My husband and I love movies, and we watch the odd television show. We’ve found for the last while, when we watch a movie, one of the peripheral issues we consider is: could we let our son, who is eight, watch this movie?
My movie-watching and book-reading wasn’t much censored by my own parents, as I recall. Well, I read more books than I watched movies (lack of transport creates is own limitations) but still, I was left to my own devices with books. My dad suggested books from time to time — Willa Cather’s My Antonia one summer, Frank Herbert’s Dune when I asked about science fiction — but I don’t recall ever being told “You can’t read that.” So I’ve read Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and bunch of other stuff, serious and fluffy.
Movies were a different story. I couldn’t go myself for the most part, as I had no way to get there. Back then, movies weren’t the sort of hobby they are for me now. And these were the days before cable was so prevalent, before all the networks we have today, before things like TCM.
I’ve come to the conclusion that to some extent, movies are easier to censor than books. I can block shows with certain ratings using the V-chip (and I do); I can simply say “no” when my son asks to watch something. He has no TV in his room — he can’t hide under the covers with a flashlight as he could with a book. And somehow, I think reading about things, where you make the movie in your own head, is different from watching and seeing the ideas and dialogue interpreted for you.
So we watch these movies — our collection ranges from Amelie to Metropolis to Zombieland — and as I said, one of our first thoughts is, can our boy watch these? And then we find ourselves wracking our brains for the content of the movie. Often, the deciding factor is sex.
I know many people out there — and I include myself among them — say they’d rather have their kids see two people in love being intimate than two people beating the bejeesus out of each other. But when would you like that? I don’t particularly want to explain to my 8yo what sex is, and I don’t think at this point he wants to know.
Sometimes it’s easy — he will not be seeing Zombieland or The Terminator or Inception or Austin Powers or Sunset Boulevard or Batman Begins. I feel those films and others are either too violent, contain too much profanity, or will bore him. Trying to explain what’s going on will frustrate me and bore him. I really don’t think he’ll care, or understand, Norma Desmond and her desire to reclaim her stardom. (But by God I’ll make him watch that one day! And Casablanca!)
However, I could explain the violence in many movies in relatively simple terms. In The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, I can tell him that the bad guys want money and will do bad things to get it and the good guys will do what they have to do to stop the bad guys. That divide would probably apply to most movies. Autobots are trying to stop the Decepticons from destroying the earth; Batman is trying to stop [insert villain]; etc. Sex is different; it doesn’t lend itself to that kind of relatively easy explanation.
For example, we were debating whether we could show our son any episodes of Firefly, the late, lamented sf series by Joss Whedon. I said, well, not the episode where Mal (the captain) and Wash (the pilot) are captured and tortured by a mobster. Then I said, well, no, because one character, Inara, is a “companion” — a legal prostitute. In the few episodes of the show that were made, it’s not so much that Inara sleeps with anyone that concerns me, it’s more the repeated times Mal calls her a “whore.”
Actually, that word caught me off guard in another movie we recently watched, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In a scene involving the god Vulcan (Oliver Reed) and the goddess Venus (Uma Thurman), Vulcan calls her a trollop, a floozy, and then — several times — a whore. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when our boy didn’t ask me what that meant. The Iron Man debate ended quickly when we recalled Tony Stark’s roll in the hay with the reporter.
Don’t get me wrong. I might be holding these movies back, but I’m not sitting him in front of Tarantino movies, or even things like The Dirty Dozen. Old movie does not equal safe movie. I’m just making my calls as best I can and it dawned on me that in this process, sex tends to be the deal-breaker. Violence is not “better than” sex. But it struck me, as I said, that it’s easier to explain the violence. And perhaps it’s easier to ignore, in some ways? One of the scenes my son has watched many times is the end of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, when Anakin Skywalker loses his extremities (and mind, one could argue) in a light-saber duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi. But I can tell him that Anakin became a bad guy and Obi-Wan was left with no alternative to stop him. I can explain that good guy/bad guy thing.
The columnist Gregg Easterbrook has noted many times in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column the descriptions of “violence” in MPAA ratings. Something like Spider-Man will say “Rated PG-13 for comic book violence.” I have also seen “action violence,” “science-fiction violence,” etc. Easterbrook asks — why isn’t it just “violence”? Marketing, probably, and I’m sure he knows that.
In fact, I could argue that watching a guy shooting webbing out of his arms at a guy made of sand is, in fact, different from the violence you’d encounter in a movie like Heat. Spider-Man is not realistic and is not meant to be.
Sex is different, probably because it involves emotions and fluid judgment, and those are a whole lot harder to explain to a kid. I don’t really think my kid is ready for those explanations yet, although when he asks I’ll be as honest and direct as I can be for his age. If he asks more, I’ll answer more. It’ll just be a little harder to explain.