R-Rated Superheroes And PG Horror: The Wrong Conversation
In Martin Scorsese’s 2004 Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, one scene probed the boundaries of 1940s screen standards. In the scene, Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) presents enlarged stills of actresses’ cleavage from various movies of the time, to which his ‘expert’ applies calipers—to demonstrate to censors that his movie is no more lewd than its contemporaries. It is intentionally over-the-top, making light of the constraints that governed production in Hollywood’s first few decades. Yet it is also a reminder that such restrictions are a kind of folly in themselves—appropriateness is a highly subjective standard, one which has only gotten more subjective in the last fifty years, as American society has splintered away from a unified idea of morality.
The last two decades have further complicated the project of identifying media standards, as the Internet has blown open access to content (and to the means of content production/distribution). Audiences have more reason than ever to modulate what content they consume, and there are tools to help with that. An MPAA rating, however, should no longer be one of those tools…if it ever was.
RELATED: The Batman Lands PG-13 Rating Despite Supposed 'Disturbing Content'
Early cinema was a glorious free-for-all in terms of what stories could be told onscreen, and how they could be portrayed. In 1934, William H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), introduced the Production Code (or the Hays Code, as it is often referred to), which was a set of rules both for what stories could be told and what images could be shown to theater audiences. ‘Bad’ characters (that is, characters who acted against the moral consensus of the time), for instance, must
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