I remember years ago hearing a speaker talking to youth about their entertainment choices. He told a story about his little boy not wanting to eat raisins. So he decided to try a little experiment. He gave him a bowl of cereal with one raisin in it. He watched his son pick out the raisin and go ahead and eat the cereal. The next day he put a couple of raisins in the bowl, and again the little boy removed them before eating the cereal. The next morning he put in a handful, and then watched as his son carefully picked out every raisin. Finally, he placed a bowl of cereal in front of his son with raisins mixed all through the cereal. The boy started to remove them one at a time, and then just gave up and pushed the bowl away.
The point of the story was to ask teenagers how much offensive material has to be in a movie before you decide it's just not worth trying to pick your away around it. Good question. I'm finding that as I get older, instead of becoming more tolerant of what I see in movies, I'm actually becoming less and less happy trying to ignore offensive material in my entertainment.
My wife and I fast-forwarded our way through the Oscars last night just to see which movies that we have not seen would get awards this year. I wondered why each year it seems like I've seen fewer and fewer of the nominated movies. This year we've only seen one of the films up for Best Picture.
And then it struck me--of the 15 movies up for one of the top awards (Picture, Director, Best & Supporting Actor/Actress), 10 were rated R and 5 were rated PG-13. Not one movie out of the 15 was rated PG or G. According to Kids-in-Mind.com (a very helpful resource for parents about the mature content of films--actually, Judy and I frequently use it to decide what we will see), these 15 movies included a total of over 150 "F" words. That's an average of more than 10 a film! (Granted, two of the films accounted for nearly 100 of that total, but most of the films had at least 2 or 3, if not more.) The only nominee for Best Picture which did not find "F" words necessary to produce quality dialogue was "The Reader"--and it got a 9 out of 10 for the amount of sex!
Some will say that such films are realistic and serious and true-to-life. Maybe. But I can remember when Hollywood was able to make Acadamy Award winning movies without vulgarity, nudity, simulated sex acts, or realistic visual effects of someone's head being cut off.
So when I look at the movie listings on a Friday night, I find myself wondering, "How many raisins can I keep picking out of my cereal?"
The answer seems to be "less than I used to" . . . but even at that, I'm pretty sure I'm putting up with more than Jesus would.
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4 comments:
You should know, Rob, that no one wants to make a PG movie. The don't make enough money. If you studio wants to make money, then they make a G movie. If they want to win awards and be lauded then make an "R." PG, in may ways, is caught between. If it's not something with a built-in audience (High School Musical, Hannah Montana, etc...) it's hard to find a PG audience.
Parents won't take young kids to PG movies and teenagers and adults, largely, feel that PG is "kid's stuff." Our attitudes about suck things are revealed even in the site you wisely point us to: "Kids-In-Mind." Somehow we've adopted the idea that PGish is child's play.
Now I'm one of those people who really believes that not everything should be "family-friendly," but I do think you're right in highlighting how many things in movies are offensive and questionable.
At the same time, I remember Ron Howard talking about sex and language in movies. His take was about the "why" of such things. There's very little language in Apollo 13 (very, very little) and Howard said that had to do with who those people were. There's much more, I suppose, in Frost/Nixon. Why? Because that's who those people were.
That being said, I, too, hadn't seen ANY of the nominated films. Why? Cause I just don't go to the movies all that much.
"You should know, Rob, that no one wants to make a PG movie. The don't make enough money."
Sean, the studies I've read indicate that G and PG movies make more money than R rated movies. Here's a USA Today article talking about it:
Sex Doesn't Sell?
Casey Perkins
Casey,
Thanks for posting that link. It is a very interesting article that updates the work of movie critic Michael Medved in his 1992 book, Hollywood vs. America. The book is a devastating expose of the truth about the change in Hollywood that occured in the late 1960s and drove away as much as 2/3 of the movie going audience. Here are a few lines from his book:
"Recent history shows conclusively that whatever motivations pushed the motion picture business to its current obsessions, financial self-interest was not among them...
Consider, for example, the universally accepted assumption that Hollywood grinds out so many "R"-rated films only because these features make more money at the box office. This proposition cannot possibly survive even a brief inspection of the readily available figures from accepted industry sources...
Taken together, the numbers since 1980 show that a given "G" or "PG" film is nearly five times more likely to place among the year's box-office leaders than an "R" film. (pp. 286-288)
The offensive and dark trends he documents so conclusively have only become more and more evident in the fifteen years since his book was published. This despite the fact that the more money is to be made in less offensive films. The motivation in making so many violent, foul-mouthed, and immoral movies is clearly not money.
Rob
Sean,
Thanks for the comments. I agree that not every thing should be "family-friendly." As an example, Schindler's List was a brilliant movie about a very adult topic (the holocaust), and one to which I would never take young children.
However, the nudity in that film is also an example of what upsets me about Hollywood. When the victims were shown being stripped and herded naked into the gas chambers, the nudity was justified and perhaps necessary to truly appreciate what happened at the hands of the Nazis.
On the other hand, there was a scene of the commandant in his room overlooking the concentration camp, calmly surveying the camp after having sex with his mistress. The mistress was shown in bed topless, with the sheet only covering the lower half of her body. Some young, unknown actress actress was made to display herself for the director's artistic vision. While the nudity may have helped accentuate the commandant's depravity, it was not necessary to the plot or the history. And that actress will live with that scene forever on her resume.
This is what I see as the difference between mature subject matter and offensive content.
Thanks again.
Rob
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