Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Organization of Theater Owners have announced plans to try to make it easier for parents to get information about film ratings, a move that’s a response to the debate over the role of violent media in inciting or inspiring real-world violence:

Following through on a commitment made to Vice President Joseph Biden in the wake of the December shooting in Newtown, Conn., the Motion Pictures Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners are making minor tweaks to the movie ratings system in order to better inform parents. The new “Check the Box” campaign, unveiled at CinemaCon, will highlight descriptions of why a movie received a certain rating. Also, there will be a tag attached to trailers explaining that the trailer is approved to play with the feature they came to see. The campaign also includes a new PSA, as well as a new poster that will be displayed at theaters across the country.

Given that the ratings system is intended to give parents information that will help them decide whether or not their children should be allowed to see given movies, any movie that makes it easier for them to get details on why the ratings board decided to assign a given letter rating is a useful one, even if highlighting the rationales won’t placate people who object to any given decision.

And I think it’s a smart move to try to align trailers with the content they’re paired with. It’s easy to start with the theater owners, of course, because trailers and movies are governed under the same ratings system, and so it’s not tremendously difficult to pair up trailers that have been cut to the same standards as the movies they air in front of. And though it would be much more difficult, I think this kind of alignment is something the movie industry should strive for with television as well. It might mean some financial hits for networks if they stop accepting violent advertising for movies to air during general interest programming like sporting events, and it might require some creativity on behalf of the people cutting trailers to make spots for R-rated content that’s appropriate to air before general audiences, or that doesn’t feature guns or gun violence. But these constraints don’t seem like they would completely paralyze either television or movie studios.

Given that efforts are continuing to pin blame for gun violence on violent media culture, the content industries are responding proactively with a new and voluntary campaign to help parents understand the tools that already exist to help them keep their children from consuming media they find disturbing:

In the news release on Wednesday, representatives for the industries said they would “make a positive contribution to the national conversation on violent behavior by launching a national educational campaign through communications channels including television public service announcements, educational and informational websites, in-theater advertising, and other media.”

The industry representatives include the lobbying groups for filmmakers, theater owners, broadcasters, and cable operators. They said the public service ads would appear on television and on the Web in the months to come. The ads will remind parents about the existing television and film ratings systems and the parental controls that are built into most television sets. Ads about the film ratings system will also be shown in movie theaters.

As someone who was very effectively kept away from violent movies, television, and video games as a child—though not from an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein, which gave me nightmares for months—I’m genuinely curious as to what options the parents in the audience wish they had to regulate their children’s media useage that aren’t available to them now. I totally understand that it can be jarring to have advertising for violent or sexual content come on during or in front of programming that itself is rated for general audiences. And I imagine trying to prevent content creep both at school as children get older and have more autonomy over how they spend their time, and as kids visit other people’s houses where video games are more widely available or certain channels are unblocked, must be a constant source of frustration.

The first problem is one that could be fixed by voluntary self-regulation on the part of movie theaters and television broadcasters, in coordination with movie studios and video game manufacturers. The second is harder, and involves lots of conversations with your children about what hard, scary things mean, and what makes you uncomfortable, and what makes them uncomfortable. And the latter probably involves some limits-testing and kids encountering things that upset them, and that they decide they’re not ready for. That’s a risk I think some parents don’t particularly want to take, but it seems to me to be a fairly necessary part of children and young adults developing their own internal set of limits, which are likely to be more effective than simply asking them to abide by parentally-determined ones.

But beyond those ongoing efforts and voluntary regulation by the industry, and excluding the idea of bans on certain kinds of content on the grounds that censorship is neither desirable nor implementable, what are the resources you wish you had? Better channel-blocking and web-monitoring software? Guides to talking about certain kinds of images, like gun violence or sexual assault? Or are you all set?

A documentary about the life, work, and opponents of the late conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart, Hating Breitbart, is on its way to theaters, and its director, Andrew Marcus, is perturbed that the movie received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. He told the Daily Caller that the rating should have come from “gutter behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus and their enablers in the progressive institutional left media” depicted in the movie because ““The hatred aimed at Andrew and the tea party was pornographic!” But like Bully, the documentary about children who are tormented for reasons ranging from their sexual orientation to simple social awkwardness, Hating Breitbart was rated R for the language that appears in the film. And like Bully, which eventually cut a number of incidences of the word “fuck” to earn a PG-13 rating, Marcus is trimming Hating Breitbart to try to bring the rating down.

