On Friday, Motion Picture Association of America president and CEO Christopher Dodd took the stage at the National Press Club to talk about his first several years on the job. It was an interesting talk less because of policy issues that Dodd focused on, or that he discussed during the question-and-answer period, but because of the way he talked about movies, and what they’ve come to mean to him as art during his almost two years at the association. In arguing for movies’ unifying role in a politically divided country, and movies and television as key tools of cultural diplomacy, Dodd’s talk raised some fascinating questions for me about how we approach and analyze movies, and what levels of responsibility we want to assign an art form that claims that potential impact.

Dodd admitted that before coming to the MPAA, “As a father of two very young children, 7, now almost 8, and 11, my movie selections were limited.” But as he’s reconnected with the product that his member companies produce, Dodd made an argument that both serves to burnish the reputation of those companies, and potentially exposes them to higher standards than your average producer of widgets.

“They tell stories, stories that help us make sense of our world and ourselves…Consider the focus on racism in To Kill A Mockingbird or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dodd said. “The best movies ground us in common values and ideals. America’s a big place, as we all know, with red states and blue states…But gathered together in a darkened theater, regardless of our differences, we become, in spite of our differences, one place.”

The ability of movies to achieve that unity or provoke that kind of thought doesn’t mean that all movies have to meet that aspirational standard. But it does suggest that movies that do aim to tackle big ideas deserve to be taken seriously, which means being examined critically. Often, debates over accuracy get dismissed as nit-picking, which if the only question at stake is whether a movie is a literal translation of historical events or not, is potentially fair. But the questions of why and when movies choose to diverge from the historical record is can be rich ones, particularly when those questions happen in the realm of character interpretation, as in the presentation of President Lincoln’s attitudes toward black Americans in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a critic who writes about the politics of entertainment, it’s been exciting to see academics, policy reporters, and political commentators enter the debates around Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty because their desire to play on this turf is a reaffirmation of the idea that gives life to my career, even if I’m not always thrilled about how these arguments have functioned. The battles over how to interpret Zero Dark Thirty , for example, seem to me to have narrowed down to debates about whether the film is an accurate transcription of a murky historical record, rather than exploring the more revealing questions of how the script and directing choices shape the movie’s message about the immorality of torture, and why Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow felt compelled to portray the movie as an unbiased piece of reportage in the first place. That latter choice in particular says as much about the state of our debate about the use of torture as the movie itself.

If we’re going to take film seriously on the grounds that it has a unique power to influence audiences, we need to examine how well it does at getting audiences to do interpretive work—and leaving them space in which to do it—to open themselves up to new ideas, and to inhabit new perspectives. The blunt statements of opinion writing or cable news appearances, or the clear conclusion-drawing of long-form journalism aren’t necessarily the things that serve those goals well in film, where an indirect approach may lead otherwise-resistant audiences to a point they might not have accepted when presented bluntly, and manifestos can make characters seem like strawmen, rather than flesh-and-blood humans.
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I think MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is right to say, in the wake of the controversy over the initial R rating given to the documentary Bully (it was lowered to PG-13 after cuts), that the association’s ratings system, which carries great power, should be more transparent to the public. There’s a perception, fair or not, that the ratings weight certain content—like sexual content between gay couples—more heavily in moving towards an R rating, and that the system fails to acknowledge how context mitigates content. That last perception was at issue in Bully: the R rating depended on incidences of profanity deemed inappropriate for teenagers, despite the fact that those profanities were uttered by teenagers and directed at teenagers. More data about how the ratings panels make their decisions would help outside observers determine whether these perceptions of inconsistency and failure to contextualize were true, or to debunk them.

Discussing whether transparency might be a good idea is not the same thing as committing to it, of course. Releasing the exact counts of words that trigger ratings might be one place to start. And while making it clear who’s in the ratings panels might open up the possibility of bribery, it would also let outsiders look for patterns in raters’ behavior the same way political analysts score the leanings of judges. Any other thoughts on what data it would help to have in the open? It’d be nice to have this be the kind of thing that doesn’t just float into conversation and disappear.

What could have been a tense session at Sundance yesterday in the wake of the failures of SOPA and PIPA to advance, turned into a generally genial conversation between MPAA President Chris Dodd, National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian, and filmmaker Christine Vachon, with occasional tough interjections from moderator and New York Times reporter David Carr.

“My take is that your industry vastly underestimated the intimacy and closeness of the relationships between tech companies and the consumer,” Carr told Dodd. “The people we want re-engineering the Internet are not your people or your old people.”

Dodd acknowledged that the protests against SOPA had been “a watershed event,” and said that the conversation would continue about legislation to address the problem of overseas sites that distribute pirated content. But he generally pivoted towards talking about the need for technology and content providers to recognize their common interests rather than dwelling on their differences. He pointed out that the same consumers who want content available on a wide array of devices are also the consumers who go to movies in theaters most frequently. “The person who loves technology loves content,” Dodd said. “They’re not the enemy of this industry at all. They’re the future in many ways.” He and Fithian also both emphasized the need to give consumers more choices in theaters.

“The screens in the film world got dominated by big pictures,” Fithian acknowledged. “We don’t need Harry Potter playing on 6 screens in our megaplexes. Maybe 4. And maybe we can pick up some independent movies.” He pointed to Open Road, the distribution company owned by AMC and Regal Cinemas as proof of the theaters’ intentions to begin acquiring independent movies and acting as distributors themselves. And Fithian said that the move towards digital projection will dramatically lower the cost of getting a movie in theaters from $1,000 per print to $100 for digital copies. In a reversal from prior approaches, Fithian suggested that NATO might reconsider offering Video On Demand sales in theaters so consumers could immediately get multi-device-capable copies of movies they’d just enjoyed.

And Vachon, who is at Sundance promoting her LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, which I’ll see on Wednesday emphasized that just as the MPAA and NATO are changing their approaches, so are filmmakers. “I think theatrical exhibition as the only means of measuring the success of a movie is changing, and fairly rapidly,” she said. “We are experimenting as much as we can with length, with format. We’ve always experimented with content…Our budgets have come down drastically, but the methodology of making a movie…that hasn’t come down…the creative margin is what has to be reconciled and reworked…we are constantly looking at different kinds of different distribution, ways we can directly market our work to the consumer.”