Christopher Nolan has directed two movies in which a soldier washes up on a foreign shore and, battle-weary and sodden, fights to return home. The first, 2017’s Dunkirk, dramatized the World War II evacuation in which thousands of Allied soldiers were killed. It received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for “intense war experience and some language.” The other, this summer’s The Odyssey, is a seafaring adventure that laments the atrocities of the Trojan War—and is rated R for “violence and some language.”
That R is surprising. As the translator Emily Wilson wrote in her site-crashing review for the London Review of Books, Nolan’s film is “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle.” She meant it pejoratively. But that quality is what has prompted beleaguered English teachers across the nation to receive the film as almost a personal gift. The Odyssey is decidedly chaste, and even stars Zendaya; what better way to get students to engage with an ancient Greek text? And yet, at least while The Odyssey remains in theaters, the R restriction—which means anyone younger than 17 isn’t allowed to attend unless accompanied by an adult—cuts off the audience members who might particularly benefit from being exposed to Homer’s epic.
The United States is a relative outlier in keeping The Odyssey away from younger audiences. Among its Anglophone peers, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland deemed the movie suitable for anyone older than 15; Canada gave it a PG. Much of Latin America rated it equivalent to PG-13, as did Spain, Portugal, and France. Denmark approved the film for ages 11 and up.
So what happened here? As a rule, the MPA never discusses specific titles in public. Ratings are voted on by a board composed of parents from outside the film industry, who have children from the ages of 5 to 15; they must leave the board after a term maximum of seven years, or when all of their children reach legal drinking age. “One of the huge problems with the rating system is that there’s no transparency,” Kirby Dick, a filmmaker, told me. For his 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Dick hired private detectives to suss out who sat on the board at the time. “We don’t know what their backgrounds are, what the diversity is,” said Dick. “They’re making judgments for all of the country, the entire public, and we have no idea who these people are.”
The identities of today’s raters remain secret, as do their deliberations. Their reasoning is so mysterious that, in 2018, the MPA made headlines just by posting a 46-page document outlining the basics of its history and process. Nearly a century ago, Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, a series of self-imposed guidelines that were enforced by “a very stern and efficient Irish Catholic named Joseph I. Breen,” Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, told me. Anyone could read its rules: “It kind of operated like case law.” The code grew defunct in the post–World War II era; in 1968, it was replaced by the film-ratings system. Today’s arrangement, styled as a consumer guide that helps families make informed choices, is more permissive than the code, but also more opaque—and more subjective.
A spokesperson for the MPA declined to make the chair of its ratings branch available for an interview, citing scheduling issues. Instead, I called up Ethan Noble, a former Miramax Films executive, and Scott Young, a former MPA senior rater, who, via their firm Motion Pictures Consulting, guide filmmakers through the ratings process. Their job is to anticipate the ratings board’s reaction to matters such as language and content. By my count, The Odyssey featured three uses of the word fuck and its variants, one of which was used to denigrate a beach. But while the movie’s ratings descriptor did highlight language, there’s no hard line governing how many times the word can be uttered before raters impose an R. In recent years, the rating board has demonstrated more flexibility, Noble told me: Today’s PG-13 movies can sometimes get away with more F-bombs, as long as the expletive isn’t “sexually derived.”
Expletives aside, though, what makes a movie “adult” can rarely be quantified. “It’s really about how these certain movies make you feel,” said Noble. Young recalled instances in which a violent scene was deemed less graphic after simple edits to the sound mix: Dial back the sounds of bones crunching or punches landing “and bring up some music, and it completely changes.” Injury and death are considered more intense when affecting a central character—someone the audience has formed an emotional attachment to. But you can mow down an army of zombies, or decapitate an orc, and get a PG-13. “Blood is a factor,” Noble added. “If the blood is red, that’s something that will easily start pushing it more towards R.”
[Read: A Trojan horse is supposed to have humans inside it]
The MPA’s squeamishness can have ironic effects: A movie that keeps the aftermath of violence off-screen, avoiding realistic depictions of what weapons do to bodies, might be open to all ages, but a movie that dwells on those consequences will likely be restricted. Take another example from the Nolan filmography: In The Dark Knight, the Joker “makes a pencil disappear” by driving it into the eye of a mob henchman. The Odyssey, too, features a memorable ocular injury, when Odysseus and company blind the cyclops Polyphemus. The former avoided the more mature rating, apparently shocking the cinematographer who shot it. Casual sadism and glib brutality can squeak by with a PG-13; the wounds of war (and, okay, one overlong scene of husbandly vengeance) can earn an R.
The PG-13 designation has always been an awkward middle child, caught between Hollywood’s clashing commercial incentives: its desire to reach a wide audience and its eagerness to avoid parental ire. Steven Spielberg first proposed the creation of a PG rating “with a little hot sauce on top” in 1984, after widespread indignation at the gory imagery in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But over time, as superhero franchises saturated pop culture, violence once confined to R-rated movies has arguably become a staple of family entertainment. Gun violence in PG-13 movies exceeded that of R movies by 2012, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it continued to rise in subsequent years. As less and less distinguished a PG-13 from an R, “the rating issue kind of dissolved,” Dan Romer, one of the study’s co-authors, told me.
Doherty, the American-studies professor, took a harsher view: The distinction between PG-13 and R “in the motion-picture industry and among exhibitors is a total joke and everybody knows it,” he said. “There are a lot of R-rated movies that are aimed at the 15-year-old kid, and everybody, everybody, knows.”
Given the substantial overlap between the two ratings, the casual viewer is left to wonder what earned The Odyssey its R. During lulls in the 172-minute run time, I’d think of the MPA’s rating descriptors, a vocabulary rich with persnickety euphemism: Would I call this flashback “mature thematic”? Was the hero, while steering past the churning waters of Charybdis, experiencing mere “action” or the more threatening “peril”? How much bare human-male backside was visible before Odysseus’s crew was transformed into pigs? In fact, was the entire scene on Circe’s island sort of sexual? (It didn’t seem unsexual.)
Scant visible blood was spilled—surprisingly little, actually, especially considering that, at one point, a man gets bitten in half. Perhaps the script’s emphasis on the hero’s psychological scars from war left the MPA board with the impression that the film contained more vivid carnage than was actually on-screen. Watching a movie like a rater, I found, can be perversely rewarding. The exercise sharpens the senses; it heightens attention to the placement of a cut, to what’s depicted or merely implied. Who, after all, has more faith in the power of cinema than someone gauging how it might affect young minds?
Restricted movies, The Odyssey included, appeal to more people than in the past. “It used to be that the movie industry didn’t want to get an R, because it would limit the audience,” Romer told me. “I think that may be changing.” Box-office data indicate that only 4 percent of the audience was younger than 17—but as anyone who has ever been alive knows, teens always find a way. An R can make a movie feel edgier and more exciting. Perhaps it can also save a movie from feeling, suspiciously, like homework.
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