On Dangerous Penises and Harmless Torture

To continue my previous rant...er, post, and to indulge my love of throwing a controversial theory around, are images of sex, violence, and drugs in popular media all that harmful? Or is the contextual basis what we should really be looking at?

Here's my (soon to be belaboured) point. I don't think that violence, harsh language, or sex is all that harmful to older children or teenagers, provided they are capable of understanding the context and the purpose for showing it. When it doesn't have a purpose, it's what we call gratuitous. There just to titillate, a little "gratuity" or tip for the hardworking average Joe for coughing up $25 or whatever it is now for a ticket. I love gratuitous nudity and violence in its place. If you ask me, a courtroom drama where the DA takes down her hair, whips out her breasts, blows up a car outside, and then resumes her closing argument is a better courtroom drama because of it. But I'm 28 years old and a working professional. I would never blow up a car I paid 18% interest on for four years. And I also know that showing your breasts in a professional situations is more likely to get you hauled into HR's office than into a plushy executive position.

There, the purpose is to entertain. It's not a part of the story, no statement is being made, and the contextual basis is nil. We as adults can make that distinction. But children can't. We'd hardly want an 8 year old to think that blowing up a car doesn't have consequences. Or to not realize that when a ninja clears a room of bad guys, that the reason the bad guys are conveniently lying quietly afterward is because they are dead or dying of massive internal injuries. So do I believe we should limit gratuitous nudity, drug use, violence, and language in film to adults? Abso-fucking-lutely. Without the ability for children to understand not only what they're seeing, but why they're seeing it, they should never see disturbing material separated from its proper contextual basis. They just don't have the capacity to make the call...but moreover to even understand that a call is being made.

But when controversial elements are used to make a point, I believe it can be more beneficial than damaging. Sure, you don't show a three year old a beheading under any circumstances. But look at Glory, Boys in the Hood, Requiem for a Dream, Mean Creek, or Bowling for Columbine. These movies all use controversial elements, and all of them earn their right to depict what they depict with a thoughtful treatment of the matter at hand. Hotel Rwanda showed little children dead on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood, and that image has never left me. But it earned the right to do that. Pay it Forward used the death of a child to force people to cry right at the end. It was completely unnecessary, exploitative, and served as a plot twist. It was melodrama, and melodrama is entertainment. Is the death of a child entertaining to you? Not to me.

Glory showed graphic violence, yes. Would I recommend that 11 year olds see it? No, but it's a well-made film with considerable historical value that puts across so many valuable messages without being preachy: that people united in something of value can put aside racial and class differences and support one another, that standing up for what is fair and right is more important than monetary gain or social acceptance, that bad attitudes can be changed by empathy and willingness to understand a fellow man's experiences, and that war is a horrific experience and that the casualties involved are significant and personal and tragic - unlike most video games would have us believe. Yet no one under 18 is able to see this movie, despite the fact that they are the very same age group targeted by military recruitment efforts. Apparently we believe that 17 year olds with parental consent are fit to serve in the military, but not old enough to witness the human consequences of war.

Boys in the Hood was a movie that looked at systemic racism as a whole, and more specifically, how gang violence, drugs and alcohol, and absent parents contribute to the shocking mortality rate of (mostly) African-American (mostly) men living in ghettos. This is a very relevant film that takes a hard look at the senseless violence that results from joining a gang, and the trap that drug and alcohol use can create when it strips away the desire to change one's current environment. Unless I'm mistaken, and the newspapers would lead me to believe I'm not, the 15-17 year olds that can't see it would be the ones that need this message, in time, the most. Not to mention that the characters in the movie were 17 year olds; are we arguing that we can bear that they deal with in reality what we couldn't bear for them to see in a movie?

Requiem for a Dream is disturbing, all right. The MPAA felt it was so much so that it was hit with the NC-17 rating, meaning that no theatres in their right mind would have shown it, and it would have faced financial ruin. The producers finally elected to release it unrated to avoid this, but theatres would then still have to restrict children. Now, this is not for the kiddies; double-headed dildos, forced amputation, electroshock treatment and prison beatings are pretty extreme consequences of drug use. But as a deterrent from drug use, for older teenagers who are experimenting with harder and harder drugs at younger and younger ages, this sure would beat the pants off the vague "just say no" superficiality of most anti-drug policies. The presence of the drugs isn't the point, and their inclusion shouldn't necessarily be the problem, since only the certifiably insane would claim that this film glamorizes drug use in any way.

