1.)
Introduction / 2.)
Ratings, Censorship and Negative Criteria / 3.)
What SHOULD Children See? / 4.) What SHOULDN'T
Children See? / 5.) Children and "Adult"
Drama
Ratings, Censorship, and Negative
Criteria
My own concern is primarily live theatre, but it may be useful to talk
about film and television, because it is much easier to determine what
"Jane and John Q. Public" think is and isn't appropriate there, and anyway
most of what I say can be applied equally well to any entertainment medium.
Considering film and television is easier because film, historically, and
television, more recently, have established systems of "rating" entertainments
for age appropriateness. I have some serious concerns about the way
these ratings are administered, and these relate back to the live theatre,
since in terms of this issue, film and television are not significantly
different from live theatre. I may as well say at once that I do
not consider film or television ratings to be censorship. I am
opposed to censorship, as any committed American artist must be, but I
know what I mean when I use that word, and it isn't ratings. Free
speech gives me the right to express myself through my art in any way I
choose, but it does not give me the right to earn money selling my work
to people who do not want to look at or listen to it. The rating
on a film or television show (or, indeed, the warning label on an audio
recording) does not prevent me from making my art, or even from selling
it. It only insists--or tries to--that people be told the truth about
the nature of my art before they pay money for it, or make the choice to
view it. I am appalled when a local government tries to close down
a museum showing an exhibition of Mapplethorpe photographs, but I would
not waste a single breath of righteous indignation decrying the fact that
an unhindered exhibition didn't make much money because most of the people
in the community don't want to look at such pictures. (I might shed
a tear for the cultural wasteland that produced such narrow-minded people,
and I might object to the way the media has warped people's perceptions
of art, but those are entirely different issues.) I am all for telling
people what they are getting, and especially for telling parents
what they are getting, when they make a decision about any form of art.
It is true that an "R" rating on a film intended to appeal to youngsters
will significantly reduce that film's profits, and this fact means that
the ratings board can effectively enact "sanctions" against a particular
kind of art by thus restricting its earning potential. But that is
an argument for making sure the ratings are entirely objective, not for
abandoning them. No, I have no problem with the concept of
ratings or warning labels.
I do have a problem with them in practice, however. As presently
administered, I don't think the rating system for films is very useful.
This is important to me because the way films are rated affects the way
people think about questions of age appropriateness in all forms of entertainment.
Film ratings have three main problems, it seems to me. First, basing
the whole process on chronological age is misleading. If all seventeen-year-olds
were equally mature, and mature in all the same ways, it might make sense,
but they're not, and neither are the attitudes regarding what is and isn't
appropriate the same across the pool of parents of seventeen-year-olds.
(Or thirteen-year-olds.) When I look at the rating of a film, and
it tells me that parents of children under thirteen should be careful (PG13),
that tells me almost nothing about the film. I have no way
of knowing why the ratings board thinks I should be concerned, and
no way of deciding whether the particular twelve-year-old in my charge
is mature enough to see the film. In my case, if the rating is the
result of "strong language" or even of "sexual situations" I would probably
be comfortable letting a twelve-year-old see the film, as long she was
accompanied by an adult, whereas if it was because of violence, I would
have to decide how important the story was before making up my mind.
(I would let her see graphic violence in Schindler's List but not
in Mortal Kombat.) Other parents might have different,
or even opposite reactions. (I know for certain that there are plenty
of parents who let their children see a lot more graphic and gratuitous
violence than I think is acceptable, yet who are far more afraid of sexuality
than I am.) But that's just the point. In order for ratings
to be useful they must be descriptive enough for individual parents
to make informed decisions. (I am assuming for the time being that
parents should have the right to decide what is appropriate for their own
children.)
