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Since my stuff has now gone and I'm heading to Melbourne on Thursday morning, I decided to go and see Sin City
this afternoon. It was a good movie - well shot, well acted, good
design and performances. I wasn 't at all surprised to find that
Quentin Tarantino did a guest director spot for one of the scenes; it's
just his kind of genre, and the structure and content of the story take
a bit from Pulp Fiction. Can't speak to whether the film is a good adaptation of Frank Miller's stuff, though, having never looked at it.
What really baffled and angered me was the rating it got - MA (15+). I'm not at all conservative about these things, and I probably wouldn't mind my hypothetical fifteen year old child of the right maturity level watching this film, even though it deals either explicitly or implicitly with gang murders, rape, domestic violence, child abuse, cannibalism, BDSM, prostituion, police corruption and evil men who turn yellow. It would make for quite the parent-child discussion afterwards, but that'd be okay with me as long as I felt my kid could handle the movie without getting deeply upset in the first place.
The rating does, however, show a certain hypocrisy in our society when you consider that Lolita - a far less violent film that dealt with child molestation in a pretty complex and confronting way - was given an R rating in this country. Sex and the issues surrounding it seem to be far more difficult for us to deal with than, say, a man having his arms and legs chopped off and being left alive for his pet wolf to eat. It's less acceptable to examine how adolescent sexuality might muddy the waters of child molestation than it is to witness a woman talking about how her hand was chopped off and she had to watch while her captor ate it.
But is the trend here really sex versus violence? The violence in Sin City is definitely more prominent that the sexual stuff is, and vice versa in Lolita. But does it come down to the fact that one is more marketable to a large audience of teenage boys, while the other is ostensibly an arthouse film intended for people who read Nabakov, so one has better financial backing and a higher corporate profile and is thus better placed to lobby for a more commerically viable rating?
Or is it more individualised? Does it come down to societal sensitivity over child molestation? In which case, you'd think something like Baise Moi wouldn't necessarily have scored an R rating as well, let alone been nearly banned. Does timing matter, such that you might not get sexually explicit things put through in a more politically conservative climate?
I'm not saying that Lolita should've had an MA rating instead of an R. In fact, I can't quite decide which category I'd put them both in myself, but I do feel it's inconsistent to have one in a more restircted category than the other. I guess that goes to show just how difficult the job of censorship must be, even if you take into account the presence of guidelines, committees and appeal processes. When it comes down to it, it's just other people deciding what's over the line and what isn't, what society will and won't tolerate. It's not a job I envy, especially when I realise how irate issues like this make me feel - I can't imagine being the target of other people's righteous indignation the way they often are.
What really baffled and angered me was the rating it got - MA (15+). I'm not at all conservative about these things, and I probably wouldn't mind my hypothetical fifteen year old child of the right maturity level watching this film, even though it deals either explicitly or implicitly with gang murders, rape, domestic violence, child abuse, cannibalism, BDSM, prostituion, police corruption and evil men who turn yellow. It would make for quite the parent-child discussion afterwards, but that'd be okay with me as long as I felt my kid could handle the movie without getting deeply upset in the first place.
The rating does, however, show a certain hypocrisy in our society when you consider that Lolita - a far less violent film that dealt with child molestation in a pretty complex and confronting way - was given an R rating in this country. Sex and the issues surrounding it seem to be far more difficult for us to deal with than, say, a man having his arms and legs chopped off and being left alive for his pet wolf to eat. It's less acceptable to examine how adolescent sexuality might muddy the waters of child molestation than it is to witness a woman talking about how her hand was chopped off and she had to watch while her captor ate it.
But is the trend here really sex versus violence? The violence in Sin City is definitely more prominent that the sexual stuff is, and vice versa in Lolita. But does it come down to the fact that one is more marketable to a large audience of teenage boys, while the other is ostensibly an arthouse film intended for people who read Nabakov, so one has better financial backing and a higher corporate profile and is thus better placed to lobby for a more commerically viable rating?
Or is it more individualised? Does it come down to societal sensitivity over child molestation? In which case, you'd think something like Baise Moi wouldn't necessarily have scored an R rating as well, let alone been nearly banned. Does timing matter, such that you might not get sexually explicit things put through in a more politically conservative climate?
I'm not saying that Lolita should've had an MA rating instead of an R. In fact, I can't quite decide which category I'd put them both in myself, but I do feel it's inconsistent to have one in a more restircted category than the other. I guess that goes to show just how difficult the job of censorship must be, even if you take into account the presence of guidelines, committees and appeal processes. When it comes down to it, it's just other people deciding what's over the line and what isn't, what society will and won't tolerate. It's not a job I envy, especially when I realise how irate issues like this make me feel - I can't imagine being the target of other people's righteous indignation the way they often are.
