The antiquated puritanism of the MPAA was on my mind all of last year.  In January 2023, professional critics reviewed an NC-17 cut of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool at Sundance that was quickly edited down to an R for theatrical distribution that same month, censoring what artistic sexual content could be accessed by adult moviegoers.  In the spring, the milquetoast M Night Shyamalan apocalypse thriller Knock at the Cabin was rated R for its PG-13 level depictions of violence, presumably because the central couple in peril are gay men.  In the summer, Ira Sachs’s love triangle drama Passages was similarly bumped up to an NC-17 rating for its depictions of bisexual lovemaking, followed by the much vulgarer but much straighter Poor Things landing an R in the Winter.  Is it because Poor Things was distributed by a Disney subsidiary that gets preferential treatment over smaller, artsier indie distributors like Mubi, or is it just another data point in the MPAA’s long history of homophobic bias?  Likely, it’s both.  None of this industrial background noise should influence how these films are critically assessed, but it’s impossible to ignore, since the MPAA’s relationship with national theater chains dictates what art audiences can access across the US.  The only way to watch the NC-17 cut of Infinity Pool or the R-rated cut of M3GAN was to rent them VOD at home long after their theatrical runs, because corporate theaters would not touch them in fear of losing money.  Long after the breaking up of The Hays Code, we’re still getting compromised, self-censored art due to the backwards moralism of review boards that preach patriotism & Family Values above artistic freedom.  It’s infuriating.

To get a clear idea of just how outdated the MPAA’s worldview on the morality of art is, consider that the most comprehensive documentary on the subject was released nearly twenty years ago, and most of its assessments of the organization still hold true.  The only major change in the movie rating process since Kirby Dick made This Film is Not Yet Rated in 2006 is that his outrage that five or six media conglomerates get preferential treatment by the MPAA over their independent competitors feels quaint now, since the number of giant corporations who own everything has gotten even smaller (see: Disney distributing a film like Poor Things).  Everything else the movie observes about the MPAA’s prudishness towards artistic depictions of what they deem “aberrational behavior” is still accurate to the way the organization censors media by bottlenecking its distribution, give or take the importance that companies like Wal-Mart & Blockbuster play in the supply chain.  In the most damning auditing of receipts, Dick runs a side-by-side montage of sexual imagery that was rated “R” vs. imagery that was rated “NC-17” by the MPAA, demonstrating a clear bias against queer media vs. its straight equivalents.  The MPAA describes itself as a board of “ordinary people” assessing this sexual content for potential immorality, but the board is made up entirely of Republican parents, a slanted view of what’s “ordinary” that Dick exposes by doxxing the anonymous members of the board.  He then demonstrates a step-by-step walkthrough of the MPAA’s unfair appeals process by submitting This Film is Not Yet Rated itself for a lower-than-NC-17 rating, illustrating how independent films are excluded from insights that would streamline the costly process and revealing that, to this day, the appeals board includes multiple clergymen to ensure the upright moralism of the art.  It was embarrassingly outdated even back in 2006, and nothing substantial has changed about it in the decades since.

You can never forget how long ago This Film is Not Yet Rated was made, either, because it is extremely dated in its 2000s era documentary aesthetics. The film managed to not only make me furious about the current state of American movie ratings but also reignited my anger over my college-era years of mediocre straight-to-DVD filmmaking.  Everything about the film’s frantic, flippant editing and its on-camera inclusion of Dick himself is filtered through a distinctly 2000s style of irreverent pop-docs about how, like, marijuana laws are bullshit or how Wal-Mart is evil or whatever.  The film’s dirt on the MPAA is valuable enough to make the dated stylistic annoyances worthwhile, but it did occasionally make me question who really caused more damage to pop culture in the long run: Jack Valenti or Michael Moore? Half of This Film is Not Yet Rated is presented as a traditional talking-heads doc where director Kimberly Pierce vents about how she was allowed to depict as much gaybashing violence as she wanted in Boys Don’t Cry but women’s orgasmic pleasure was a no-go, or John Waters vents about how the playful kink of A Dirty Shame was relatively wholesome & tame in a post-internet world where most kids have already “seen more hardcore pornography than their parents.”  The other half of the film is a little shakier.  Kirby Dick centers himself as the host of a movie-industry version of the television show Cheaters, hiring private investigators to shuttle him around LA harassing once-anonymous members of the MPAA in public spaces outside their guarded building.  It’s great that he’s out there annoying the right people, but it’s annoying all the same, and it’s a shame to see the director of the all-time great Bob Flanagan documentary Sick debase himself by imitating the distinctly 2000s filmmaking style of a blowhard hack like Moore. 

It’s no matter, really.  Any enemy of the MPAA is a friend of mine; it’s a kindship I immediately felt when this film opened with a list of all the great director’s who’ve appealed X or NC-17 ratings from the review board, including names like Waters, Cronenberg, Russell, Almodóvar, Friedkin, and Lynch.  All my friends were there.  It makes me sick to think about how much great art from those filmmakers was lost or dulled down due to the outdated prudishness of the industry’s ratings board, not to mention how many similar artists’ names I don’t even know because they were locked out of official distribution by the expense of the ratings process.  I don’t know that This Film is Not Yet Rated fixed any of the problems that it diagnoses, but it at least clearly pissed off the MPAA for a brief time in 2006, which by default makes it an effective work of small-scale activism.  When it’s not a candid-camera prank show, it’s also a concise explainer of why the MPAA system is so embarrassingly out of date, which unfortunately remains useful in the context of 2020s theatrical distribution.

-Brandon Ledet