Today, Explained - This episode is unrated

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

"The House That Jack Built" opens in select theaters across the country today, but it’s not the version director Lars von Trier wanted you to see. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) put the kibosh on the director’s cut. Some say it’s censorship, but Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson explains how the MPAA is trying to save Hollywood from itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I can't believe this is one of the last times I'll be saying this for the year, but support for Today Explained today comes from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. The Quip starts at just $25, and your first set of refills is free. And after that, they're $5 every three months. Get to quip.com slash explained. It's the most wonderful time of the year to go see movies because all the good ones are finally coming out. I want you. You're my vice. It ain't worth it. But that's what this show is about.

That was the worst pep talk ever. But also maybe a repulsive one. Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. The House That Jack Built is a super, super violent new movie from a filmmaker named Lars von Trier. You might know Lars from his last movie, Nymphomaniac. It featured a lot of unsimulated sex. The House That Jack Built goes less heavy on the sex and instead doubles down on violence. It's so violent that there were mass walkouts when it screened at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Alyssa Wilkinson was there for Vox, and if you don't want to hear just how brutally violent

this movie is, please skip the next 20 seconds or so of the show. I mean, the unrated cut is really, really disturbing. One of the actresses, like, he slices her breasts off and makes a purse out of them. He, like, dismembers two children and then forces the mother to feed things to them. I mean, it's, like, really disgusting. Wow. It's worse than anything you would normally see in an R-rated film, even a very gory like horror film. The house that Jack built finally hits theaters today.

But what you'll see if you go see it is not the movie that Lars von Trier made, the one that caused walkouts. This is a totally censored version. The Motion Picture Association of America, aka the MPAA, stepped in and put the kibosh on the director's cut. The MPAA, this group of randos out in Los Angeles in 2018, still decides what you get to see at the movie theater on your Friday night. But it turns out, way back when Hollywood first became a thing,

they created this group to stop censorship. The MPAA was set up to protect people like Lars von Trier. Alyssa Wilkinson, most people think of the MPAA as these party poopers, but they're actually there to protect Hollywood's creative freedoms. Why did Hollywood start censoring itself? The story starts about 100 years ago when Hollywood was invented. The big studios, they are producing all these movies, and it soon becomes very clear that racy content sells and that edgy content sells.

What were movies like at this point? I mean, I think we know like Charlie Chaplin and Birth of a Nation, but were there raunchy-ass movies back then? Yeah, I mean, movies were pretty raunchy back then. For instance, 1903, a movie called From Showgirl to Burlesque Queen had a girl basically undressing and smiling at the camera. Uh-oh. She was clearly doing a striptease for the camera,

and this is 1903. Or there's this film, The Cheat, which was about sexuality and sadomasochism. Oh. Yeah, a woman who was trying to repay a loan, and then you can imagine how the repayment went. And that's in 1915. Or we have a movie called Hypocrites, and it has full nudity in it. So this is a big problem in the early 20th century for a lot of people.

So it sounds kind of like the early 20th century might kind of be like the current situation that we're in, where we have the internet, and the thing that seems to draw the most eyeballs is the most racy, if not even obscene stuff. That's right. Crime, drugs, sex, all these things are very popular with people 100 years ago, just like they are today. And if you want to get butts in seats and you want to sell tickets, that's how you get them in the door. If you want to get butts in seats, show some butts. That's what Hollywood is all about. So how quickly does this become a problem for

the puritanical Americans in the 20th century? Yeah, well, it happened pretty fast. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures were business and not art, and therefore they weren't protected speech under the First Amendment. So that opened the door to the possibility that the government would choose to censor the movie industry. This is around the era when people actually succeeded in having alcohol banned in the United States, which is sort of amazing to think about now. And this was happening at the same time that Hollywood was becoming known for its scandals. There are all these scandalous stories of murders and of men preying on young, beautiful women.

One of the most famous of these was a scandal involving the comedian Fatty Arbuckle, who was an actor who was extremely popular, had a party and a woman died. And this became top headlines. Arbuckle first learns of it when reporters show up on his doorstep. He is stunned to learn that Virginia Rappe has died and that he is charged with her murder. It was unclear what happened to her, but of course the rumors flew. What were the rumors? Oh, he killed her. He violated her. There's all kinds of stories. Nobody totally knows what

happened, but this was a common thing that was happening more and more, and it made for great tabloid headlines. As you can imagine, people were beginning to call for cleanup in Hollywood, and there was a real worry that they'd be regulated or that people would stop going to the movies altogether and it would harm the industry. The industry started basically saying, look, if we don't figure out a way to clean up our public image, somebody else will probably do it for us. So let's figure out how to do it ourselves. And so what did they do initially? The major studios formed an organization that would eventually be called the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America. And they hired a man named Will Hayes, who had been the postmaster general of the

United States, to come run the organization. And they came up with something that's now known as the Hayes Code. Back then, it was called the Production Code. And this code had lots and lots of rules about what you could and couldn't do in a movie. And filmmakers would submit their films to receive basically like a stamp of approval. And this production code has all kinds of rules. You couldn't show explicit violence. So all like the gangster movies we think of when we think of like classic film, those come later. But you could show in historical context. show explicit violence. So all like the gangster movies we think of when we think of like classic

film, those come later. But you could show it in historical context. And so this is basically responsible for the rise of the Western. A Western by nature was historical and you could show revenge in a Western and boy, people really like revenge movies. They always have.

