When I was a kid my dad used to take me and my brothers to the movies a lot. It was one of those things that allowed him to spend time with us without actually having to talk to us – then, as now, conversation didn’t exactly flow freely. Sometimes we chose the movie, and he would scoff at our immature choices, and other times he chose, and we would groan about being dragged to yet another boring grown-up film while all our friends were watching fun cheesy stuff.
This is how I came to see The Crying Game at age 12, with my younger brother. And yes, the chick in The Crying Game really was a man, and this is the only think I remember for sure about the movie, and yes, it was incredibly funny at the time to see a penis on the big screen like that, although I don’t think anyone else in the cinema was quite as amused as we were, or quite as embarrassed as my poor father.
So, sometimes you miscalculate. I probably started seeing M-rated movies at about eight or nine, and that was the one time I remember being apologies to for the inappropriateness of the choice (film wise – we don’t talk about the time he took us to the MCA and ignorantly agreed with my ignorant suggestion to check out the visiting photography exhibition – a Mapplethorpe retrospecive). Mostly it was the 80’s/early 90’s American Pie equivalents, romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan, or your stock-standard action comedies that I remember. Yes, there was swearing – which was funny – and there was violence – albeit quite cartoonish – but thematically, these M-rated movies were fairly light going. As kids, we could ignore the stuff we didn’t get, the ‘adult themes’ – whatever that means – and enjoy the killer lines like ‘It’s not a tumor’ while knowing that in the end, the bad guys would invariably get their just desserts and the bad guys would come out alive and cracking jokes. And as we got older, we learned that the really good stuff was rated MA and R – and that most cinemas in the western suburbs weren’t really that strict about ID, so long as you bit the bit the bullet and bought a full-price ticket.
Anyway, last night The Dude and I found ourselves in a cinema watching The Dark Knight – rated M, for ’strong action violence’, along with rows upon rows of teenagers – mostly at the younger end of the scale, from the looks of them – and a fair smattering of parents with their children, and – like the old fuddy-duddies that we were, we were absolutely appalled.
Not just at the parents – because yeah, sometimes you do miscalculate: it’s a Batman movie; it’s based on a comic book; the earlier Michael Keaton Batman movies were a great lark and didn’t do me any harm as a kid … although would it have killed these people to read one single review about this movie before deciding it was appropriate for their six-year-olds? But at a classification board that put a movie this unrelentingly dark and creepily violent in the same class as movies like Clueless and – televisually speaking, because I’m using my DVD collection as reference here and I don’t have that many movies rated M – Scrubs, The OC and the second series of Press Gang (which is a fucking KIDS SHOW!), and implicitely tamer that MA-rated fare like Mallrats or – to introduce a Heath Ledger theme – Two Hands.
Is it because it’s a Batman movie, and therefore it’s precieved as being for kids, no matter what the actual content, and therefore the rating can’t exclude the percieved target audience – contrasting neatly with the idea that video games are for kids, no matter what the content, and therefore anything that is considered not kid-friendly should be banned outright? Or is it because it was violence, no matter how disturbing, is fine so long as it isn’t accompanied by coarse language or sex?
I’m not a fan of censorship, in any way. I think adults should be free to watch and read and play whatever they want. That said, we supposedly have a classification system for a reason – so why does it seem so damn arbitrary?
Or maybe I’m just getting old and conservative. And cranky.
For the record: a pretty good movie, but too dark – lighting wise, to the point where sometimes I had no idea what was going on because I just couldn’t see anything – and too long. Way too long. Much much much too long. Were the editors on strike when this was in post-production?
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