement, so I talked to some. We sat together in the sunshine between their final exams. They told me that the ratings crackdown "sucked." They asserted that some "really good films are rated R, like Life Is Beautiful and Shakespeare in Love." They also pointed out that an ID check wouldn't stop them.

"Of course we'll sneak in," one 15-year-old said. His friends chortled. "Cruel Intentions, Cruel Intentions!" a 15-year-old named Rhona chanted.

---

I admit I was fucked up by my peculiar cinematic diet. I remember watching Barbarella in a repertory theater at age 10; the shag rugs and the gnashing teeth of the mechanical dolls tearing at Jane Fonda's pre-feminist flesh gave me nightmares. Any rating that might have spared me this early encounter with art-porn would be welcome. But the rating system, as it stands, is a blunt weapon. It doesn't distinguish between attempts at high culture, however tarnished, and witless, rampaging flicks. R is for art -- and also for Very Bad Things and The Rage: Carrie II.

Teenagers, I think, should be prevented from seeing only certain R-rated films without a guardian. Which ones? There's the hard part. I have designed the proposed ratings system below to help the Motion Picture Association of America begin the costly and mentally taxing process of separating R-rated Euro-blushers from films starring Bruce Willis.

CBWWII: This would apply to character-building-but-extremely-violent World War II films, such as 1998's Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Another potential acronym for this rating would be TBA, or Tom Brokaw-Approved. Restrictions: ironic guardian required for children under 12, and for baby boomers prone to valorizing their parents' generation.

RO: Revisionist oater. An "oater," in film-business parlance, is a Western. Parents afraid that the current system might shut their pubescents out of such fine Westerns as Unforgiven can rest easy. The RO film isn't gratuitously violent; rather, it schools teenagers in the armed combat that is real and true and upon which our country proudly stands. Unfortunately, Wild Wild West might slip into this category. Restriction: boys over 10 who like to build forts require adult accompaniment.

FBFG: The feel-bad/feel-good movie. Rating name derives from the feeling one has watching anything by Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, or Frederick Wiseman: "I feel so bad that I feel good because my life isn't like this." Adolescents can learn a lot from viewing grimy alcoholics, underpaid construction workers, unhappy marriages, and subcultures so miserable even the social workers are mean. Restriction: children under 17 require accompanying adult guardian who is either in recovery or a member of the New Left.

MR: This restriction is named after Mickey Rourke, the American film star only the French love. Films rated MR are usually European co-productions with plenty of bared buttocks and thrashing about, shot with a blue filter. Winsome, lonesome, thick-lipped girls sit in their underwear pondering the horizon while the camera draws closer, closer, to their trembling visages. Among these films: anything starring Irene Jacob or Beatrice Dalle, or directed by Mike Figgis or, yes, Bernardo Bertolucci. Teen viewers will learn to love Claire's knees instead of Pam's implants. Restriction: boys under 17 who consider Yasmine Bleeth "a good actress" require accompaniment by girls who are more sophisticated and rueful.

PI: Pumping Iron. Anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, or other straight male muscle fetishists will be banned outright for any viewer under 50 who visits a gym or practices Tae Bo.

RYAN: Cheeky comedies starring the wandering-eyed Hugh Grant or the cybernetically frozen Meg Ryan, those stick-thin, high-cheekboned cyborgs through whose example children and teenagers come to understand adult love. These two performers alone have advanced the cause of American alienation threefold. Restriction: barred to anyone under 18, as well as anyone over 18 who agrees with the assertion that either Mr. Grant or Ms. Ryan is "undeniably charming and very cute."

---

Despite my belief in the necessity of more-accurate ratings, I can understand the MPAA's wariness about adopting a code that involves reading more than two letters at once. Thankfully, the House voted down the proposal that would have barred all access by children to movies with explicit sexual or violent material, so there's still some chance for a more sensible system. The House also voted to permit the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, which -- given the adult content of some of that material -- opens the door for a whole new ratings battle.

Alissa Quart writes for the Independent (London), Newsday, and Artforum.