I remember when, way back in the spring of 1984, everyone was excited about the sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie was called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and from the trailers it looked every bit as good as the original.
The actual film may not have quite reached that sublime level of entertainment, but it came close. Harrison Ford was at his swashbuckling-yet-brainy best, and the then unknown actress Kate Capshaw was as funny and beautiful as Audrey Hepburn in her prime. But the movie was notable for another reason: it was violent.
Really violent. Almost shockingly so, considering the target audience. People get shot. Kids get whipped. A bad guy gets ground-up in a stone wheel. And, most famously, an evil Hindu priest (played with great panache by Bollywood actor Amrish Puri) rips a guy’s heart out and sets it on fire. 
Obviously, the movie was a cartoon. It had that same lighthearted tone—reminiscent of a Saturday-serial from Hollywood’s golden era—which guys like Spielberg and George Lucas had rediscovered in movies like Star Wars and the original Raiders. All of these earlier films had a lot of story-book violence of the Cowboys-and-Indians variety. But the violence in Temple of Doom was…well…intense. People were reminded that Spielberg, in his previous life, had been famous not as the director of wistful, kid-friendly movies like Raiders and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Rather, he was the director of Jaws, one of the most disturbing (and entertaining) films ever made. Spielberg may have had the heart of a kid, but he had the cinematic impulses of a grown-up (and a complex one at that).
The problem that Temple of Doom presented was one which vexes Hollywood still; namely, how do you satisfy the entertainment cravings of adults in a film whose inspiration—and putative audience—is fourteen-year-old kids?
The answer they came up with in 1984 was a new MPAA rating called PG-13. This was a true innovation at the time. Hitherto, the audiences of America had been divided into “adults” (people 17 years old and up, who could see R rated movies), and “kids” (people under 17, who could only see PG movies unless they went with their parents). With the addition of the PG-13 rating, Hollywood seemed to recognize the obvious notion that there are a lot of things a 13-year-old-kid can handle that her 10-year-old little brother can’t.
The original intention of the new rating was, I think, a decent one—it was meant to help parents decide which films might be okay for their teenaged children to watch but not for their little kids. However, something went horribly wrong.
For one thing, the new rating legitimized the concept of the adolescent consumer, thus continuing the relentless sub-division of the American audience into increasingly narrow, age-based pigeonholes. (It was around this time that people started using the word “tween” to refer to kids in the 10-12 age group.)
But there was an even more sinister side-effect. As with the previous PG rating, PG-13 quickly became the “prime” rating that all film studios aimed for when releasing their biggest pictures. The reason for this is simple. Studios have always found themselves under enormous economic pressure to reach as broad an audience as possible. PG-13 movies were, in theory, tame enough for the teenagers to see but edgy enough for adults to queue-up for as well. And in the era of 100 million-dollar special effects budgets, a PG-13 rating is almost a prerequisite for a major film to have any hope of turning a profit.
The result? If you walk down to your local movie plex, I would bet that nearly half of the films on the marquee will have a PG-13 rating. If you look only at the major releases—films with big budgets and A-list stars—the ratio jumps to something like 70%.
This preponderance of PG-13 films is not necessarily be a bad thing, I suppose. The real problem lies in the PG-13’s undue influence on the content of films.
You remember the Greek myth of Procrustes? He was the bad guy who put his victims on his infamous bed and then made them “fit” it, mutilating some and stretching-out others so that they all came out at exactly the right length. In the same way, the desire for a PG-13 rating has prompted studios to force all kinds of films into this narrow range of content. If a film is deemed too “kiddy,” the director might be tempted to bolt-on a brief and perfunctory scene of violence—just enough to tip the scales into PG-13 territory. And a movie whose heart-and-soul clearly belongs in the R-rated universe may find itself watered-down so that if falls into the lower tier.
Undeniably, PG-13 has engendered many artistic compromises, some of which have led to dreadful films. A classic case of the latter scenario is probably the recent remake of the film Robocop. If you are old enough to remember the original, you know that it was an ultra-violent satire, a thinly-veiled indictment of 1980s greed and violence. Definitely R-rated fare. The idea of reconceiving the movie into a modern, CGI-boosted, PG-13 blockbuster was probably absurd, on the face of it. But, nonetheless, that’s exactly what Sony pictures did. The result tanked in theaters, and some industry experts such as Scott Mendelson of Forbes Magazine placed the blame squarely on the studio’s PG-13 myopia.
On the other end of the spectrum, Lionsgate hit the jackpot with The Hunger Games and its sequel. Both installments of the franchise have earned PG-13 ratings, despite being set in a dystopian future where kids are forced to fight each other. To the death. On TV. Sounds like great kiddie fare, right? Apparently so. Parents across the country, it seems, are not deterred by such grim, pessimistic material. In fact, they’re lining up in droves. And with kids in tow.
Which leads me to my main point. It isn’t just Hollywood greed that drives the PG-13 monster. The real source of the monster is…us.
That’s right. Us people over twenty-one. The real cause of the problem is that we, the so-called grown-ups, want to keep seeing kids movies. But with a twist.
I work in a software company with a lot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and I am constantly amazed at how saturated these young men and women are with what was once regarded as “teen” culture. Comic books. Video games. Even toys. Young men and women who spend their days writing code for Fortune 500 companies often go home to play several hours of World of Warcraft, and they’ll shell out hundreds of dollars for tickets to the next big comic book convention.
These guys are not rediscovering their childhoods. They never left them.
And if you go to any family barbecue or kid’s birthday party in America these days, you’ll find that it’s the adults in the room—not the kids—who are standing around chatting about The Hunger Games. It’s the new generation of post-Baby-Boom parents who really get into science fiction and action movies, many of which have PG-13 ratings. It’s the adults who really drive the success of summer movies like The Avengers and Star Trek: Into Darkness.
I can already hear you asking: So what’s wrong with that?
Nothing, in and of itself. The problem is that when a twenty-year-old seeks out a film based on a comic book (or a youth-oriented novel like The Hunger Games), he is actually trying to satisfy a contradictory blend of adult and childhood fantasies. Arrested adolescence is, ultimately, not the same thing as true adolescence. A young man wants his comic books infused with sex and real violence. A teenager might want the same, but deep down he is happier with just the comic book.
Perhaps I am being naïve about all of this. I know that most civilized countries in the world make little or no effort to shield children from violent and sexual media. In South America, I am told, TV news channels routinely air footage of mangled bodies from car accidents and shootings. And I know that even here, in America, our youth culture has always had a “hard” underground scene. Action movies in the 1970s were often gorier and more overtly sexist than anything you will see today. And for every ten copies of Spider-Man that my friends and I bought during the early 1980s, we also bought at least one copy of Heavy Metal.
But even so, I can’t help but think that our cultural obsession with childlike fantasy and adventure—an obsession that so many of us now carry well into adulthood—is in some ways robbing the real kids of today. It’s robbing them of a true kid-culture with true kid heroes. As PG-13 movies become more cynical and violent, kids find themselves graduating earlier and earlier from PG fare like The Lego Movie (a great film, btw) to vile crap like The Ring 2.
So where will it end?
It won’t. Not by itself. So long as bloated films like Pompeii require 100 million dollars to produce (yes, that’s the actual figure), the pressure to reach that 13-45 year old demographic will only get worse. The big budget crap movies will keep coming. The only question is whether we, as consumers, will keep shelling out $15 per person for ourselves—and our kids—to see them.
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