The best argument for giving both Bully and Hating Breitbart PG-13 ratings even with all the original language in them intact is that it’s a realistic, honest look at the behavior of both sets of subjects. There was something perverse about protecting children from words in Bully that were spoken by children in the target demographic. And Breitbart’s use of language was a part of his style, as the Daily Caller suggests in a description of one of the scenes in the movie:

But Breitbart is the one uttering a few choice adult words. During one sequence early in the film, he looks into the camera and inveighs against what he saw as a conspiracy among liberal media elites to cast conservative politicians and commentators as Neanderthal throwback villains.

“What the left has stood for with political correctness,” he says on screen, looking into the distance, “is to try and get those with whom they disagree to shut up. And the tea party movement, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and Allen West and all the people who have gone out there against the mainstream media and said, ‘You’re going to call us racists? You’re going to call us potential Timothy McVeighs? Fuck you!’”

Then Breitbart looks into the camera and takes a pregnant pause before half-whispering his conclusion.

“War.”

Marcus may be irritated that his movie got an R rating, but the decision is in no way inconsistent with the MPAA’s previous decisions. I’d be in favor of a standard that recognizes that life, even as 12-year-olds are exposed to it, is sometimes obscene. But as it is, the ratings are fairly consistent in shielding younger viewers from obscene language, if not the ideas that animate it.

The British Board of Film Classification has decided, in the wake of the release of some extremely sexually violent movies, that it wants a better sense of where the British public’s thinking is on violent and sexual acts and images. In its annual report, the Board explained:

In 2011 the BBFC considered The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (in which a man achieves sexual gratification from the stapling together of victims to form a human centipede and which culminates in him raping a woman with barbed wire) and The Bunny Game (in which a truck driver abducts, strips and sexually abuses and tortures a prostitute).

The BBFC intervened with both of these works on account of their depictions of extreme violence against women. It made significant cuts to The Human Centipede 2 and refused to certify The Bunny Game because of the harm risk both works posed.

Partly as a result of these and other films, the BBFC is commissioning a major new piece of original research into depictions of sadistic, sexual and sexualised violence, mainly against women, to determine what the British public today believes is potentially harmful and therefore unacceptable for classification. The research will be completed in 2012 and the BBFC will publish it in the usual way, not least because it might be helpful to other regulators.

I have mixed feelings about refusing to certify films at all, of course. But I cannot wait to see the results of this study. When we talk about sex and sexual violence, a lot of our conversations are dominated, I think, by surprise and shock that some people think certain behaviors, or ways of discussing issues are normal or acceptable. As much as I think I might be dismayed by the results, an attempt to document in a reliable way people’s attitudes about what shocks them, what counts as normal, what counts as consensual, what counts as shocking or upsetting in culture would be a fascinating baseline to have as a basis for future discussions.

This doesn’t surprise me at all, but apparently, the scene in Prometheus we discussed at length yesterday freaked out a lot of people before it scared the audience:

Even the monsters in Scott’s world were real — including the baby alien that Rapace’s Shaw rips out of her belly with help of a high-tech, robotic surgery machine — the kind every space ship without a doctor aboard should carry. The climatic scene in the middle of the film was shot over four days, a period that Rapace says she’ll always remember as the most stressful of the entire shoot.

The scene, according to Scott, is the one that tipped the film’s rating from a PG-13 to an R. The director said the only way to land the more family-friendly rating would have been to remove the scene entirely. “They didn’t even want the scene,” Scott said. “It wasn’t about just cutting it down, they didn’t want the scene.” And that was something neither Scott nor studio chief Tom Rothman wanted considering the importance of the sequence and the toll it took on the Rapace.

Given that both the themes and the plot of the movie are both totally dependent on that scene, I have a hard time imagining what the movie raters would have preferred as a substitute? Would they have wanted the snaky thing that killed members of the crew to come back for Shaw, even though it would have had no connection to her whatsoever? Could the movie have had a PG-13 rating if the alien had burst out of Shaw, and the medpod had healed the damage afterwards? It’s funny, how we have a tendency to treat damage done to women by other people as less threatening than women asserting their own autonomy over their bodies.

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.

