saturn return to sender

Just saw This Film is Not Yet Rated (cf at Wikipedia). It’s a fun and pointed rebuke of our violence-happy, sexually-repressed, corporate-owned culture machine.

I agree utterly, completely, 100% with Darren Aronofsky: if you show violence without blood, your movie should get an R rating. “The only people who can handle that intellectually are adults.” If you show violence realistically, with blood, suffering, etc, (cut to gruesome scene from Saving Private Ryan) you should get a PG-13 rating.

In fact this movie contains one of the more pithy summaries of the state of our culture I’ve heard. Director of Gunner Palace Michael Tucker is discussing the MPAA’s rating of his documentary about the everyday lives of soldiers in Baghdad. His film was rated R for “language and drug use.”

“This is not fiction, this is reality,” he says. “These are real soldiers, they’re living in a war zone … We’re not instructing people to bleed off these obscenties. This is just their life.”

Their attempt to get a PG-13 rating was called “a waste of time” by the MPAA. (Though according to imdb, the appeal was eventually successful, on the shockingly logical premise that a person old enough to be recruited by the army should be allowed to see a documentary realistically portraying military life. That notwithstanding … )

When the Americans liberated Buchenwald, and they saw these images and these heaps of people … Is that PG? Is that PG-13? Is that R? People need to see that. When a little girl’s running down the road in South Vietnam, you know, burnt by napalm, and she’s naked … Is that PG? Is that PG-13? Is it R? I mean, you can’t rate reality. And if you can’t deal with it, then don’t send people to war.

I couldn’t possibly say it better.

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