Mean Creek, rated R, takes a calm, quiet, deeply unsettling look at school-age bullying and what can happen when a bad, if somewhat understandable idea gets into the hands of the wrong kid. The bully in this movie is pretty bad, but the movie is brave enough and cares enough to show that his aggression is due to the deep loneliness he feels at being unable to connect. The teenager that encourages the others to act out a vengeance ploy is no white knight avenger but a bully in his own right, satisfying his own emotional agenda. The teens realize once the plan is underway that it might be a bad idea, but don't act, and their inability to resist the mob mentality results in tragedy. As if that wasn't enough antidote to the "kick the bad guy's ass" simplicity of most teen dramas, they must struggle with whether to tell the truth and deal with the consequences, and why they must in order to hope for redemption. The reason, incidentally, for banning this film from being seen by teenagers is because of the use of the "F" word. If you know of even a 10 year old who has never heard this word, you live in a much nicer world than I.

Here we have a movie depicting preteens and teenagers struggling as they start to develop an independent moral system. It's just that lack of moral system that we point to time and time again when we see horror in the news; but since we never give young people the encouragement or opportunity to think about these issues, how can we expect them to develop it in a vacuum? Bowling for Columbine is another great example of this specious logic, a thought-provoking film that teenagers cannot see. If anyone should be outraged by this, it should be those very teenagers, their schoolteachers, and parents. Gun control is becoming an issue that is screaming to be addressed. Children do not feel secure at schools, and they know damn well why they shouldn't; the same 17 years olds that acquired the guns and killed their classmates would have been deemed too young to see a film discussing their actions or the political system of a country that allowed it to happen. If teenagers are not asked to think about such things, we are putting an already vulnerable segment in an even more precarious position: ignorance.

I am certainly not advocating movies as a scare tactic for today's youth, but I believe that raising consciousness and having discussion about issues like drug use, bullying, gun control, gang violence, war, racism are more important than using censorship to pretend they don't exist. If a movie earns the right to depict something with sensitivity and depth, let us think twice before we reject it out of hand.

Or at the least, demand that the MPAA start to justify their decision making process. The sight of a penis or pubic hair almost guarantees an NC-17 regardless of context. Too traumatizing, I suppose, for teens to see something that exists in their own pants. But somehow it's not considered traumatizing for trashy Hollywood fare to show misogynist attitudes and violence if it's supposed to be funny.

How else do you explain the MPAA feeling that a movie like Employee of the Month, where the clerks sit around spewing homophobic remarks and a dimwitted female lead rewards with sexual favours anyone who attains "Employee of the Month" status as suitable entertainment for 14 year olds?

And then there's Big Daddy, where an unfit adult caregiver repeatedly has fits of violent rage in front of a 5 year old and even encourages said 5 year old to participate. Adults know that a child in real life who was abandoned, found by a stranger and forced to witness violence and urinate on newspapers would be seriously traumatized. And probably, so do most teenagers. But a little more insidious is how the main character continuously degrades and humiliates a woman because she worked as a waitress for Hooters to put herself through medical school. Somehow this feels...icky. What is the movie trying to say, here? We know that a woman intelligent and driven enough to support herself and get through medical school while working is a far better role model than a 32 year old who works one day a week at a tollbooth because he's living off a settlement, who uses an abandoned child as a ploy to get dates, and who is a violent jerk, but the movie's not quite sure about that. His incessant and misogynistic comments about her being "nothing but a Hooters girl" and "what are you going to tell your kids about their mother" despite her being a doctor is a little worrisome, considering that his character uses a "live nudes" sign as a night light. But the fun is being poked at his stupidity, right? I'm not so sure. The former Hooters girl with the medical degree is portrayed very clearly as the 'bad guy' for being concerned about the child's welfare and condemning the clearly antisocial behaviour of the Sandler character, while the Sandler character comes off as sympathetic. So what's going on? And can a 13 year old really make that distinction, if I can't quite figure it out?

Or 2 Fast 2 Furious, another PG-13 where we have men repeatedly punching and kicking each other, a race where a car (and presumably, the driver) ends up turned sideways beneath a semi and is crushed, a man repeatedly bashing another man's head onto a dashboard and then using a button to eject said man into a body of water and (are you ready for this?) a scene where a men forcibly ties another man down, places a live rat in an upside down can on the man's bare chest and heats the can with a torch, thus making the tortured rat have nowhere to escape but through the man's body. Soon thereafter the man removes the can and rat, we see the bloody scratch marks on the man's chest.

Now that's something that I just wouldn't want a 14 year old to be exposed to. MPAA, you have some 'splaining to do.