Doug French’s article today critiquing Atlas Shrugged: Part I focuses on the absence of Rand’s second favorite social activity (after excommunicating dissidents):
[T]he movie looks like it was done on the fly and sanitized for the 21st century. For instance, Ayn Rand was a passionate smoker. “Smoking is a symbol of the fire in the mind.” And her characters constantly smoked. The dollar-sign cigarettes are an important plot device. In the book, Hugh Akston offers Dagny a cigarette that she accepts and smokes — a cigarette so good she saves the butt, which has a dollar sign on it.
None of the principle characters in Atlas Shrugged: Part I smokes, except Hugh Akston (Michael O’Keefe), who looks like he’s nervously lighting up for the first time. There is only a momentary shot of the dollar sign on the cigarette butt, so only Atlas fans with their antennae fully deployed will pick this up.
I can think of a simple reason why the film’s producers omitted smoking: To avoid the dreaded “R” rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, the de facto monopoly that pre-screens films in order to warn parents about what content may not be appropriate for their children. Since 2007 the MPAA has considered smoking a factor in its rating decisions:
This action is an extension of our current practice of factoring under-age smoking into the rating of films. Now, all smoking will be a consideration in the rating process. Three questions will have particular weight for our rating board when considering smoking in a film: Is the smoking pervasive? Does the film glamorize smoking? And, is there an historic or other mitigating context? Additionally, when a film’s rating is affected by the depiction of smoking, that rating will now include phrases such as ‘glamorized smoking’ or ‘pervasive smoking.’
If Atlas the movie featured anywhere near the level of smoking that Atlas the book did, there’s no doubt the film would have been rated “R” instead of “PG-13.” (Heck, it might’ve flirted with an NC-17.) Given the filmmakers no doubt wanted to tell Rand’s story to as wide an audience as possible, it would have been commercially self-defeating to invite an “R” rating, which would restrict the ability of teenagers (theoretically) to see the film. Even Rand could appreciate the dilemma.
Of course, the entire rating system is an affront to Rand’s Objectivism and even mainstream Austro-libertarianism. Although the MPAA maintains its system is purely private and voluntary, that is just a convenient fiction. The MPAA — the six largest Hollywood studios — is arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington. Anyone who tries to buck the rating system, or Heaven forbid adopt a competing system, would face opposition not just from the MPAA but its government allies.
Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission are particularly fond of “rating systems,” which create a backdoor form of censorship that skirts thorny First Amendment issues. Just last week the FTC issued a report on its latest round of “undercover” visits to retailers to see if they were complying with the “voluntary” ratings systems — including the MPAA’s — with the ominous threat that widespread “failure” of the ratings to keep objectionable content away from teenagers might justify direct government intervention.
Nor surprisingly, the MPAA ratings aren’t terribly useful to actual consumers. Like any government-run system, the ratings are arbitrary and lack transparency. The MPAA won’t identify the members of its ratings board, nor will it publish definitive criteria for how to avoid a particular rating. Over the years, critics have noted the MPAA tends to focus on peripheral issues — like how many times an expletive is used — without assessing the film’s overall appropriateness for a given audience. Just recently, the Academy Award-winning film The King’s Speech failed in its attempt to change its “R” rating to “PG-13.” The difference was a single scene where the protagonist — a man trying to overcome a stammer — unleashes a string of expletives as part of his therapy. For this reason alone, the MPAA declared the film off-limits to teenagers.
The MPAA and its trademarked — it always comes back to IP! — ratings system should be an anachronism in a modern age of decentralized information and communication. A sophisticated parent doesn’t need a secret ratings board to tell her what types of films are appropriate for her children. She sure as hell doesn’t need the FTC playing detective to ensure the MPAA’s “voluntary” codes are strictly adhered to — because Heaven forbid someone sell a “R” rated movie like The King’s Speech to a 16-year-old who wants to purchase it.
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The King’s Speech “R” rating is silly when you know what kind of movies get PG-13 rating. The rules must be changed or just get rid off of the rating system altogether.
Go to an elementary school playground and use that as a standard for ratings. Everything will get G.
I don’t see why they felt they had to get a PG-13 rating. I don’t think an R rating is going to stop many “teens” from watching it. Anybody can see an R-rated movie as long as they can find an adult to go with them. An NC-17 rating is a serious problem, as theaters won’t carry NC-17 movies and those few that do won’t let anybody 17 or under watch the movie at all.
