13 Films That Broke the Motion Picture Association Rating System
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post 13 Films That Broke the Motion Picture Association Rating System appeared first on Consequence.
During Sex in Cinema Week, Consequence is looking at movies, the Hays Code, and what society labels taboo. See our introductory breakdown here, visit our analysis of Hollywood’s Pre-Code era and the ensuing Hays Code, and check back throughout the week for more analysis of the censorship of movie sex scenes and the creativity it inspired in filmmakers.
With the dissolution of the restrictive Hays Code in 1968, filmmakers could take bigger risks than ever before. But there were still limits, thanks to a new organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (now shortened to MPA). When the MPAA, as it was known then, became the warden of censorship in US cinema, the rating system’s uneven assessments would often come at a severe cost.
The civil rights movements of the 1960s and the ensuing cultural reset spilled over into film, where depictions of sex, violence, drugs, andconversations around race became more widely accepted. The movie industry, bolstered by the success of both European cinema and the burgeoning film period deemed “New Hollywood,” grew in commercial and artistic scope. New audiences found their lives reflected on the silver screen for the first time.
Still, pushback towards what content was “suitable” was inevitable. As the Hays Code had done previously, the MPA and their rating system have served as a religious, conservative influence on Hollywood.
The notable 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated summarized decades of hypocrisy and secrecy from the MPA’s ratings board. The double standards demonstrated a significant bias against queer folks and people of color, especially in regards to sex. They gave harsher ratings to films that featured female orgasms or homosexual intercourse, as well as those that were independently produced. The ratings board was comprised of people who were not cinematically trained, had no expertise in child development or had children over 18, and have had their identities shielded by the MPA; their appeals board has contained two members of the clergy.
The current era of the MPA system assigns a rating to films from five categories: G (General Audiences), PG (Parental Guidance Suggested), PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned), R (Restricted), and NC-17 (Adults Only). The PG-13 rating was added in 1984, and the NC-17 rating was once an X, though the MPA changed it in 1990 to differentiate those movies from pornographic films. By now, most movie goers are well aware of the setup, and you can probably name the first R-rated movie. But the rating system has had sever consequences, both financially and artistically. Harsher ratings meant less people would see the film, and up until the streaming era, an NC-17 was a deathblow.
Even since This Film Is Not Yet Rated‘s scrutiny of the MPA over 15 years ago, our attitudes towards what ought to be censored have changed. In a post-#MeToo entertainment landscape, conversations around sexual politics are more visible than ever before. While there will always be groups of the population that object to simply having those conversations (remember when people were mad that Pixar’s Lightyear featured a gay couple?), we are, allegedly, living in a more sexually progressive age.
The idea that something is not “suitable” for audiences changes over time — but has the rating system changed alongside it? And what impact has it had on film history? Many ratings feel like a stretch; read below for 13 films that proved the system is actually broken.
The NC-17 “Kiss of Death”
Even after the MPA revised the “X” rating to “NC-17” in an effort to differentiate traditional films from the adult industry, the rating was still a difficult hurdle for filmmakers to jump over. It’s one thing to limit anyone under 17 from seeing a film — not all movies are required to be teen-friendly. But for adults, an NC-17 rating can be a major reason to not see a film in the first place. If the MPA’s judgment of a film is so derisive that it warrants an extreme rating, that tells audiences a lot about the intensity of its content before that film is released. And yet, over the years, there have been several NC-17 rated films that were not as graphic or as intense as the rating suggested.
Y tu mamá también (2001)
Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexican coming-of-age drama was not afraid to embrace sex in the slightest. But rather than being smutty for the sake of it, Cuarón and his leads Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal imbue the film with an honest and nuanced exploration of young male sexuality. The tension between the two and Maribel Verdú eventually boils over into a passionate sex scene, which is undoubtedly earned given the film’s tender narrative — and yet, it was subject to censorship controversies both in Mexico and in the United States.
Regarding the MPA’s NC-17 rating, critic Roger Ebert wondered why there wasn’t any backlash to the decision: “Why do serious film people not rise up in rage and tear down the rating system that infantilizes their work?” Compared to some of the R-rated films that depict extreme violence, like Saving Private Ryan (we’ll get to that later), Y tu mamá también does not depict “extreme sexuality” — it presents coitus as a conduit to exploring lost youth within a conservative society.
Blue Valentine (2010)
After This Film Is Not Yet Rated exposed the MPA for its biases against female sexuality, they didn’t exactly change their strategy. Derek Cianfrance’s romantic drama Blue Valentine was allegedly given an NC-17 rating because it depicted a scene with cunnilingus. If a movie is given an NC-17 rating, it becomes nearly impossible for it to be given a wide release into theaters, which can significantly harm a film’s overall financial success and bury it in obscurity.
Ryan Gosling, one of the Blue Valentine‘s stars, was well aware of the impact of this rating, and clapped back at the MPA for the decision: “There’s plenty of oral sex scenes in a lot of movies, where it’s a man receiving it from a woman – and they’re R-rated. Ours is reversed and somehow it’s perceived as pornographic.” The film’s distributor, The Weinstein Company, successfully appealed the decision, and it was re-rated to an “R” without any additional cuts. But it’s worth wondering that if Blue Valentine was produced without a distributor as big as the Weinsteins, that appeal may have fallen on deaf ears, and the work’s overall visibility would have been diminished.
Blonde (2022)
Before the streaming era, the vast majority of American cinemas would refrain from screening NC-17 films. But in the days of Netflix and HBO, the cinema has become deemphasized in favor of living room televisions, and the old revenue method of physical ticket sales has been replaced by whether or not you click a button on your remote. Andrew Dominik, director of the controversial, fictionalized Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, seemed to use this to his advantage. Blonde became the first NC-17 film to go straight to Netflix, and the harsh rating was, perhaps, deserved: the film, among many other salacious moments, features some very graphic scenes of sex and rape.
But the controversy around the film’s rating, its depiction of sex, and its fictional dramatization of a non-fictional character all helped boost Blonde‘s streaming numbers. The reviews for Blonde were mostly negative, and while that can often have damning effects on a movie’s longevity and success, all Netflix needs is for people to be talking about it enough to click “Watch.” Perhaps because of the film’s final destination being a streaming service, Dominik felt that being gratuitously explicit was now possible — and though it was controversial, Blonde, Netflix, and the streaming era have technically opened the door for other creators to explore the edges of the MPA’s restrictive rule. Streaming has brought a lot of tenuous issues in the entertainment industry, but undermining the MPA rating system is one of the more interesting developments.
Queer Films, Nudity, and the Female Gaze
One of the most hypocritical aspects to the MPA’s jurisdiction comes in its treatment of queer intercourse, male nudity, and female sexuality as a whole. While some films purposely lean into what many consider as obscenities to subvert the audience’s understanding of queer themes, other films are judged harshly by the MPA for a rather frank, realistic depiction of sexuality. Furthermore, the MPA doesn’t seem to have an issue with films that cater to the male gaze — but the female gaze is largely neglected or suppressed by a tougher rating. In the last several years, however, the tide has begun to turn, and films that would have had an extraordinarily difficult time avoiding an NC-17 rating in the past are given R’s and lauded for their realistic, novel depictions.
Pink Flamingos (1972)
Billed as “An exercise in poor taste,” John Waters’ Pink Flamingos is as raunchy as it gets. For all of the film’s various obscenities, which includes just about every MPA taboo possible (explicit sex, nudity, queer and trans sex, gore, cannibalism, incest, everything under the sun), the film was certainly always going to get an X rating ahead of its limited, arthouse cinema release in 1972. But Pink Flamingos is significant in that it embraced the kind of “filth” that the MPA — and, for the most part, audiences — were too afraid to touch.
Still, despite and because of the X rating, Pink Flamingos brought John Waters international attention and became a midnight movie mainstay, especially within queer urban settings. By leaning into his freedoms as a filmmaker and embracing perversion, Waters played on the homophobic idea that queer folks were subhuman, deranged, even demonic. The film demonstrated that despite the MPA’s relatively new reign, shock value in cinema can be used as a political tool, as humor, and as a celebration.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
Jamie Babbit’s debut feature But I’m a Cheerleader evokes — you guessed it — John Waters, but without most of the raunchy fare that characterized films like Pink Flamingos. Instead, But I’m a Cheerleader is an accessible, genuinely joyous film about embracing one’s sexuality and rejecting heteronormativity. It is a love story about two young women who fall for each other at a conversion camp, while also being a conduit to exploring the performance of gender and the ways in which conformity stifles individuality.
