Parental Guidance Suggested

Joanne Freeman: You know, Nathan, Brian, it’s really interesting to me that in that last piece, I learned something that I feel kinda goofy for not knowing, I will confess. So, I had a bat mitzvah, I knew what that was all about, but then I stayed and I went on and was confirmed.

Brian: You stayed?

Joanne Freeman: I know, I’m a nut. I stayed.

Brian: I always wondered about those kids that stayed. That was like-

Joanne Freeman: Yeah, I was one of those kids.

Brian: … the jailbreak once you were done with your bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah. Did you not get the memo?

Joanne Freeman: I was that kid, and I was the one who stayed. No, I enjoyed the whole process of learning and I just, I guess, I didn’t have much of a background in Judaism before that point, so I think I was kinda soaking in all of this information, so I stuck around. But I never understood why it was called confirmation. It always felt to me like something that should happen at a church. And in a sense, that last piece basically said, “Yeah.”

Brian: That’s exactly right.

Nathan Connolly: I had a confirmation as a Catholic and basically you already have the big milestone when you have Holy Communion when you’re much younger. So you get to have the Eucharist and the sacramental wine, and that’s always the big deal. Can I participate in the procession. The confirmation was just kind of like, “Okay, now I have more obligations. I have to show up and lector on Sunday as opposed to just being an altar boy.”
So for me, as I’m sure for a lot of folks, getting confirmed at 13 is not nearly as significant as getting your drivers license at 16 or being allowed to vote when you’re 18, and certainly not being allowed to drink alcohol when you’re 21. So, it gets lost in the sea of other milestone in adolescence.

Brian: So maybe that’s because there’s not a specific number, like 13 for instance, associated with it.

Nathan Connolly: Probably. I think it’s certainly some of it. I actually remember being more excited about being PG-13 legal than having the confirmation.

Joanne Freeman: I think that the same holds true for my confirmation, right? There’s no number associated with it but bat mitzvah and bar mitzvah are these really meaningful moments when it’s a big deal. Certainly my parents, actually my parents never went to synagogue until I was 12 and then suddenly it was like … “Oh my gosh. We gotta go to temple.”

Brian: Better get moving.

Joanne Freeman: “She’s gotta have a bat mitzvah.” Yeah.
And I have to share with you guys, particularly Brian because of your confession about only knowing the word shalom, which I think is probably true for any Jew who went through that training.

Brian: It is a two syllable word. I just wanna point out.

Joanne Freeman: I have several syllables, and I’ve never had a reason to do this, to actually offer the world my Hebrew sentence.

Brian: Hit us with it.

Joanne Freeman: I have a whole sentence.

Brian: Hit us with it Joanne.

Joanne Freeman: Okay, here it is. [foreign language 00:34:02], which means-

Joanne Freeman: [foreign language 00:34:01] which means “I like to hang out in cafes on Saturday nights.” That literally … I took conversational Hebrew, and that is the only sentence I remember.

Brian: And just to be clear, that’s actually a bad thing, right? To be hanging out on the Sabbath, or no?

Joanne Freeman: Well, no. Saturday night’s okay. Friday night, not so good.

Brian: Okay, got it.

John Lewis: At age 13, Nathan. It’s a bad thing.

Joanne Freeman: That’s true.
Due to strong language, and simulated teen partying, the following segment has been rated PG-13.

John Lewis: Did you let Nathan party again?
You might ask “Why 13?” And I’ll tell you, it’s arbitrary.

Brian: This is film historian John Lewis. We asked him about the origins of PG-13, and why 13 year olds are considered mature enough to see edgy content.

John Lewis: Why it became PG-13 is anybody’s guess. I guess it’s sort of halfway between 10 and 16. It’s also maybe it’s like bar mitzvah age. I really don’t know.

Brian: Lewis says Hollywood studios introduced the PG-13 movie rating for a very specific reason: To boost the bottom line.

John Lewis: Before 1968, you have a very strict production code written by a Jesuit priest in 1930 named Father Daniel Lord. I mean, you couldn’t invent a name like that.

Brian: Good name.

John Lewis: Yeah, yeah. And it was explicit, what you could and couldn’t do.

Brian: You couldn’t show a criminal beating a cop, or unmarried couples in bed, for example.

Nathan Connolly: But by the 1960s, young people were bored by the bland, buttoned down offerings of Hollywood studios.

John Lewis: So cinema is struggling, and then you’ve got these foreign imports coming in, and you have a generation of very well educated young people in America who are anxiously talking about the next Truffaut or [Gadar 00:36:16] film, and aren’t the slightest bit interested in seeing a studio movie.

Nathan Connolly: Hollywood needed to find a way to attract those young people without alienating more conservative audience members. Lewis says this tension was apparent in the 1966 movie adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

John Lewis: The content of the film was …

Brian: Intense.