I know that the video game ratings agency (the “ESRB,” which was “voluntarily” created by the game industry in the early 1990s after pressure from politicians during the Mortal Kombat controversy) never stopped me from getting an M-rated game when I was under 18. After politicians tried to pass some laws mandating the “ESRB” rating system (these laws have all been declared unconstitutional by the courts), stores “voluntarily” decided to start enforcing this “voluntary” ratings system.
Actually, the ratings systems replaced even worse censorship codes. Between the 1930s and 1960s, movies were censored by the Hays Code. When some in the movie industry first introduced this code in 1930, it was ridiculed, but it became enforced by politicians and religious organizations during the FDR administration and was “voluntary” (in name only, of course). In the 1980s, Nintendo censored its video games, refusing to license any games that it considered “offensive” (yet, there were X-rated games on the Atari just a few years earlier).
TV is largely censored by the cartel of TV networks and by organizations such as the fanatics at the “Parents Television Council” (the group that sends the FCC almost all of the “complaints” that agency receives). If a TV show is deemed “too controversial,” people write letters to the sponsors and the sponsors pull out. Then, the network drops the show due to lack of ad revenue. Fortunately, the FCC has very little power over TV (they only control what is broadcast on your local over the air stations), but anti-free speech groups definitely do whatever they can to shut down shows they don’t like.
There is absolutely nothing “voluntary” about these ratings systems. We need to remove the governmental backing behind the ratings systems and then they will collapse on the free market.
That’s what the Internet is for. All you have to do is click a box that says you’re over 18 and you’re gold.
The FCC actually had an immense level of influence on the content of television for a good period of time. They were the primary reason that The Untouchables TV show was watered down to the point where it lost viewership and was subsequently canceled.
Paul Cantor wrote an essay on this very topic that is available both here and in “Back on the Road to Serfdom”.
Of interest: “This Film is Not Yet Rated” is a 2006 independent documentary film about the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system and its effect on American culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated
I’ve always wondered just how useful a rating system is that puts bloody war violence on the same level of vice as seeing a pair of boobs. I know I’ve never equated the two. I guess Hollywood really is a planet unto itself.
But the MPAA doesn’t equate the two. Boobs get the R rating. Violent movies like “Hanna” get PG-13.
Yet, Jack Bauer on the TV show “24″ can be shown torturing people. No questions asked.
I suppose one fits the states narrative better than the other….
I use the ratings provided by Kids in Mind: http://www.kids-in-mind.com/
They tell you what is in the movie that might be objectionable, giving you the information so you can knowledgeably decide what you’re getting yourself or your children into.
Also, the film could have used more of her other favorite activity, sexual lovemaking; (Dagny and Rearden merely laying tracks into the tunnel on the Rio Norte didn’t do it for me, too sublimated.)
This film should have been made much hotter sexually, flashbacks to Dagny’s youthful love affair with Francisco, etc — fast-forwards to Galt’s face hovering over her after a plane crash (maybe a sort of premonition dream.)
Also the film should have been set in a historical era, the New Deal era, when government interference was more ambitious and sweeping, when depression economics and crushing unemployment were a very real part of the story, when railroads (Dagny Taggart) and steel mills (Henry Rearden) and wildcatting for oil (Ellis Wyatt) and mining (Francisco D’Anconia) were more central to the economy of the United States.
The attempt here to locate the plot in a speculative fiction future era of terrible peak oil crises is very weakly executed in the filmmaking, the script is a mess. If Ayn Rand were alive, she’d have to go to court over this script, it is so poorly written.
It should have been a 30s and 40s costume drama, with art deco interiors and clothing and hair styles, and much more of Ayn Rand’s “Old Hollywood” style dialogue scenes, elevated and eloquent, should have been in the script — it was replaced with some very pedestrian screenwriting, clattering boilerplate that merely advances the speculative fiction plot but fails to express her vision– and the script should have been a television series in a Masterpiece Theater style — this film has no style (unless you count quick and dirty made-for-tv-movie a style.) It should have been made for one of the premium cable networks, such as Showtime, as a series, and then maketed as a DVD Box Set.
This film is not worth seeing. Tis better to film it in your head, while reading, than watch this. The producer, I think, was hoping to bring viewers to the book through the popularizing media of film, but he made a poor film.
If Mr. Oliva is correct, then the film’s producers are dimwits. An R rating would pretty much guarantee that more teenagers would “shrug” off the MPAA pretense of authority and go see it.
That is internet.
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