Upon viewing the film in 2023 — and considering that teens are the film’s subject — it’s easy to make the argument that But I’m a Cheerleader could have (and should have) been rated PG-13. But believe it or not, the MPA’s first rating was an NC-17. Aside from the occasional profanity and sexual references (which is actually how teenagers talk), it seems that the MPA was threatened by the acknowledgment of queer sexuality, and queer female sexuality specifically. To put it differently, a male student drawing a penis on a chalkboard in class wouldn’t illicit as harsh of a rating as a female student drawing a vagina — the sapphic nature of But I’m a Cheerleader was clearly too much for the MPA, and it’s a prime example of the organization’s inherent biases at the time.
Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
Back in 1999, it was pretty obvious that the MPA didn’t know what to do with content about queer and trans people. In addition to the harsh initial rating for But I’m a Cheerleader, they also initially rated Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry — a story about the real-life rape and murder of Nebraska trans man Brandon Teena — NC-17. But the rating came not for Pierce’s brutal, violent depiction of Teena’s rape, but for a prior scene where leads Hilary Swank and Chloë Sevigny have sex. According to Pierce, who spoke about the MPA rating in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, she was told by the MPA that an orgasm sequence was “too long,” to which she asked if anyone had ever been hurt by an orgasm that was too long. While the film certainly isn’t PG-13 appropriate, it is an example of the MPA’s clenched fist when it comes to female sexuality and queer stories, and how their priorities with violence didn’t match their priorities around sex.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)
If the MPA was concerned about the length of queer sex on screen in Boys Don’t Cry, then they were certainly cautious about Blue Is the Warmest Colour. The film made waves for its long and very graphic depictions of lesbian sex, and even with an NC-17 rating in America, it still became a wildly successful film and won the 2013 Palme d’Or. But many audience members and critics were dissatisfied with the way that sex was depicted. Several perceived that despite the film being about lesbians, it was still crafted with the male gaze in mind, including a male director and two heterosexual leads; when The Hollywood Reporter asked gay women what they thought of the film, one replied that it was “pretty obviously two straight women having sex.” While the film is unique for its ambivalence towards the MPA’s sensitivities, it also brings up the way audience demands for representative truth in queer storytelling were greatly increasing, and the function and purpose of sex scenes were under more scrutiny.
Brüno (2009)
Apparently, parents were so concerned about seeing Sacha Baron Cohen’s bare buttocks that they specifically requested the MPA would note which films featured “male nudity.” It worked — from Brüno‘s release until 2018, the MPA began to include male nudity as a specific, gendered factor in its rating system. Eventually, the MPA would list nudity without gender, and would solely factor whether it was partial or full, the length of the nude scene, and whether the context was sexual or not.
But the need to denote male nudity, as opposed to female nudity, highlights that the MPA was less concerned with the latter because it’s usually depicted in a patriarchal, heteronormative way; there are dozens more instances of breasts onscreen than penises, which have a harder time making the final cut due to the MPA’s restrictions. Their brief decision to denote nudity by gender shows the MPA’s implicit bias against the female gaze, and the ways in which the organization has upheld the archaic patriarchal standard that male nudity = male vulnerability = male weakness, belittling the gender binary.
What Is Suitable for Adolescents?
At the behest of parents, the MPA introduced the new PG-13 rating in 1984. But the division between an R-rating and a PG-13 one is a thin, ever-changing line. Some films are so graphic in both violence and sex that an R-rating is obvious — a body exploding or a full-blown orgy is pretty much always going to be intense for young teens, even in 2023. There’s a major grey area between the two ratings, and that grey area correlates with what the MPA specifically thinks is too much for anyone under 17.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
It’s almost surprising that the MPA waited so long to introduce a rating between PG and R — middle school-aged kids can tolerate certain images on screen better than, say, seven year-olds. The tipping point came from the release of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which had many parents confused about why a film that featured human sacrifice was given a PG rating. In this case, they absolutely had a point — Temple of Doom is an adventure, but it’s a dark, carnal, and intense one, and it’s a movie that most children under the ages of 11 or 12 would be shocked by (especially the crazy “reach into a guy’s chest and grab his bloody, beating heart during a demonic ritual” sequence).
Temple of Doom, along with the horror-tinged Gremlins, showed that a new class was necessary between PG and R, because the maturity required to withstand certain images — especially violence — doesn’t just “happen” when someone turns 17. It’s an ongoing process throughout childhood, and a buffer was needed for the (slightly) traumatized kids who probably still shudder when they hear someone say “KALI MAAAAA!”