Roger Ebert, invaulable as always, intervenes in the controversy over the R rating of Bully with a reminder of what the MPAA was trying to do in the first place when it introduced its ratings system:

The MPAA began to set this trap for itself when it got into the ratings business in the first place. It was intended at the time not to promote public decency in language, but to provide the motion picture industry with a plausible way to head off local censorship boards. When I started at the Sun-Times, the city had a board of censors made up of the widows of police captains, and their rulings were often inexplicable. There was also the question of whether censorship was even constitutional. Jack Valenti, in 1968 the new head of the MPAA, came up with the rather brilliant notion that a new code should be “voluntary,” and thus no test of the law. Studios and theaters would be asked for voluntary compliance…

The one thing the MPAA cannot ever do, Valenti argued, is get into the business of value judgments. It can advise parents that a film contains the f-word, for example, but not whether that use is appropriate. Now that 20 members of Congress have come forward to sign a petition protesting the R rating of “Bully,” we can assume that the film uses the word for justifiable reasons.

And he also reminds us that Valenti’s code was a break with the Hays Code, the set of rules that dictated that, for example, even married couples in the movies had to be portrayed sleeping in different beds. If the MPAA’s ratings system has become more conservative than the communities it’s meant to serve, and if it’s no longer helping movies get into communities and in front of audiences that might otherwise be barred from seeing them, then it’s not fulfilling its original intention. Such certainly seems to be the case with Bully, which had schools prepared to bus their students to see it, and has a strong case for letting teenagers, especially those whose parents might not be appropriate and supportive discussion partners, see it on their own. If that’s so, there’s precedent for breaking with the past and starting over.

Well, this is charming. The National Association of Theater Owners has decided to respond to the Weinstein Company’s complaints that the MPAA rating system was too rigid and context-resistant to deal with Bully in a nuanced, intelligent way…by being even more rigid and context-resistant! Deadline reports:

Surveys of America’s parents reflect their very strong concern with the use of harsh language in movies. The vast majority of parents surveyed have indicated that the type of language used in “Bully” should receive an automatic “R” rating. You ask us to ignore the preferences of America’s parents and our own ratings rules because of the merit of this movie. Yet were the MPAA and NATO to waive the ratings rules whenever we believed that a particular movie had merit, or was somehow more important than other movies, we would no longer be neutral parties applying consistent standards, but rather censors of content based on personal mores…I have nothing but tremendous respect for you and the work of TWC. Our industry is so much the better for your involvement. But if you decide to withdraw your support and participation in the rating system, and begin to release movies without ratings, I will have no choice but to encourage my theater owner members to treat unrated movies from The Weinstein Company in the same manner as they treat unrated movies from anyone else.

In most cases, that means enforcement as though the movies were rated NC-17 – where no one under the age of 18 can be admitted even with accompanying parents or guardians.

I’m not a parent, but this reads to me less as an attempt to be responsive to America’s parents and much more as a nuclear option to try to limit the audiences for movies that come out of studios that have the temerity to say that the ratings system doesn’t work for them. It’s one thing to enforce the ratings system, and another to jack up the rating that a movie would have gotten otherwise if a studio doesn’t want to comply with the system. That’s not safeguarding community standards: it’s about showing you have power. Particularly since some school districts are going to try to get permission for their students to see Bully anyway, something that would become impossible if the theaters started enforcing rules that required parents to accompany their children to the movie during the workday.

And of course, this is also a move that will limit tickets sales for NATO members who carry Bully. I wonder if showing you’re willing to get into an arms race with one of Hollywood’s best salesmen is worth the lost revenue.

After the MPAA refused to change the rating on Bully, a documentary about the impact of vicious anti-gay harassment on teenagers, from an R to a PG-13, Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing Bully, has suggested that it might be time for him to depart the MPAA. Weinstein is a showman par excellence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using the ratings system as a way of bringing attention to the movie. But he’s also correct that the ratings system isn’t working to truly get people the information they need to make decisions about what movies their children should see, and in setting standards for which content children absolutely shouldn’t be able to see without their parents present.

First, we need to move beyond the contradictory ideas that ratings simultaneously need to be responsive to community standards, and that they also should be consistent over time. It’s much more important that ratings be responsive to contemporary community standards, broadly defined, than it is that they be consistent from the onset of the ratings system until the present day. If we were still abiding by the standards of the 1947 People v. Wepplo decision that declared material obscene ” “if it has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire,” most American popular entertainment couldn’t be marketed or made at all.

