PG-13

Do You Know Where Your Children Are? is the cover story of this week’s Washington Post Magazine. It’s about the PG-13 movie rating, which has been with us nearly 20 years (geez, I’m getting old). Because the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates movies, is an arm of the studios themselves, the lines between “R” and “PG-13” have blurred over the years, with many movies now getting the softer rating. Indeed, that category is the most profitable of all:

[A]ttracting older teenagers as well as younger ones and even children, maximizing its profit-making potential by leaving no group languishing out on the sidewalk. Unlike R movies, which restrict any unchaperoned child under 17, the PG-13 rating means any child will be accepted who has the muscle mass to proffer a bill, even though PG-13 movies by definition contain material inappropriate for these same young moviegoers.

Because of its broad and inclusive reach, PG-13 has become by far the most profitable rating that a movie can receive. Last year, 13 of the 20 top-grossing films were rated PG-13 (most of the rest were rated R). Overall, PG-13 films earned $4.5 billion in 2002, twice as much as R-rated movies, despite the fact that R films (which include fringe and foreign releases) were more numerous. Those dramatic numbers explain why the PG-13 rating is now the most sought-after by studios, which aggressively pursue it.

The problem, of course, isn’t with the studios or the MPAA, but with absentee parents:

The white sedan was sleek and expensive, and the woman driv-ing it looked sleek and expensive, too. Her face was heavy with makeup, her hair ambitiously coiled as if she had someplace interesting to go. She pulled up to the curb of the Loews Wheaton Plaza multiplex and waited while five children got out of her car. From the front passenger’s side came two girls who looked to be about 12 and 13; from the back emerged a boy of 8 or so as well as two smaller children, no older than 5 or 6.

It was a few minutes before 10 on a Friday evening. Most of the movies were starting their final, late-night showings; patrons were hurrying to the kiosk, forming a straggling line, which the children joined. The 8-year-old bought the tickets. The driver of the sedan sat at the wheel of her car, saw the transaction completed and drove away.

Alone, the children proceeded inside the crowded multiplex, where the three who could read deciphered the titles and found their way into Theater 11. That room was almost full, occupied by a restive crowd of older teenagers and twentysomethings who were passing the time with recreational bickering. A girl got up, and a boy slapped her on the butt. Somebody shot somebody else the finger. The children found seats as the lights were dimming, arriving in time for a series of trailers, including one for a horror movie in which a busload of high school students are serially eaten, others for action movies featuring gunfire, imperiled women and massive, unexplained conflagrations.

In this, the trailers were virtually indistinguishable from the main feature: “S.W.A.T.,” a police action movie that begins with a scene of armed thieves cleaning out a bank vault while terrified hostages cower on the floor. “Throw that bitch to the front and kill her!” says a thief, but before he can dispatch one particularly freaked-out hostage, she is accidentally shot in the neck by a hotheaded SWAT officer trying to rescue her. Later in the movie, a French criminal slits his uncle’s throat; a helicopter full of police officers crashes to the ground in a lethal explosion; and the hero pushes the hothead ex-officer, now gone over to the side of international villainy, to a grisly death under a train.

The teenagers found all of this highly satisfying. “UUHHHNNNnnn!” they went, collectively, when the hero, played by Colin Farrell, had his head slammed into a mirror during a locker room fight. They laughed during car chases and exulted at explosions. Meanwhile, the five young children sat, absorbing the mayhem while the woman who had driven them was — where? On a date? At a club? At the grocery store? Asleep? It didn’t matter. If their caregiver was unable, just now, to give care, Hollywood was happy to help out. Come one, come all, come young and old, rich and poor, potty-trained and, um, not. Hail the ascendancy of the PG-13 movie.

I was at “S.W.A.T.,” too, in the course of sampling the ever-growing array of movies that carry the PG-13 rating, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year. Afterward, I found myself often thinking of that late-night drop-off at Wheaton Plaza. The question seemed not so much what was wrong with it as what was most wrong with it. Small children dumped on the sidewalk of a crowded theater at a time when all but the oldest should have been in bed; taking their seats in a hormonal mass of older adolescents; put in this position by a mother or aunt or babysitter who couldn’t be bothered to get out of her car to see them safely inside. What movie they saw seemed almost inconsequential. Given even this limited evidence of their upbringing, “S.W.A.T.” was in some ways the least of these kids’ problems.

Indeed. Eight-year-old kids should be in bed at 10 PM, not out watching movies, especially without parents in attendance. Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the parents, not the entertainment industry, to regulate what kids have access to.

Of course, with most middle class homes having cable or satellite television and DVD players–not to mention the Internet–one suspects most pre-teens are seeing plenty of R-rated (or worse) material.

FILED UNDER: Popular Culture, , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. I was in one of those “container stores” recently–the type that sell various sorts of organizers, and are therefore haunted by people like me (the eternally unorganized, but hopeful).

    While cruising the furniture section, I happened upon a video/DVD rack that folded up and LOCKED. “Hm,” I thought. “Why on earth would you want one of these? Perhaps it’s for people who have extensive porn collections.”

    Then I realized that every house that has kids should have one of these. There are plenty of movies/Discovery Channel series/HBO “events” that are far too intense for young people. Supervision is the key, of course, but even the best parents have to sleep sometime: I’d still lock this stuff up. I wouldn’t want my (as yet unexistent) kids to check out Band of Brothers on their own.

    The story of the woman dropping the kids off is sad, and I wish the reporter had checked on her license plate number and ratted her out.

  2. Absentee parents are to blame for a great many problems these days — juvenile delinquency, school performance, teen crime and gang activity, teen pregnancy, teen alcohol and drug use, etc. etc. The list goes on and on. There will always be those exceptions to the rule — good parents who, no matter what they do, wind up with a kid out of a control and, conversely, lousy parents whose kid rises above his or her circumstances to become a centered, responsible, successful adult. Overall, though, I believe a great many of today’s societal ills can be traced directly to the breakdown of traditional family structures and the abdication of parental responsibility.