R-Rated Films: MPAA Warnings Dissected & Discussed
Anyone who’s ever gone to the movies is probably familiar with the jarring age warnings that precede each preview. Whether a help or a hindrance, the concept of these ratings serves a greater application and purpose than may be immediately appreciated.
The foundation of any parental guidance system is its framework for defining age-appropriateness. What qualifies as mature content? How does one consolidate the essence of multiple cultural viewpoints into one definitive system? This seemingly simple task of demarcating age-groups quickly takes a turn into murky waters, creating a space for controversy.
Age advisory is not trivial or insignificant, as it implies concepts that society finds socially unacceptable, taboo, or morally questionable.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), seemingly undaunted by such a challenge, stepped in to create the modern rating system. This development replaced the self-censoring of film typical of the earlier 20th century (e.g., Hays Code) with a mere suggestion of a film’s age-appropriateness. Today, the MPAA categorizes a film into five categories: General Audiences (G), Parental Guidance Suggested (PG), Parents Strongly Cautioned (PG-13), Restricted (R), and Adults Only (NC-17).
Since 1968, this standardization has generated a good amount of data about the intended audience of movies. However, it wasn’t until 1991 that the MPAA began consistently recording their reasoning for a film’s rating. This additional information provides insights into the specific content condemning films to more mature ratings. Since the filmratings.com database stores every MPAA rating, we can begin to see trends in the types of risqué, disturbing, or upsetting content featured overwhelmingly in the narratives films tell today.
Why are exploring these trends important? The content that receives visibility in films reflects the types of conversations storytellers are willing and able to have. Film influences in the sense it elicits thought and opinion, so it does matter in what quantities topics are receiving recognition.
Let’s stop here and change gears. Allow me to introduce myself…
“My name is Sophia, and I really love watching movies.” A quick, straightforward icebreaker I used recently, this statement does not lie. I watch A LOT of movies. Naturally, as a fanatic and a bit of a nerd, I’ve been led down many rabbit holes, not limited to exploring the gender imbalance in animated Disney scripts.
The most recent of these data exploration projects grew out of two unconnected incidents of full frontal nudity in non-sexual contexts. The first instance occurred in the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), in which the character played by Jason Segel gets broken up with, in the nude. The second was from Return of the Living Dead (1985), which featured a re-animated female corpse that goes around attacking people in the nude.
Both these movies fall into a long pattern of comedy and horror films using nudity in non-sexual scenes. These genres typically use nudity as eye candy or to signal a vulnerable, weak, or carefree character. Most of the full-frontal nudity used to this end is generally female. For this reason, I found the full-frontal male nudity in Sarah Marshall to be very unusual and perhaps an indicator of change in the nature of nudity in film. This possibility led me to investigate the ratings system.
Although my original query had been about the trends in male nudity versus female, I quickly discovered that the MPAA did not distinguish between the two in their recorded reasoning. Thus, my question became more generalized: what trends are present in the MPAA ratings database, and do they have any meaningful interpretation? I was particularly interested in exploring R-rated movies containing the most “adult” content and hoped to find some information about the state of nudity in film.
After defining my objectives, I wrote a simple program to parse through the data stored in the filmratings.com database and output the original data plus some inferred features to a .csv file.
My research only includes data from 1991 to the present day because these were the only years the MPAA recorded their reasoning for why a film received an R-rating. These reasons, varying in severity, generally fell into five categories: sex, nudity, violence, language, and drugs.
NOTE: Occasionally a reason supplied didn’t fit nicely under one of these labels (bloody/disturbing images, rape, smoking/drinking, gore). For the purposes of my project, only occurrences of the phrases: “sex” or “sensuality”, “nudity”, “violence”, “language”, or “drug” were collected.
NOTE: Reason occurrence was calculated by taking the number of films listing a specific reason and dividing by the total number of films for that year.
The first data visualization I wanted to explore was the occurrence percentages of the five main category keywords.
On examining the frequency of reason occurrences, some trends begin to appear. Language appears far more often than any other reason, with an average occurrence of 82% and a projected upward growth of .5% per year. Violence and sexuality follow behind, both with an average occurrence of 61%. Sexuality listings are projected to decline by .4% per year, whereas violence is projected to stay steady. Drugs and nudity both appeared in far smaller amounts, with an average occurrence of 24% and 22%, respectively. These reasons are projected to increase by .8% per year.
What do these statistics mean? Do more films today include profanity, drugs, and nudity? Or have the MPAA raters become more aware and concerned about these categories and rated more films R because of it?
Assuming a consistent methodology in assigning and recording ratings, one interesting hypothesis worth exploring is that filmmakers today are leveraging the authenticity and appeal of some categories over others because of changing societal attitudes.
NOTE: The percentages calculated above were based on how often one reason occurred given another reason being present. They do not reflect the percentage of all films that listed a combination of reasons.
Another point of interest was the occurrence of reasons in combination with each other. For instance, the data suggests that films that include nudity as a reason have an 80% chance of also listing a language warning. Similarly, films that list sexuality as a reason have an 84% chance of being accompanied by a language warning.
When a film listed violence as a reason, there was only a 21% chance that this would be in combination with nudity, the smallest percentage for any combination.
Perhaps the most interesting finding was that films listing drugs for their R-rating had a 96% chance of being accompanied by a language warning, with the smallest observed standard deviation from the mean of 2.6%. This finding suggests that the drugs and profanity are seen as inseparable when presenting a story involving drugs and may say something about society’s idea of drug culture.
Considering the implications of my findings leaves me with many unanswered questions. Chief among them, what more can we learn about the growing “adult content” categories of nudity and drugs?
As an extension of this project, I plan to do original research into the type of nudity shown when a nudity warning applies to an R-rated film. No official database specifically records whether a film includes female nudity, male nudity, or both. However, some people on the Internet have made it their business to tag these terms in a film’s IMDB page, so this may be the place to start.
Until next time…