More importantly, the American public as a whole isn’t actually served by holding on to certain old standards. A significant majority of Americans believe that gay couples should at least be able to get the legal protections of civil unions, and we’re edging towards a majority of Americans supporting equal marriage rights. It doesn’t serve the interests of that majority to treat depictions of sexual contact between gay couples differently than depictions of those same acts between straight couples—it serves a minority who are resistant to the consensus that the rest of the country has reached about the normalization of gay couples.

It also doesn’t particularly serve the public interest to have the only grounds for a movie to be moved from R to PG-13 even if the profanity it in would normally trigger an R rating is if “based on a special vote by a two-thirds majority, the Raters feel that most American parents would believe that a PG-13 rating is appropriate because of the context or manner in which the words are used or because the use of those words in the motion picture is inconspicuous.” That doesn’t leave any room for precisely what Bully is trying to accomplish: illustrate that certain language is the opposite of inconspicuous, that it’s pernicious, and damaging, and that it can take lives. One would hope that most American parents believe that it’s a worthy goal to communicate to their teenagers that harassing their peers to the point of suicide is horrendous and a message that doesn’t have to—and in fact shouldn’t—wait until children are of age.

We need a ratings system that more clearly breaks down the reasons parents might find a movie unsuitable for their children, and that provides some sort of context for tagging a movie with those elements. I’ve long thought it might make sense to have a universal ratings system that applies across popular media so parents don’t struggle with the different, and not particularly analogous, systems that are used to label music, movies, television, and video games. And while I don’t think it’s perfect, the television ratings system that appears before programming begins and breaks ratings down into discrete and clear elements seems to me to be the one that provides parents with most information. Parents expose their kids to different things at different rates—I might let my kids hear mild curse words before I let them see Darth Vader cut Luke’s hand off—and they should be given information consistent with that. It’s very, very difficult to reconcile efficiency in label with the goal of providing as much context as possible to parents, but we need more than a single tiny box with several letters in it to truly serve the needs of communities and individual families.

Linda Holmes raises a vital point about Bully that illustrates the difficulty of getting a ratings system right. In theory, it would be good for every student to see a movie about the worst consequences of bullying and harassment with an adult who can help talk through its lessons, be that teacher or parent. But there are also students who may be struggling dreadfully with these issues who might not be safe seeing the movie with a parent or teacher because those people are among their tormenters. We live in a day and age when teachers can use the platforms they have to make life harder for gay students, and when gay teenagers have disturbingly high homelessness rates because their parents are not always supportive. When the ratings system is based around parental decision-making rather than an impossible-to-reach standard of audience wellbeing, it’s going to flounder in cases this one.

When I talked to Eliot Mizrachi, the director of communications at the Entertainment Software Rating Board, about the ESRB’s new ratings system earlier this year, one of the things that confounded me most about the system was the presumption that the more control a player has in a game, the higher the rating ought to be. But some new research is a reminder that, especially as socially responsible — or at least socially-themed games — continue to enter the market, intensity can be about inculcating values and skills as much as it can be about the jolt people get out of shooting marks or beating up hookers. GamePolitics notes this in a piece about video games as useful training ground for crisis management:

“With popular film, you are mentally engaged in understanding the story and keeping in mind different scenes to understand the big picture,” she said. “Even more so with video games, because you have an active role in designing the story, to a certain extent.”

But in studying plot, narrative and metaphor, Furtner found that not all films and video games work well in training. Those with a strong narrative and deep storyline tend to be better than traditional training methods. Furtner says that she plans a new study that she will modify to influence player behaviors. In the long run she hopes that her work will help lead to more integrated ways for agencies, companies and organizations to implement useful crisis management training.

“I want to help people to be able to say, ‘I’m not going to react, I’m going to respond,’” Furtner said. “I think it’s important to make a shift in the way we are teaching our employees so that they are able to remember this a week, a month, a year from now.”

I don’t really see a world of games where players, say, work in a combat hospital and have to make life-and-death choices about how to save their patients are going to eclipse first-person shooters. So I can kind of understand why the ESRB defaults the way it does. But intensity works in a lot of directions and to a lot of different ends. It’s worth keeping that in mind.