America Loves a Bully and the Acceptance of Violence in Movies

FROM ADAM LEIPZIG AT CULTURAL WEEKLY:

Joan Graves, head of the MPAA’s ratings board, writing to defend the R rating for the film Bully, has said, “Our ratings reflect how we believe a majority of American parents, not just from large cities on the coasts but everywhere in between, would rate a film.”

She’s probably right. That scares the hell out of me.

Let’s be honest about why a movie with a half-dozen “bad” words or a nipple-slip gets rated R, while horrific violence routinely earns a PG-13.

We Americans say we abhor violence, but we’re really quite comfortable with it. Violence has always been a signal part of American society and yes, to some extent it’s a Red State/Blue State issue….

…There’s an inherent violence in the American swagger, the bellicose way we approach negotiations, our armies of litigious lawyers, and the political clout of the gun rights lobby. Americans own more guns per capita than people of any other nation, and while guns may or may not be for protection and sport, as the NRA claims, there’s no arguing that the gun is the most compact and effective mechanism of violence ever devised…

Here’s a key part of the article that I find an interesting critique of traditional American Christians:

The Right is comfortable censoring sex and language, but not violence, because sex and language transgress their preferred religious ethic while violence does not.  The Right doesn’t feel violence will undermine our way of life – and their method of dealing with it is generally more violence.

Read the rest of the article here.

THOUGHTS?