The new television ratings are a step in the right direction, not because
they have a wider range of ages (which is pretty silly, if you ask me)
but because they include information about what factors have gone into
the decisions. You can look at the rating on a television program,
or a film on television--even most cable programming--and see why
it got a particular rating. Then you can make a more informed decision
about whether to watch or let children watch. But there is another
problem with the ratings systems of both film and television, and this
problem carries into most people's attitudes about the "appropriateness"
of live theatre. The criteria are entirely negative. In other
words, a "G" rating does not imply the presence of "family friendly" or
child appropriate material in any way--it only implies the absence
of material that could be considered inappropriate. A "G' rated film
will (theoretically) contain no "strong language" (there's another whole
chapter there), no nudity or "sexual situations," and no graphic violence.
But it may not be intended for children in any way, and may in fact be
totally inappropriate in other ways. A film adaptation of Checkov's
The
Cherry Orchard would presumably earn a "G" rating, despite the fact
that it would probably bore to stupefaction anyone under about sixteen.
That's pretty stupid, and if you argue that it's just a byproduct of the
way the ratings system works, and not significant of anything in the attitudes
of the average person, I disagree. This is exactly the kind of thinking
that goes into many people's definition of "age appropriate." At
my school we put out a brochure every fall, listing our season and including,
with synopses of the plays, the note, "best enjoyed by ages . . ."
In this way we essentially provide a "rating" for the play. One of
the teachers was directing a Noel Coward comedy, and his copy reached us
reading "best enjoyed by all ages!" That's so obviously silly that
it can only be because rather than asking himself what age group would
best enjoy the play, he performed an algorithm consisting of various species
of the question, "does it contain anything objectionable?" This is
a very intelligent man, who saw instantly that it was silly when it was
pointed out to him, but he's not alone in automatically applying ratings-style
criteria when considering age appropriateness. Everyone does it,
because it's so easy. We say, "I don't want my child seeing anything
about sex," because it is so much easier than what we should say, which
is, "I want the sexuality of characters in the dramatic forms my child
sees to be presented in a manner that is appropriate, in my view, to his
level of maturity."
I also think it is a mistake to consider only subject matter when deciding
whether an entertainment is age appropriate. Take the example of
The
Cherry Orchard again. For fun, compare it to Joseph and the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (Let's leave out the relative
artistic merits of these two works for now.) If I had to assign movie-style
ratings to these two plays, I'd probably give The Cherry Orchard
a "G" rating, since I can't think of anything that precludes it. Joseph,
however, contains a handful of mildly dirty jokes, quite a bit of innocent
double entendre, and at least one "sexual situation." I'd probably
have to rate it "PG13." Yet nobody I know would ever suggest that
The
Cherry Orchard is more appropriate for a young audience than
Joseph.
The problem, of course, is that what makes Checkov difficult for children,
and what makes at least this Webber/Rice so much fun for them (remember
we're ignoring questions of artistic merit for now), has nothing to do
with content and everything to do with structure and style. When many people
say a work is "age appropriate," they don't mean it is intended for, or
likely to be interesting to, children of a particular age. Rather
they mean it doesn't contain any of a (relatively arbitrary) list of things
they think are "inappropriate." It is this kind of negative, algorithm-based
approach to that leads to absurdities such as the fact that The Sound
of Music--which bored me silly as a child, with its slow pace, songs
that stopped the plot dead in the water, and emphasis on romantic love
and WWII politics--is rated "G," while something like Nightmare on Elm
Street--which is clearly intended, rightly or wrongly, for a young
audience, and which practically no one over seventeen would willingly sit
through--earns an "R." I would love to see a ratings system that,
if it insists on talking about chronological age, considers the style,
complexity and structure of a piece of art when labeling it "appropriate"
for a particular age. And I'd like to see one whose criteria are
positive as well as negative. But most important, since I don't necessarily
think I have a right to impose my views of what's appropriate on others,
I'd like to see a system that describes, rather than simply "rates"
art, so that parents and other responsible adults can make their own judgements.
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Copyright © 1999 by Matt Buchanan