A decent man doesn't want to kill but if if you're going to shoot, you shoot to kill. So in some weird way, the reason there's like a new Coen Brothers Western on Netflix is because a hundred years ago, you couldn't show violence in a contemporary sense. Yes, that's exactly right. What about the other stuff? What about like the juicy, sexy stuff? You could not have nudity. You could not portray sexual behavior and you really couldn't even refer to it, which led to some really strange things. So the aftermath of sexual activity can be pregnancy and childbirth, but you couldn't show that. In Gone with the Wind, for instance,

there's a scene where a character is giving birth and everyone is shown only as shadows on a wall because you couldn't actually show what was happening because that was sexual in nature. Betty Boop basically ended because of this rule. You couldn't have Betty Boop cartoons because they were kind of overtly sexual in nature. Betty on the high wire!

You couldn't have perverse topics. And so this being like the 30s and onwards, their definition of perverse topics included things like interracial relationships and homosexuality. These aren't my clothes. Well, where are your clothes? I've lost my clothes. Well, why are you wearing these clothes?

Because I just went gay all of a sudden. Now see here, young man, stop this nonsense. You couldn't show a mixed-race couple, which meant that generally people of color were not getting hired for lead roles. You couldn't use profanity. And if you did, you might get a fine or your film might not be released. So there was all kinds of things that you couldn't do in a film, some of which seems crazy from 2018. How long before you get like PG, PG-13? Is that still decades away? It is, yeah. So the code lasted for decades. The code sort of appears in 1930. Some movies are

drastically recut. Casablanca, for instance, was drastically recut in order to meet the code and be released. But some people started to try to either subvert the code or just release the film without code approval. This starts happening more and more, and the movie that most people think of as having kind of ended the code is Some Like It Hot, which is considered probably one of the best comedies of all time. That's good. I'm going to level with you.

We can't get married at all. Why not? I'm a man. Well, nobody's perfect. It comes out in 1959. There's cross-dressing, there's racketeering, there's gambling, there's some kind of homosexual undertones. It is not code approved.

And it was such a huge hit that it became clear that the code was becoming something that filmmakers probably wouldn't even need to abide by if they wanted their movie to make money. Once they realize that they can make these movies and make a ton of money because people are very excited to go see them, then there's really no impetus to have your film approved by the code, except that people are still very worried that the government is going to come in and start censoring films. And the reason they were afraid of that was partly because there's two Supreme Court cases in 1968 on this. One is Interstate

Circuit versus Dallas, which was about citywide censorship ordinances. And the other was called Ginsburg versus New York, which was about how content that was deemed obscene could be marketed. And the industry just kind of saw the writing on the wall and they decided to replace their self-censorship of the Hays Code with something they called self-classification. So in 1968, they devise and launch this rating system that looks a whole lot like what we still have 50 years later, and that turned 50 years old on November 1st of this year. In 2018, it's a battle between Netflix and movie ratings. Who do you think wins? That's next on Today Explained. All right, so we're approaching the last Quip ad of the year for the show,

so I want to just try and run through all the things i've learned about the quip this year uh first of all the quip runs on batteries you don't have to plug it into a wall ever it's a very sleekly designed it's a nice travel companion uh when you're brushing with the quip you don't get a lot of like back splash saliva situation going on on the mirror you don't get a lot of gunky buildup on the brush. It's actually funny to think about all the things I've learned about the Quip this year. It's got these gentle pulses that tell you when to switch sides when you're brushing so you can give equal treatment to the four quadrants there in your mouth.

It's quiet, so you can do stuff while you brush with the quip like listen to your favorite podcast and rate and review it even on on apple podcasts the brush starts at about 25 but you can dress it up with all sorts of bells and whistles there's a family pack if you're looking to buy four quips at once and uh getquip.com slash explain. Today, today explained. Alyssa, what are ratings like now? How have they changed from what we heard the Hays Code did in the 1920s to, say, 2018? Today, the MPA ratings are divided into five categories. G, which is for general audiences.

PG, which is parental guidance. PG-13, which means this film is only suggested for ages 13 and over. R, which means restricted, and that says no audiences under 17 that aren't accompanied with an adult. And then something called NC-17, which is supposed to mean no audiences are admitted who are under age 17, whether or not they're with an adult. Yeah. This is a voluntary rating system. You don't have to have your film rated, but almost everyone chooses to submit their film for rating still. And those have changed over time. The PG-13 rating, for instance,

didn't even exist until 1984. There used to be the X rating that was supposed to be for unrated films, but the porn industry basically grabbed hold of it as a marketing tactic and started using it. And that's why they invented NC-17. But in general, the idea is you make a film, you send it to the MPAA, a group of people in a room rate it. You take that rating and either accept it or recut your film, and then that is what is released into theaters. What exactly gets something determined rated R or something PG-13? Is it like, are there quotas for curses or breasts or violence, gunshots, blood? Yeah. So some of this seems to be codified and some of it is not.

