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 Tip o' the mouse to Victor, who ran his blog through this ultra-scientific bit of web software that gives your site an MPAA rating.  His Rightwing Film Geek got the kiss of death: NC-17, no one under 17 admitted under any circumstances!  Why?  Because he had the temerity to use the words (and I quote) "death (20x); sex (18x); gay (10x); abortion (9x); dead (4x); crap (3x); porn (2x); hurt (1x)."

I got my PG-13 for "gay (3x), sex (2x), abortion (1x)."

So the blog rater operates more like the infamous CAPCon "W.I.S.D.O.M." analysis, which comes up with a score merely by counting instances of presumptively objectionable content, than the MPAA, which for all its quotas for foul language certainly takes context into account.  Famously, this approach leads to the most pious Christian fare (such as the Jack Van Impe production Revelation) receiving scores in the 50's on its 100 point scale of virtue (where zero is represented by American Psycho and 100 is represented by that masterpiece of world cinema Who Gets The House).  The CAP people provide the following disclaimer on every analysis page:

We make no scoring allowances for Hollywood's trumped-up "messages" to excuse, or its manufacturing of justification for aberrant behavior or imagery. This is NOT a movie review service. It is a movie analysis service to parents and grandparents to tell them the truth about movies using the Truth. If you do not want the plot, ending, or "secrets" of a movie spoiled for you, skip the Summary/Commentary. In any case, be sure to visit the Findings/Scoring section -- it is purely objectuve and is the heart of the CAP Entertainment Media Analysis Model applied to this movie.

A purely objective rating system.  Isn't that what we all want?  Sex is treated as sex -- gay, straight, or box turtle.  Violence is violence.  Crime is crime.

Well, no.  I don't think that's what we want.  Noel shouldered the thankless task of defending the Motion Picture Association of America in this A.V. Club Crosstalk, and one of his points was that as flawed as its ratings sometimes are, we do need guidance through the post-sixties anything-goes movie landscape.  And we don't need "objective" guidance.  We need guidance that has human judgment behind it, that can tell Saving Private Ryan from Hostel.  Sure, that judgment is fallible, and its biases are often obvious.  But robotic application of binary rules is worse than nothing -- it's the ratings equivalent of zero tolerance policies, for which parents and legislators always clamor loudly, only to be shocked when kids are suspended for bringing plastic cutlery or Tylenol to school.  What they want is the application of ordinary human judgment -- the same human judgment they previously called "tolerance" and wanted to zero out.

And of course, these "purely objective" ratings are based on someone's opinion of what constitutes "offense to God" and "impudence/hate" in the CAPcon example, and "strong language" and "cartoon violence" in the MPAA example.  Humans have to populate those categories, because the "objective" system has not yet been invented that can define a word or assess cultural standards.  And don't get me started on the selection of the categories themselves -- the CAPcon system, billing itself as a child protection scheme, comes down hard on depictions of kids sassing or disobeying authorities.  Huck Finn, with his despairing inability to "do the right thing" and turn in the runaway slave, would not fare well.  Nor, dare I say, would the Bible itself, chock full of wanton violence, impudence/hate, sex, alcohol (good Lord), offense to God (mostly on the part of the villains, certainly, but the beauty of the objective ratings is that it doesn't take that into account), and murder/suicide by the morgue-full.

There's no escape from human judgment, folks.  Rather than searching for the software that can bring us the holy grail of objectivity by counting words, acts, or implications, we need to embrace the conversation that starts with the application of human sensibilities.  So I'm declaring this blog PG, because my community standards don't regard the mere mention of the words gay, sex, or abortion to render the material inappropriate for children under 13, although it indicates that the blog probably isn't aimed at the tweener demographic explicitly.  Victor gets an R (just like the post-Oscar Midnight Cowboy!).  What would you give your site?

Posted: Friday - June 29, 2007 at 06:18 PM         |