Eighth Grade (2018)
There have been many films about 13 year-olds, but this one is as realistic as it gets. Bo Burnham’s lauded directorial debut was a thoughtful look into what it’s like to be an eighth grader in the modern age, smartphones and all. But despite the film being relatively unspicy, the MPA gave the film an R-rating for “profanity and content related to fellatio.” Burnham, in turn, did not choose to re-edit the film, and instead defended the script’s original language: “It didn’t feel like our responsibility to portray a reality that was appropriate for kids, but rather portray the reality that the kids are actually living in.” Burnham was certainly onto something here — spend 15 minutes around any group of eighth graders and you’re more than likely going to hear them swearing. Burnham made a film that immerses the audience in the experience of adolescence — edgy language, sexual politics, and mental health included — and the MPA’s rating effectively kept a great deal of young movie goers from seeing it for themselves.
Boyhood (2014)
Similar to Eighth Grade, Richard Linklater’s sprawling, epic portrayal of a boy’s life from ages six to 18 was given an R-rating. Despite the realistic, slice-of-life nature of the film, the rating is due to language including sexual references and teen drug and alcohol use. While it’s understandable that the MPA was a little sensitive towards the depiction of a teenage boy’s first time drinking or smoking pot, both in life and within the context of film, it’s not such a big taboo that it would shock a young mind. In fact, Boyhood seems to find cinematic elegance in the insignificant moments of growing up. Sometimes this casual exposure is equated to explicit endorsement of those activities, and in turn, stigmatized and censored. Boyhood is such a carefully composed vision of life that people of all ages should be allowed bear witness.
Excessive Violence and the “Masterpiece Exception”
Sex is a major reason why films get harsher ratings — even making jokes about it could end up on the cutting room floor for the sake of a better judgment from the MPA. But what about violence? There’s an awkward grey area when it comes to depicting violence on screen — of course, the bloodier the violence is, the harsher the rating. But violence is more than just blood and gore; it’s psychological, it impacts how we view the characters on screen, and it’s often driven by context, both historical and in the film’s narrative. The line between whether a violent film gets an NC-17 rating or not is much thinner than if it depicts sex, and it demonstrates a difficult lapse in the rating system.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The MPA has had a rather soft spot when it comes to films depicting World War II. In fact, the only World War II films that have received an NC-17 rating are Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (which received the rating not due to violence, but because of sexual content) and Sean Matias’ Bent, which follows the persecution of gay men in Nazi Germany. But legal scholar Julie Hilden posits that the MPA has a “masterpiece exception.” She claims that a film like Saving Private Ryan features such graphic violence that it would normally be given an NC-17, but is given an R because of the film’s artistic merits and historical context. Through this lens, the MPA deems extreme violence less worthy of censorship than sexual content, because the violence depicted is apart of a broader artistic statement — in Saving Private Ryan‘s case, the carnage of war was more important for a broader audience to see than films that depict female orgasms or gay sex.
The Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
When the Marvel movies come to mind, violence isn’t exactly their defining feature. These family-friendly adventures are sanitized, sexless, and essentially bloodless. But there’s something fascinating about what Infinity War actually depicts in its content: mass murder. The moment in which half of Earth’s population turns into dust is devoid of gore, making it much easier for children or blood-fearing audience members to digest it. And yet, it brings up a rather strange concept that the MPA isn’t concerned with — depicting mass murder or genocide is okay for a PG-13 film, but only in a sci-fi or fantasy setting. It’s much easier to get behind Aragorn and Legolas slaughtering swaths of orcs in The Lord of the Rings or Luke Skywalker and Han Solo wiping out hundreds of Stormtroopers in Star Wars. But if those films decided to run with a steamy sex moment or a flash of nudity, it’s difficult to imagine those works garnering the same PG-13 ratings.
While Infinity War didn’t exactly “break” the MPA the way that Brüno or Boys Don’t Cry had, it brings up a historical unevenness that has impacted creators for decades. The group has sought to be more transparent over the years about their processes and standards — certainly after This Film Is Not Yet Rated‘s exposé. But when it comes to censorship, the MPA raters have oscillated between having a hard line and a rather opaque one. Their judgments about whether something should be seen by the masses can help destigmatize certain subjects, but they can also justify the puritanical pearl-clutching that the conservative, religious right is so intent on upholding. As we’ve seen in the Hays Code era and before it, there will always be a debate from the public about what deserves to be seen and what should be censored. But at the end of the day, whether the MPA agrees or not, consumers will see the movies that they want to see — sex, violence, or an F-bomb be damned.
13 Films That Broke the Motion Picture Association Rating System
Paolo Ragusa
Popular Posts
