This Post Has Been Rated "B" (Boring)...
I've been thinking about film ratings lately. Lord knows why.
For my international friends who might not be totally familiar with the American movie-rating system, here it is in a nutshell:
G
General AudiencesContent is suitable for all ages.
PG
Parental Guidance SuggestedSome material may be unsuitable for children..
PG-13
Parents Strongly CautionedA stronger PG suggesting content inappropriate for those under the age of 13.
R
RestrictedNo one under 17 admitted without parent or guardian.
NC-17
No One 17 or Under AdmittedAdult-only content; absolutely no underage admission.
(The PG rating replaced an earlier "GP" (General - Parental Advisory) classification, which itself had supplanted the original "M" (Mature) rating; both of these abandoned ratings were deemed too confusing and/or misleading for their stated purposes. PG-13 is the infamous rating created after parents groups complained about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, specifically scenes of Mola Ram yanking the beating heart out of the chest of a human sacrifice, prompting Spielberg to suggest an "intermediate" category between PG and R. And NC-17 replaced the "X" rating, which was oddly never trademarked by the MPAA and thus exploited by the porn industry as an advertising gimmick, rendering it worse than useless as an official classification.)
It may occur to you that a lot of this system is totally subjective in nature, open to wide-ranging interpretation depending on who's in charge of the ratings department on a given day. In particular, the lines between PG, PG-13, and R content seem to be an arbitrary division, as I can name many films rated R that could easily have earned a PG-13, and some PG films that might need to go as high as R. The recent Watchmen film might even have had to garner an NC-17 due to the rather graphic violence portrayed, but it managed to squeak by with an R (probably for commercial considerations, as NC-17 movies tend to have a stigma to them that keeps audiences away). In no way do I feel any of the six Star Wars films needed to be ranked any higher than PG, yet Revenge of the Sith got slapped with a PG-13, probably because of the mass Jedi wipeout and Anakin's rather grisly fate. The original Transformers movie from 1986 got a PG rating -- itself highly unusual for an animated film of the time -- but I really might have gone as high as PG-13 with it simply because of Optimus Prime's death and some of the nightmare-quality visuals. And I could name a few movies of the '80s (Spaceballs and Beetlejuice being the ones that pop instantly to mind) that managed to drop one or two F-bombs on the audience; this is usually an instant R for any film, yet these two were able to get away with lower ratings. Any confusion over exactly what pushes a movie into R/NC-17 territory instead of PG/PG-13 could be alleviated if the MPAA would simply be more public about their exact guidelines... a move the MPAA has always staunchly refused to make.
Not only that, but the very ratings themselves, by which I mean the symbols used to represent them, strike me as substantially flawed. It was fine when the system was established in 1968, when only a single-letter scheme was used (G, M, R, and X in increasing order of explicitness). The current system of letters and numbers is a classificationist's nightmare, following no intrinsic logic or discernible pattern in its structure. Their meanings can be divined by the public only as it relates to the films that bear the rating. A G-rated movie, for example, has come to mean a film targeted only at young children, like a Disney animated feature, when in reality it simply means the content has been deemed "appropriate" for all ages. By way of illustration, the original Star Wars bore a G rating upon its initial release, as did Star Trek: The Motion Picture (though both have since been reclassified as PG). Similarly, NC-17 suggests pornography to the average moviegoer, mostly because it effectively replaced the X rating in the system, which for years had been used and abused by the adult-film industry. If you were to ask the average person on the street, chances are most wouldn't be able to tell you what the abbreviations really stand for, except perhaps that R means "Restricted." This, to me, does not suggest a sound and logical system. (Don't even get me started about our current TV ratings system, or the convoluted mess that is the ESRB.)
There is a lesser-known ratings system, utilized by the independent (that is, non-MPAA controlled) Film Advisory Board, that is as I write this the only "official" alternative to the MPAA categories. However, it's every bit as nonsensical, if not worse in some respects:
C
ChildrenAppropriate for ages 10 and under.
F
FamilyAppropriate for all ages; equivalent of G rating.
PD
Parental DiscretionMay not be suitable for children; equivalent of PG.
PD-M
Parental Discretion - MatureIntended for ages 13 and up; equivalent of PG-13.
EM
Extremely MatureIntended for ages 17 and older; equivalent of R or NC-17 depending on content.
AO
Adults OnlyAges 18 and older only; equivalent of abandoned X rating.
On the positive side, the FAB's system is color-coded for easier identification; the colors start at bright yellow for C and progressively darken as content becomes stronger. This is a nice idea, one that's utilized by other countries (such as the UK, Canada, and Japan) in their film-rating systems. However, the initialisms used are perhaps even harder to remember than their MPAA counterparts, and the content guidelines continue to be arbitrary and subject to individual interperetation of just what constitutes material "appropriate for" certain age groups. And then there's the curious coincidence that the FAB rating for a Family film bears the same symbol as a failing grade in most American school programs; it's possible to read too much into that and suggest the implication that family-friendly films are doomed to failure at the box office.
I acknowledge and agree that there should be some form of easy-to-remember ratings system for movies, to determine at a glance whether I should let my kids see a certain film. I also concede that it's not possible to establish a foolproof, universally-accepted way to do this, as everyone's values are different and what strikes me as offensive content, you might simply brush off, or vice versa. However, I believe the current systems as utilized by the MPAA and even the FAB are fundamentally broken in that they make very little mnemonic sense and are too open to misrepresentation. The FAB's system has a few good ideas, namely the color-coding of ratings and dividing their equivalents of G and NC-17 to lessen the stereotyping associated with movies released under those ratings, but those initialisms have to go -- they look terrible and can often stand for something completely different ("PD," for instance, is a common abbreviation for "Public Domain" in media circles), resulting in further confusion.
Maybe a system in which numbers are used instead of letters, representing the suggested age one should be in order to see the movie in question, would work. Maybe combine this with, instead of an alphanumeric symbol, an actual icon that serves as a recognizable visual shorthand. By now we should all be used to certain universal constants (at least in the American idiom) with iconography; a red octagon, for instance, means "STOP" even if the word isn't spoken, while a yellow triangle with a ! inside indicates a show-stopping problem requiring attention (thanks in part to our friends up in Redmond). There's nothing, other than cultural inertia, to suggest such a system of widely-recognized pictographs cannot work in place of the now-familiar MPAA ratings boxes, and if set up properly might even make it easier to convey, at a glance, a helpful suggestion to answer to that age-old question of parentdom: "Should I let my kids watch this?"
And I don't even know why I'm talking about this now! All I know is that I've rambled on and on about something nobody probably cares about, yet for whatever reason has entered my ADD-riddled brain and demanded attention. Oh well.
Let me know what you think, anyway.