We had no ratings systems back in the days of my youth. The Catholic Church circulated listings to the faithful, but as a young Jewess in America I could go to anything I wanted, as long as my parents approved enough to drive me there and buy my ticket.
In many ways, there was no reason to have movie ratings. The studios agreed to the Hayes code, which uphold certain standards about language, nudity and gruesome violence. Arbitrary, ridiculous standards, but generally understood by the audience.
By the late 1960s, all this fell by the wayside as film, like other popular media, responded to an opening up of the culture and a liberation from repressive societal standards (and instituted some new ones, but that’s another sixty or seventy columns). Filmmakers wanted to show how people really talked and really looked and really acted.
Hence, a rating system. It wasn’t great. I remember, after seeing it was rated “M” (Parental Discretion Advised), my parents decided that we, as a family, would go see Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols from Jules Feiffer’s play. I was 18, certainly old enough. And we might have had a fine time… except we took my grandparents, too.
(Side note: Has anyone ever looked more like a flesh-and-blood Feiffer cartoon that Art Garfunkel?)
In any case, movie ratings are a fact of life, along with ratings on all sorts of other things, including television, music, comics and video games. I find them relatively useless. As a parent, my standards for what was inappropriate for my child had little to do with what the ratings board thought and everything to do with my understanding of my individual kid.
The ratings continue to be useless, in no small part because in an attempt to be critically neutral (that is, to not to a position on the artistic merits of any particular film) they provide no context. A recent study showed that PG-13 movies have as much gun violence, for example, as R-rated movies, but this doesn’t necessarily tell us how violent the movie is, nor how much that violence is glamorized.
That is information thoughtful parents want to know.
Now that I’m no longer the parent to a young child, my interest in movie ratings is more selfish. An R-rated comedy is a usually a different animal entirely than a PG comedy. If there is nudity, I want to know exactly who is naked, and how inadequate I’m going to feel in comparison. If the R rating is only from cuss words, that means something entirely different from an R for violence.
So I was delighted to see that, in Sweden, there is demand for information about whether or not a movie passes the Bechdel test. As a consumer, I appreciate knowing if characters of my gender will be treated as independent human beings.
And I wondered, what other information would I appreciate getting from ratings? Here is where I would start.
• Affordable Housing. Under this new ratings system, the audience would be informed ahead of time about the credibility of the housing situation. I was watching It’s Complicated, a movie where Meryl Street has a fabulous house with a fabulous kitchen (I’m coveting kitchens these days) and a fabulous little store and fabulous men who want to have sex with her even though she is the same age they are. And I realized that this movie is, essentially, porn. It’s porn for women, but it sets up the same impossible expectations about reality as conventional porn does for men. Only in this case, the money shot isn’t ejaculation but white carpet that stays clean.
• Traffic. Children need to be protected from unreasonable glorification of dangerous driving. Even worse, it strains credulity to believe, for example, that Jack Bauer could drive across Los Angeles in the daytime in 20 minutes.
• Product Placement. Will I walk out of this movie and then be forced by my over-stimulated toddler to go to McDonalds or Toys’R’Us to buy some piece of crap that was used by the hero in the film? And can there be a parallel rating system that tells me what pro-social, non-consumer behavior is shown?
• Calories. It used to bug me a lot that the characters on soap operas, always extremely thin, spent all of their time meeting in restaurants for meals, or sundaes, or creamy coffee beverages. If I’m going to watch people eat delicious, fattening foods, I want to either see them exercising, or complaining about gaining weight.
• DQ. No, not Dairy Queen (see above), but Drag Quotient. Several years ago, when the Barb Wire movie came out, I saw a little kid run to her mother and point at the poster. “Look, it’s RuPaul!” squealed the child, with joy. No, it was Pamela Anderson, but that’s besides the point. If the movie, television show or comic book features women who have had so much work done with the implants and the hair extensions and the facial injections that they can inspire such a response, please let me know in advance.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
SUNDAY: John Ostrander
If you’re a fan of the 
