Beyond the Multiplex

Critic Jack Mathews, now of the New York Daily News, has argued for many years that the MPAA penalizes depictions of consensual adult sexuality in serious dramatic films, in favor of a farcical, juvenile, teen-comedy vision of sex. One notorious recent example, covered in Dick's film, is the 2003 movie "The Cooler," which was stamped with an NC-17 rating because of a tender, intimate sex scene in which actress Maria Bello's pubic hair is briefly visible. (Director Wayne Kramer, with Bello at his side, appealed the decision and lost.)

Dick agrees with Mathews' assessment, but sees a new pattern, which may be specifically aimed at placating aggressive activists on the right, who are always eager to demonize Hollywood as a den of liberalism and immorality. "In particular, gay sex is much more highly restricted than straight sex," he observes. "It's almost a full rating more restrictive." His film includes a compelling montage in which similar scenes are set next to each other, with the heterosexual image invariably resulting in a less restrictive rating.

In "But I'm a Cheerleader," the ratings board found a masturbation scene offensive, possibly because the teenage girl in the scene is fantasizing about another girl. That scene is far more chaste than the infamous one in "American Pie" in which a hetero teen boy satisfies himself with the aid of recently baked pastry. That film received an R rating, while "But I'm a Cheerleader" got an NC-17.

As director Kimberly Peirce tells Dick, the MPAA board asked for cuts in a sex scene in "Boys Don't Cry" where all we can see is costar Chloë Sevigny's face. Of course, Sevigny's character is being orally pleasured by Hilary Swank's character at the time, and seems to be enjoying a delirious orgasm. The clear message, Peirce says, was: Not too much female pleasure, please, it makes us uncomfortable.

"It might not be an accident that the way the ratings board comes down on gay sex happens to help the MPAA in Washington," Dick says. "The motion-picture ratings are only a small part of what the organization does. The larger part of what they do is their lobbying presence in Washington, where they have recently been quite successful in getting a lot of onerous copyright and piracy laws passed. By coming down hard on films with gay sexual content, that allows them to curry favor with precisely the people who are the most uncomfortable with homosexuality and who hold the balance of power on Capitol Hill."

I'm not terribly encouraged by Dick's suggestion that what America needs is a European-style nanny-state ratings board packed with accredited experts on child development. Despite his assertions, most of the research that claims to identify negative effects of media violence is nebulous at best, and I can't get excited about exchanging one form of de facto censorship for another. At the same time, every parent (myself included) wants some nonjudgmental shorthand method to tell material that's clearly not for kids apart from material that might be.

As Dick says, if the NC-17 didn't virtually crush a film's commercial prospects -- if it were purely an advisory notice that a movie contained "adult" material, and that it might not be OK with your Aunt Hattie or your 6-year-old niece -- it's hard to see how anyone could complain. But right now we have a secret process in which certain films (mostly major studio films) are rewarded, and others (mostly ambitious, quasi-independent productions) are punished, all for reasons nobody gets to know about. As Newsweek critic David Ansen puts it, this isn't designed to protect children, it's designed to turn us all into children.

"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" opens Sept. 1 at the IFC Center in New York and the Nuart in Los Angeles; Sept. 8 in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas; Sept. 15 in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and Washington; Sept. 22 in Austin, San Diego and Seattle; Sept. 29 in Cleveland, Minneapolis, San Jose, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz.; Oct. 6 in Denver and Salt Lake City; and Oct. 13 in Nashville, with more cities to follow.

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