Let's Talk About Film Censorship Ratings...

The big news this week was that Steve McQueen's sophomore effort Shame got given the dreaded NC-17 rating by the MPAA. Now, this isn't something that came as a huge surprise, as most of the people who saw the film at various film festival's said that it's explicit content would get it the NC-17. It's all because this movie deals with sex addiction, which of course leads to a whole lot of sexually explicit material which then results in the NC-17 rating because, you know, kids can't watch that kind of stuff. Unlike many of the films before it, Shame will not be put up for appeal for an R rating. Instead, it's going to wear it's NC-17 rating loud and proud, and hopefully it will change a few people's attitude towards the NC-17 rating. Because, if the critical acclaim, trailer and cast are anything to go by, this film will be amazing.

Why is being an NC-17 such a bad thing?

Okay, so coming from New Zealand, which probably has the most complicated rating system like, ever, I can't help but feel that the MPAA rating system is a pile of crap. Well, to be honest, my life would be a whole lot easier if we had the 'R' rating here, because then I could drag my mother out to see films like Drive which is an R18 here. But this NC-17 business? It is seriously the largest pile of crap I have ever heard in my life. So, what I gather from this whole Shame situation and everyone trying to cut their films down to get an R rating, is that being an NC-17 is totally bad territory.

Here's what I don't understand: why is being an NC-17 such a bad thing? Here in New Zealand, we have R18's. Technically, this is a far worse rating than an NC-17. Yet, we just go about our day. Sure, there are very few R18's that make it to the cinema, but in the past couple of years, there have been some pretty successful ones in cinemas like: Drive, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kick-Ass, Machete, Piranha...the R18 is just a sticker here, to be honest. Also, some of the movies that are widely regarded as classics are R18's, like: Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Reservoir Dogs, American Psycho, Trainspotting, Taxi Driver, Requiem for a Dream and The Usual Suspects.

The R18 effect.

If you took a walk down the average DVD store's new release wall, you'd find that the large majority of the R18's are films that missed the cinema and went straight-to-DVD. Usually that's because they're sucky B-grade horrors that only have their target audience with fourteen year-old girls and boys who think they're as tough as nails and enjoy watching people suffer. But while the R18 doesn't necessarily do that much here outside of the cinemas, it does have this strange power which makes the younger crowd more interested in it.

Psychosis, one of those straight-to-DVD horrors

And here is where we have our problem. I see this happen all of the time. Let's say, a group of fourteen year -olds come into Blockbuster because they are having a movie night, and their mother or father has to stand by the counter awkwardly, where their children hand over a pile of DVDs so they can pay for them. More often than not, the pile is filled up with R18 horrors or action films, because these days teenagers are instantly drawn to incessant gore and violence to fill up their movies. The fact that their choices are R18's only makes them better because a) they feel so high and mighty when they're watching an R18 because it is against the law which of course makes them bad-ass, and b) if it's an R18, that means it probably has a lot more gore and violence in it than an R16 which will obviously make it better. That's just the way things are. It's never going to change. You slap an R18 sticker on a movie at the cinemas and the kids are just going to illegally download it. Just look at Kick-Ass, which was one of the most downloaded movies of 2010.

The Shame in having a whole lot of sex scenes.

Fact of the matter is: teenagers will only watch R18's if they are horrors or actions. Teenagers are all about the violence. And now I'm going to be perfectly blunt: if an R18 had sex scenes in it, there is only about a 10% chance that a teenager would get it out because firstly, they wouldn't want to watch it with a whole group of people and secondly, they'd have to get their parents to get it for them and that could cause a particularly awkward moment. Teenagers only want to watch sex scenes by themselves. And you know where they can do that? On the internet. Where it's free. So to be perfectly honest, what teenager is going to want to watch Shame? Apart from me, of course, the one who has it on her most-anticipated list simply because Michael Fassbender looks amazing in it. To be perfectly honest, no teenager is going to want to watch - or own up to watching - Shame just because it is an R18. No teenager is going to want to see Shame just because it has Magneto from X-Men: First Class in it. I bet you, by the time it comes out, everyone will know it as the 'sex addict' movie, and other teenagers will think you're weird if you have seen it and liked it. The exact same thing happened with Black Swan, which teens were quick to label as the 'weird lesbian movie', and the very few of us who actually liked it were attacked by the Facebook statuses of those who didn't. So yeah, there won't be a big teenage fan base for Shame, so I don't know why the MPAA is getting their knickers in a twist about.

What really gets me, though, is that sex is deemed worse than violence in film. It was the same back in the strict 'Hays Code' days, when the code was more lenient towards violence then it was to sex and offensive language. Nowadays, in your average M-rated film (probably PG-13 in the US), you could see a few people getting killed. On television shows like CSI or Criminal Minds, which are on at times when little kids could still be up, you can see people meeting their grisly demise. Hell, The Dark Knight escaped with an M rating and I know quite a few people around my age who were terrified by the violence in that movie. There are very few M rated films which has sex scenes in them, in fact, the only ones I can remember are Never Let Me Go, The Constant Gardner and Brokeback Mountain. But once we get up into the R/NC-17 territory, sex really is bad. I mean, come on...how can something as sick and vile as The Human Centipede: The First Sequence pass with an R rating (it's obviously an R18 here, and all the teenagers watch it like there's no tomorrow), but Shame gets an NC-17. Let's look at it this way: whether we like it or not, people have sex. That's how you, the person who is reading this, came to be on this Earth. People do not make centipedes out of humans for fun. Yet, there's still heavy censorship on something that humans do actually do but something about stuff that humans shouldn't do escapes with a lighter rating. This is the moment when I yell: "WTF?!"

But if people were inspired by The Human Centipede, then Tom Six thought ahead and incorporated that idea into his sequel. Along with having a guy do a whole lot of obscene sexual things towards his centipede. And that got banned in the UK along with going 'Unrated' in the US. At least there is some justice left in the world.

Is the NC-17 rating going to hurt Shame?

My uneducated answer to this is no. Of course, I have not seen this film, and probably won't get to see it until at least half way through next year when it comes out on DVD. Even without seeing the film, I could tell you that Michael Fassbender's performance is probably one of the best that this year has to offer. If the Academy decide to turn his performance down because of the fact that this film is an NC-17 then a lot of people aren't going to be happy. And really, what's an NC-17 to them? They're all over 17, so they can get the fuck over themselves. The biggest thing that Shame has going for it is the fact that it was so well-received at the various film festivals it played at and it already has a wide enough fan-base, which is no doubt due to the fact that everyone likes Steve McQueen, Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. People are excited by how upfront this movie is. If any of the awards circles reject Shame because of it's rating then that is the biggest douchebaggery that I will ever witness.

In conclusion...

I think that Shame will change the face of the NC-17 forever. If it gets some nominations come awards time, then we'll be able to say that an NC-17 finally got some proper awards attention. There's just something so different about the Shame case which is different to, I don't know, something like Showgirls or what ever other NC-17's you can think of.

There's something that we all really have to face: films are more violent, more sexual, more profane than the censorship system ever wants them to be. Films like The Human Centipede or the entire Saw franchise abuse this fact, but films like Shame use it to actually tell a proper story. That may sound like a sentence straight out of the 'How to be a Pretentious Douchebag who Also Loves Films' manual, but it is true.

So my message to everyone is embrace the NC-17. If cinemas refuse to show the films, then stuff 'em. We in New Zealand will still show R18's and we seem to be getting along fine. An R18 is worse than an NC-17 and yet we don't run around like the world has ended.

And there is my $0.01. Where's yours?