John Lewis: It’s intense, and it’s also not suitable, and it’s not even interesting to anyone under 18. There are a couple of quotes … There’s a line in the play “Hump the hostess,” and then the word “screw” is used not in a carpenter’s context.

Nathan Connolly: In other words, for that time, pretty racy stuff.

Joanne Freeman: But Jack Valenti, the new president of the Motion Picture Association of America, figured out how to get Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf into theaters.

John Lewis: Part of the compromise was the first implementation of an M-rating, and the film was a box office success despite a restriction. This was further encouragement for developing a new system based on the concept of age-based categories.

Joanne Freeman: The M-rating stood for mature audiences, but all ages were permitted. The first rating system also included G, appropriate for all ages; R, or restricted, no one under 16 allowed without an adult; and, of course, X, for adults only. Eventually, M became PG for parental guidance.

Nathan Connolly: Lewis says the creation of the ratings system was a brilliant marketing move. It allowed Hollywood filmmakers to push the boundaries in terms of sex and violence, and with ratings, the public, not some Hollywood censor, got to decide whether or not a film was appropriate for children.

John Lewis: Valenti’s basically saying that it’s not the movie business’s position to tell parents how to parent.

Brian: The rating system worked just fine for awhile, but by the 1980s, PG films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where a guy’s heart is ripped out of his chest, made some parents uncomfortable.

Nathan Connolly: That was my movie right there.

John Lewis: Yeah, well, it wasn’t everybody’s movie because …

Brian: Some parents felt that the space between PG and R had become a mile wide. So, in 1984, America’s first movie with a PG-13 rating hit the theaters. It was a movie called Red Dawn.

John Lewis: And it’s the sort of lunatic, right wing fantasy film that’s been remade.

Brian: For those of our many listeners who have not seen Red Dawn, this is about Cuban Marxist Russian proxies invade the United States.

John Lewis: That’s right. And were saved by Patrick Swayze.

Brian: And find all the guns in the United States because overzealous American bureaucrats have forced Americans to register their names if they own guns.

John Lewis: Right.

Brian: So they know right where to go.

John Lewis: Right. And our only hope is a group of teenagers headed by the then charismatic movie star Patrick Swayze, who leads a rebellion against the invasion. And the cast was appealing to teenagers. But if you’re going to tell teenagers, if you give it an R-rating, that they can’t go see it, or they can’t go see it unless they go with their parents, and no 16-year-old wants to see anything with their parents, you’re basically killing that film’s box office. It’s driven by the market.
There are certain films that so depend on an adolescent audience that they can’t get an R-rating and make money.

Brian: I see.

John Lewis: So the paradigmatic PG-13 films are films that could possibly get an R, but couldn’t possibly succeed at the box office if indeed it got that. So something like Twilight, Hunger Games, a superhero film that maybe has some kind of difficult content. They all have plenty of violence. Those are the films that PG-13 is designed to contain.

Brian: Are you listening, all you 11-year-olds?

John Lewis: It’s also a guarantee of a certain kind of appealing content, that if you’re a 12-year-old and you’ve found some of the movies you’ve seen recently a bit tame for your tastes-

Brian: Exactly.

John Lewis: -the PG-13 is a descriptor that guarantees a certain kind of content.

Brian: So would you change this system?

John Lewis: If I worked in the industry, I wouldn’t, no. I mean, it’s capricious. It’s inequitable in some ways. By and large, the raters … There are all these acronyms. They’re called CARA, the Classifications and Ratings Administration. They’re the board, this sort of anonymous committee of middle aged parents.

Brian: Are these just civilians? Do these folks have other day jobs?

John Lewis: No, I think you could make a living doing this, yeah.

Brian: Really?

John Lewis: Yeah.

Brian: Did you ever find out who some of these people were? Has anybody ever found out?

John Lewis: Well, there’s a movie called This Film’s Not Yet Rated, which was directed by Kirby Dick, a terrific documentary filmmaker. I’m actually in the movie, too, so perhaps you might see me in the movie.

Brian: Cool.

John Lewis: And he hired private detectives and outed a number of the raters. They’re called raters. And it turned out they actually weren’t what they were supposed to be. That they hadn’t by then grown-

Brian: They didn’t even have kids?

John Lewis: Well, they had grown kids, so their kids were already out of the house. It’s a dreary job. If you could imagine.

Brian: Yes. No, I cannot imagine.

John Lewis: Yeah. If you talk to anybody who reviews films for a living like at a newspaper, they’ll tell you it’s the worst job because you’re seeing 300 movies a year, and 285 of them are terrible.

Joanne Freeman: John Lewis is a professor of film studies at Oregon State University and the author of Hollywood Versus Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry.