This week the Federal Trade Commission officially accused Hollywood of intentionally luring children to violent movies, TV programs, and video games. Although the FTC doesn't support legislation of entertainment industry marketing, Al Gore might, and Slate's "Culturebox" columnist, Judith Shulevitz, does too. In this conversation, she and Jack Shafer, Slate's deputy editor and "Press Box" columnist, debate whether ads for violent entertainment should be regulated, censored, or just turned off.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponDear Judith,
If I start drawling like a junior Jack Valenti, grabbing myself by the lapels to proclaim The Right of Hollywood Artists To Scatter Viscera All Over the Gigaplex because, hey, Shakespeare did it at the Globe, please have the boys in Redmond pull the plug on the Slate servers. And if I come even remotely close to stereotyping you as the Nurse Ratched of the nanny state, please hit me with a defamation suit. Assuming, as I do, that you're no prude, no bluenose, and no bowdlerizer, I intend to exploit your anti-censorship views to convince you that giving the Federal Trade Commission the power to regulate the marketing of movies, video games, and music in the name of consumer protection would be an abomination, not to mention an unconscionable surrender to hysteria.
How's that for truth in marketing?
The timing of the FTC report, as you write, serves the demagogues well. In this election year, few candidates will wage a principled stand against the report lest their opponents' campaign commercials cast them as unindicted Columbine triggermen. But the FTC plan isn't the only anti-media-violence plan afoot. Currently pending in the Senate is the Media Violence Labeling Act of 2000, co-sponsored by everybody's favorite candidate for vice president, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and by Sen. John McCain. The bill would authorize the FTC to rate movies, games, and recordings for violent content. According to a critique by Professor Ronald D. Rotunda of the University of Illinois College of Law, the bill would make an FTC rating label mandatory for all movies, games, and recordings. Producers who refused to display the FTC rating on their entertainments would face a $10,000 fine for each day of noncompliance. This scheme stinks of prior restraint to Rotunda and prompts the question of why we should want to give the government the power to license any expression, violent or otherwise.
OK, I've already gone Valenti on you after promising I wouldn't. You've taken the high moral ground trying to protect the kids from the bloodletters and bad men of Hollywood marketing, and I'm shoving you down the slippery slope of argument to make you look like an Orwellian censor. Because I vowed to fight fair allow me to back up and consider the nightmare on the table—the FTC report—not the nightmare in the waiting room.
Before we gasp at the horror of those craven Hollywood bastards peddling their rated-R-for-violence films to our innocent Suzies and Jamals with ads on mtv.com, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in Seventeen magazine, shouldn't we ask which R-rated films the FTC investigated? It turns out that the FTC selected 44 rated-R-for-violence movies and found that 35 of them "were targeted to children under 17." But which films? A seasoned cinéaste such as you knows that there's a world of difference between the fierce violence of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and the stylized smashup of John Woo's Face/Off. But the FTC isn't saying, preferring to play Joseph McCarthy and wave its list of 35 guilty movies all over Washington without actually naming names.
How distraught would you be if you learned that one of the 35 violent movies that Hollywood targeted your 14-year-old with was Face/Off? Not very, I'll bet. There's one school of thought that the existing rating system actually increases the violent and sexual content of films. Hollywood knows that the young audience routinely eschews PG and PG-13 flicks as fodder for toddlers, so it routinely inflates the ratings of movies to R by adding gratuitous dollops of violence and sex. Could it be that Hollywood movies would be less violent if the MPAA rating system didn't exist? In any event, until the FTC comes clean about the identity of the 35 violent movies, we're arguing about phantasms.
(One quick aside: If it's OK for parents to take their kids to R movies—"Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian"—why shouldn't Hollywood be allowed to market to them?)
While I sympathize with parents who feel beaten down by the industry's multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, I wonder if we've become too pre-emptively protective of children, imagining them as delicate flowers that crumble at the slightest touch. We've banned seesaws and swings from modern playgrounds, required helmets for even the most casual bicycle trip, and otherwise excised danger and excitement from their lives. No wonder kids crave drugs and R-rated movies! Anything to feel alive.
Can I quote myself without appearing to be a shameless self-aggrandizer? Back in 1997, I wrote disparagingly about a similar regulatory power grab by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler. Frustrated in his efforts to regulate tobacco, Kessler claimed jurisdiction over tobacco sales by diagnosing teen smoking as a "pediatric disease" and the marketing of cigarettes to kids as one of the disease's vectors. While I disagreed with Kessler's gambit, I could hardly disagree with Kessler's medical judgment that cigarettes kill. There are few scientific questions more settled than this. Until somebody produces lesion-packed brain scans of kids who've been fed a steady diet of pathologically violent movies, I'll doubt that the FTC has any business regulating movie marketing in the name of consumer protection.
Too Valenti? If so, let me know what measures Culture Czar Shulevitz would feel comfortable taking to prevent the marketing of violent films to kids.
Regards,
Jack
Is Hasan a Terrorist? And Other Great Stories From Slate This Week.
How Sarah Palin Is Dividing the Republican Party
Can We Apply the Lessons of Y2K to Swine Flu?
They Made a Movie About the Wrong Aviatrix
Jamie Foxx's New Single Is Extremely Lewd
The Week's Best Editorial Cartoons
Reader Comments from The Fray:
The purveyors of violence in movies are not artists. They are highly-paid commercial whores who are trying to make the most bucks they possibly can. The FTC report makes clear just how determined and analytical they are about making that money by going after kids. The only artistry involved is the First Amendment PR they put out. Their only real concerns are over their $*#$* bottom lines.
So I say we as a nation can figure out a reasonable way to take the profit out of this without endangering the ability of someone to make a political point in a film. One very simple, very concrete first step would be this: there is no more "the film has been rated R, the trailer is approved for all audiences" BS--if the movie is R, the trailer is R and you don't show it at a PG or PG-13 movie.
--Mike Kelly
(To reply, click here.)
If it is OK to make something, it should be OK to market it, especially if allegedly parents/adults make the final decision.
--Joe
(To reply, click here.)
[Part of a much longer post, part of a thread that argues out many of the issues.]
The real hypocrisy here is the would-be censors who weasel their way in with a rating system and then use that as an excuse to drag us all further down the slope because 'we agreed with them'. Rating a movie 'R' doesn't mean 'kids shouldn't see it'. That's XXX or NC-17. 'R' means 'some (subtext: overly sensitive) parents might not want their kids to see this'. Whose parents didn't let them see R-rated movies? Mine let me. My friends' let them. Well, except for this devout Christian family that everyone sort of looked at pityingly out of the corner of their eye (pitying them because they couldn't see R-rated movies and the like, of course). Turning a sop for the extreme right into an excuse to sue is such total bull-pocky that I'm chilled to the bone that it's getting as warm a reception as it is.
--Terrycloth
(To reply, click here.)
(9/12)
Reader Comment from The Fray:
Both Culturebox and Press Box appeal to constitutional lawyers to resolve their dispute over what the Supreme Court would do with a restriction on the marketing of R-rated entertainment to children. I am a First Amendment lawyer (I am currently counsel for the ACLU in challenging California's "Son of Sam" law before the California Supreme Court, among other things); here's my take.
While Culturebox is correct to point to the Central Hudson case as setting out the four-part test that is used to determine the constitutionality of regulations of commercial speech, it is important to understand that while the Court still invokes the Central Hudson test, it is increasingly finding commercial speech restrictions unconstitutional under that test. For instance, the Court recently struck down a prohibition on advertising state lotteries in neighboring states where gambling is prohibited. This certainly suggests that the "lawful conduct" prong of the commercial speech test is being de-emphasized. Recent cases emphasize whether the advertising is truthful and non-misleading, which is a recognition that the main interest the government has in regulating commercial speech is to protect against deceptive advertising.
As a result, the Court is likely to be skeptical of arguments that a restriction on non-misleading advertising is constitutional. The advertisements that Culturebox complains about are not misleading. Rather, the issue is whether an entertainment company can truthfully describe its products to children who are not supposed to be able to obtain the product without parental permission. I think that the Court would be extremely skeptical of such a law.
Further, there are two important points about the law that would tip in favor of striking it down. First, as Press Box notes, children are permitted to obtain these products with the permission of their parents. As Culturebox notes, there is a pragmatic concern over letting them see the advertisements, because kids may then beg their parents to let them see the R-rated movie or have the video game. But it is still the parent's decision. And there is a strong argument that advertisements that tell children that "X" is a product that their parents should buy for them is protected under the First Amendment. Or can the government ban all advertising for toys on Saturday morning kiddie shows?
Second, the ratings system itself does not have the force of law. This is tremendously important. In fact, I believe that it would be unconstitutional for the government to require the industry to rate their programs and products. (This would create a tremendous chill on expression, would be vague, and would also be a form of compelled speech which even Culturebox admits is unconstitutional.) But since the ratings system itself is not enshrined in law, it is not illegal to sell a kid an R-rated movie ticket or CD or video game in the first place. And if they are not prohibited from selling these materials to children (unlike, for instance, cigarettes or alcohol), how can they be prohibited from marketing them to children? To take an obvious example, would it be constitutional to ban anyone from wearing a Nazi uniform from within 1000 feet of a school, where anyone else with any other viewpoint is permitted to protest there? If it is legal generally to express ones self in the presence of children, it can't be illegal to express certain messages around children merely because those messages are "harmful". It cannot be the case that the government may permit the marketing of a CD containing lyrics that preach tolerance of homosexuals to children while prohibiting the marketing of a CD that contains lyrics that preach gay-bashing. That is content-based censorship. For that reason, I believe that the Court would strike down what Culturebox seeks.
--Dilan Esper
(To reply, click here.)
(9/18)