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Main >> News Listing >> June 2004 >> Article ID 5059
 Sex in movies: scarier than violence? | Type: Internet Article |
| | Sex in movies: scarier than violence? | Jun 05, 2004 | by Dan DeLuca
Summary:
Meanwhile, the NC-17 rating sees to it that movies such as "Young Adam" - movies with a seriousness of purpose that attempt to portray violence and sex in ways integral to a complex story and even aspire to be works of art - are kept off-limits to a generation raised on Christina Aguilera videos and Grand Theft Auto. We can't stop them from seeing Paris Hilton videos or pornographic images from Abu Ghraib prison. But for now, at least, the youths of America are safe from Ewan McGregor's willy.
Read on for the whole article. |
In the operatically bloody "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," Lucy Liu whips out her samurai sword and swiftly decapitates an insubordinate crime lord. In "The Passion of the Christ," Roman soldiers beat Jim Caviezel senseless, digging spiky cat-o'-nine-tails into his flesh in a torture sequence that seems as if it will never end. And in the Scottish character study "Young Adam," "Star Wars" star Ewan McGregor lets his light saber dangle for a few fleeting seconds in a tense sex scene with Tilda Swinton.
So which image poses a more serious threat to the psyches of impressionable American youth? As far as the Motion Picture Association of America is concerned, the answer is obvious: McGregor's manhood is a thing to be feared. "Young Adam" got slapped with an NC-17, long seen as a kiss of death, while bankable directors Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson walked away from the carnage with commercially viable R ratings.
It's almost too easy to take potshots at the MPAA for the sex-is-scary-but-violence-is-cool inverted logic, and also point out that, as a society, we seem to have it backward. So I'll let McGregor and Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed last year's "The Dreamers," the coming-of-age-in-1968-Paris flick, which also got an NC-17, do it for me.
"I am surprised that to show a naked body, which is the most natural and innocent thing, still provokes some kind of puritanical reaction," Bertolucci said.
McGregor, who has made a habit of dropping his trou in movies such as "Velvet Goldmine" and "The Pillow Book," was more glib: "You can blow thousands of people's heads off with a semiautomatic machine gun, but you can't show a picture of my willy."
"Young Adam" does, in fact, show McGregor's willy; that, along with a nasty, fully clothed sex scene in which he dumps custard and ketchup on Emily Mortimer, is what earned David Mackenzie's movie an NC-17. And I'm not going to argue that it shouldn't have gotten the rating, which means that no one under 18 can be admitted.
(An R rating, by contrast, means that nobody under 17 is supposed to get in without an adult. It's far less effective in keeping kids out, as parents continue to take their elementary schoolers to gorefests such as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or comedies that cross the line.)
There are movies that are made for an adult audience, and "Young Adam," with its brooding story line, excellent acting, and sex that looks real (if not like real fun), is probably one of them. In fact, without the NC-17 rating, you'd be hard-pressed to imagine a teenager even being interested in it. Now that it has that label, however, hormone-addled youths will be waiting impatiently for it to show up on late-night cable.
The problem isn't with the NC-17 rating itself. It's that since the MPAA came up with it, nearly all of the 18 movies that have received the rating, starting with "Henry & June" in 1990, have gotten it because of sexual content, rather than excessive violence.
So the full range of ultraviolent films, from "Saving Private Ryan" (which wants to show us the horrors of war) to this year's bloodied-up remake of "Dawn of the Dead" (which wants to scare the living daylights out of us), gets lumped in the R category. And, since the MPAA did away with the X rating in 1990, films that are the slightest bit explicit in their eroticism earn an NC-17 and are marginalized in a sex-movie ghetto, even though they are almost always thinking-person affairs.
What really makes the MPAA system look absurd, however, is the way the culture has been saturated with pornography since the NC-17 label was born. An estimated $800 million a year is spent on porn video rentals. And thanks to the Internet, celebrity sex videos and real-life beheadings are readily available to any curious teenager (or adult) with a search engine or file-trading services such as Kazaa.
Meanwhile, the NC-17 rating sees to it that movies such as "Young Adam" - movies with a seriousness of purpose that attempt to portray violence and sex in ways integral to a complex story and even aspire to be works of art - are kept off-limits to a generation raised on Christina Aguilera videos and Grand Theft Auto. We can't stop them from seeing Paris Hilton videos or pornographic images from Abu Ghraib prison. But for now, at least, the youths of America are safe from Ewan McGregor's willy. |
 Source: Tallahasse Democrat | |
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