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America Loves a Bully
by Adam Leipzig
Joan Graves, head of the MPAA’s ratings board, writing to defend the R rating for the film Bully, has said, “Our ratings reflect how we believe a majority of American parents, not just from large cities on the coasts but everywhere in between, would rate a film.”
She’s probably right. That scares the hell out of me.
Let’s be honest about why a movie with a half-dozen “bad” words or a nipple-slip gets rated R, while horrific violence routinely earns a PG-13.
We Americans say we abhor violence, but we’re really quite comfortable with it. Violence has always been a signal part of American society and yes, to some extent it’s a Red State/Blue State issue.
Our history of violence goes a long way back, to the Revolutionary War that incepted our nation, and continuing through the many military actions our country has taken over the years. Yes, other countries were founded with a war, and many have engaged in military actions on foreign shores. But most countries have not engaged in civil wars, as America did, for four long, bloody years; we fought ourselves over issues that, in some ways, parallel today’s politics, with the southeast at odds with the northeast. America’s Civil War not only had the highest number of casualties of any US war, but had the highest number of deaths as a percentage of our population: six times more deadly than World War II, the next most deadly war in terms of US casualties.
There’s an inherent violence in the American swagger, the bellicose way we approach negotiations, our armies of litigious lawyers, and the political clout of the gun rights lobby. Americans own more guns per capita than people of any other nation, and while guns may or may not be for protection and sport, as the NRA claims, there’s no arguing that the gun is the most compact and effective mechanism of violence ever devised.
Here’s the Red/Blue divide.
According to a recent poll, Republicans heavily favor US military action against Iran, strong military spending and keeping America’s military presence overseas (America has a military presence in 148 nations, three-quarters of the countries in the world). Democrats oppose all of these things. To draw us back to Bully, the same people who object to movie F-bombs don’t mind real bombs; they also want to limit women’s reproductive rights, some are OK with forced trans-vaginal ultrasound, most oppose gay marriage, and historically they have not raised objections to plenty of violence in our entertainment.
America’s dominant religious traditions have long accepted violence but deplored sexuality and certain kinds of speech. The evangelical Christian/Tea Party/Red State bloc has its roots in Puritanism, which taught that anything pleasurable was the devil’s work – sex and music especially. The Right is comfortable censoring sex and language, but not violence, because sex and language transgress their preferred religious ethic while violence does not. The Right doesn’t feel violence will undermine our way of life – and their method of dealing with it is generally more violence. On the other hand, sex and language (all the “bad” words relate to sex) feel truly threatening to them: witness the battles over gay marriage.
So what should we do about our movie ratings system? I believe parents should be able to make informed decisions about what their children see. I believe our entertainment affects us. I believe movies, plays, art, and music can uplift, inform and heal. But if they can heal, they can also harm. That’s why I’d keep most violence away from kids, and be far more open about language and sexuality – the aspects of being human that are self-expressive and creative, as opposed to destructive.
In America, throughout our history as well as today, violence barely causes a ripple, while sex and language provoke tidal waves. That’s what really scares the hell out of me.
Adam Leipzig, Cultural Weekly’s publisher and an independent film producer and executive, is the former president of National Geographic Films. He trains creatives and entrepreneurs how to get their greatest work into the world.
Image from the film Bully, courtesy The Weinstein Company.
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Comments (6)
Charity Hume
March 19th, 2012 at 2:54 AM
Thank you for this article. It scares the hell out of me too. A recent headline that brought US hypocrisy about tolerating violence into sharper focus for me was "Church goers more likely to back torture." Enough said.
Editor
March 22nd, 2012 at 6:48 AM
"According to a recent poll, Republicans heavily favor US military action against Iran, strong military spending and keeping America’s military presence overseas (America has a military presence in 148 nations, three-quarters of the countries in the world). Democrats oppose all of these things."
You've got to be kidding? This is just not true. Democrats are as imperialistic as their republican partners. I have never heard one Democrat in power ever talk about shutting down the overseas military bases. That is a very misleading, factually wrong statement.
Democrats are also war hungry, and salivate at the thought of more small easily winnable wars, such as in Libya, Syria, and central Africa. The imperialism of Democrats is obvious and quite disgusting. If you oppose Bush's wars, you must oppose Obama's. Anything less is blatant hypocrisy.
CulturalWeekly
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:51 PM
I do, in fact, oppose the wars under the Obama administration, just as I opposed the wars in prior administrations. I was referring only to the poll results cited: that in this poll Republicans were more heavily in favor of military action against Iran, higher military spending and the scale of our overseas presence, and in the same poll, Democrats more heavily opposed those issues.
America Loves a Bully and the Acceptance of Violence in Movies | The Pangea Blog
March 22nd, 2012 at 5:19 PM
[...] you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed or join the email update list.FROM ADAM LEIPZIG AT CULTURAL WEEKLY:Joan Graves, head of the MPAA’s ratings board, writing to defend the R rating for the film Bully, [...]
Phil Wood
March 23rd, 2012 at 12:33 AM
This is a splendid scary piece. I've been pondering it for a while, wondering how applicable it is here in the UK. Here there's something of a fault line opened up between religious and political conservatives. Our Tories are just as nasty as ever on poverty/wealth and war but have become more libertarian on sexual ethics. The religious right are more consistently nasty but far more marginal than in the U.S.
As a UK based Mennonite I've always been puzzled as to why American Mennonites tend to vote Republican. A curious choice for a peace church. I've always read Anabaptism from the left rather than the right. Though peaceable I'm mostly nearer Muntzer than Menno.
Garner Simmons
March 24th, 2012 at 2:19 AM
Although I am generally opposed to censorship of any sort, allow me to play devil's advocate with respect to the R rating for Bully. The R requires that anyone under the age of 17 be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. As a parent who believes that motion pictures, especially controversial ones, should be seen by both parents and children together so that the issues presented can be openly discussed once you've left the theater, such a rating is not necessarily a bad thing.
Some years ago, Disney released a film called Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams. The film received a PG rating meaning that there was nothing to prevent a child from attending. The story for those who are unfamiliar with it, deals with a charismatic teacher at a private boys school who strongly influences his students in poetry and the arts. One of the students has a secret passion for the theater and tries out for Puck in a student production of Midsummer Night's Dream without his father's knowledge. When the boy's overbearing father finds out, he orders the boy to resign from the play, threatening him with military school. Distraught, the boy commits suicide. The result is that William's teacher is dismissed causing his remaining students to stand up for him against the "injustice" done by the school's insensitive administration.
Having taken my three sons, we discussed the film as we drove home. Our middle son, Sean, then 11, was particularly moved by what we had seen. So I asked him, did the boy who committed suicide do the right thing? Sean was absolute in his belief that the boy had no other choice given his father's actions. Then I pointed out that at 17, the boy had his whole life in front of him and that he would be under his father's control for a year or two at most. That he had thrown his whole life away for nothing. As we continued to discuss it, I realized that that was the scene Disney had failed to include. Instead counseling the class about this senseless suicide, they had chosen to direct our pity towards Robin Williams (after all, he was the star). But more to the point, I found myself wondering how many young people seeing the film without their parents had no one to rebut the dangerous notion that suicide was a valid solution.
One might ask a similar question this weekend with respect to Hunger Games with is PG-13 despite extreme violence towards children.
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