So, for instance, you cannot have nudity in a movie that is PG-13 rated. Yeah. You can have one F-bomb, but only if you use it without a sexual connotation to it, which is why a movie like Boyhood, for instance, which we would generally think of as pretty tame, becomes rated R because of the language. Or a movie like Once, that was rated R because it's Irish and they swear a lot. This reminds me of like when I watch a Marvel movie and there's like a big moment where there's like a fuck or a shit and everyone has a good laugh about it because it's unexpected and you're watching a Disney movie and it comes like in the third act, but there's only one there because they're just allowed one, huh? Yes, that's right. Sexual content is part of this as well. And there's a lot of controversy about the way the MPA thinks about sexual content. Like,

for instance, female sexual pleasure usually garners a higher rating than male sexual pleasure depicted on screen. Homosexual relations look different than heterosexual relations. So all of these things have been part of the criticism of the MPA over time. And then the last part is violence. In a PG-13 rated movie, you can have violence and gun violence, but you can't show blood or carnage. And you can in an R-rated movie. And this is very controversial, partly because some studies have found that there's actually more gun violence in PG-13 rated movies than in R-rated movies overall. But they're cutting out any depiction of what actually happens when you shoot someone with a gun because they want to get the

PG-13 rated movies so that they can have a larger audience and make more money from it. So why does violence get a lower rating than sex in America? Violence is part of American film. And part of that is that hollywood has a pretty close relationship with the pentagon the military and the cia both have liaisons with hollywood some papers that were unearthed by the independent in 2017 had some really wild statistics so between 1911 and 2017 more than 800 feature films received support from the Department of Defense. Really? Like financial support? Well, often it's more like they were able to shoot in a place that they might not be able

to shoot or they had someone on set as an advisor or something like that. So these liaisons work with Hollywood in different ways depending on the production, but they include suggesting story ideas, providing research, making suggestions on scripts that producers send over to them. Wow. The CIA has been involved with 60 films and TV shows since its formation in the 40s. The CIA? The CIA. And there was a big scandal not all that long ago with the film Zero Dark Thirty.

Who's in the Saudi group? What's the target? Where was the last time you saw bin Laden, huh? Gawkers got their hands on memos where the CIA would tell the writer, Mark Boll, what to take out of the movie that they didn't like. The CIA exerted pressure on the film, allegedly, for showing torture in a more positive light, as something that was actually positive because it got information.

Yikes. According to the memo, he's agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us so we're absolutely comfortable with what he'll be shown. Here is the CIA saying, we took out everything that was uncomfortable to us in the movie. And so in the end, what he's showing is exactly what the CIA is comfortable with. So what, to be clear, does the CIA have partnerships with Hollywood or with the MPAA? Well, the MPAA is basically just an organization made up of the six biggest studios in Hollywood.

So they're one in the same. There's no difference there. The military, for its part, has done the same thing, has influenced films to portray the military in more positive ways. And they've also done it in some really strange ways. Like, for instance, the CIA requested that Robert De Niro's character in Meet the Parents not have manuals with CIA information about torture in them. There's just all these kinds of things that we're only kind of finding out about because journalists keep digging up paperwork through the Freedom of Information Act. How do you think that the MPAA

sort of remains like a legitimate body? Is it just that people don't know? It's a couple of people in a room in LA who have no connection to the government whatsoever? I think the average American doesn't think too hard about where the ratings come from. Sometimes I talk to people and they actually think it's a government organization. Right. But it's not.

And there's no law against seeing an R-rated movie if you're under the age of 17. That's purely an agreement between the theater owners and the MPAA. Do you think these major shifts we've seen throughout the history of movies from the birth of movies in the 20th century to the creation of this Hays Code to the creation of the rating system in the 60s, do you think we're about to see another one of those big changes now that the internet has changed the way we access movies and TV? Netflix right now is trying very hard to disrupt the theater industry altogether and to just disrupt Hollywood completely. The statistics over the last couple years show that fewer filmmakers are submitting their films for ratings to the MPA than they have

in the past, which probably indicates that some of them are becoming more comfortable with the idea of releasing straight to streaming or finding a small theater that they can release their film in without a rating. So there's some changes afoot. And the more that the production to theater pipeline is disrupted, the more the MPA's rating system becomes less important or harder to enforce. So then it really is up to parents to decide whether they're going to let their kid watch it or not, whether they're going to watch it with their kid, whatever they're harder to enforce. So then it really is up to parents to decide whether they're going to let their kid watch it or not, whether they're going to watch it with their kid,

whatever they're going to do. And the rating essentially becomes obsolete at that point. Alyssa Wilkinson is a movie critic at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Today Explained One for the road, the Quip electric toothbrush, unlike most electric toothbrushes, is pretty affordable. $25. Comes with a little bonus when you go to getquip.com slash explained.

It's a free set of refill brush heads. After that, they're $5 every three months. Getquip.com slash explained.