The entire situation has an almost comical backwardness. A documentary about kids being verbally abused in hallways, physically assaulted on school buses, and psychologically ruined during their adolescence—and the question isn’t whether it should be made. The question of whether or not teenagers should be permitted to watch it without a parent present is up for debate.
That is the peculiar reasoning behind what transpired with Bully, the Lee Hirsch documentary that debuted in American theaters in 2012 with a R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America and ended up with something completely different. In the interim, a months-long pressure campaign took place that, depending on your perspective, was either a grassroots victory or a reminder of how incredibly arbitrary the ratings system has always been.
The movie received a R from the MPAA due to profanity, particularly the repeated use of one word in a scene where a child is beaten on a school bus. Not because of graphic violence. Not for pornographic material. For words that, by Tuesday’s third period, every American middle school student has already heard. The seventeen-year-old Katy Butler, who started the online petition calling for a PG-13, put it simply: the word in question represents what bullied children hear on a daily basis in the schools that these ratings are purportedly intended to protect. Over 500,000 individuals signed.
The Weinstein Company, which supported the movie, made the unusual decision to release Bully unrated in protest. Although the idea was sound, it felt more like a publicity stunt than a moral stance. In actuality, the MPAA’s rating would have prevented any adolescent from viewing the movie without adult supervision. That is, the precise audience that the movie was intended for.
What the story reveals about the machinery behind those tiny letter boxes is what makes it worth reading again. A board of twelve parents—six men and six women—hired for seven-year terms and mandated to have children between the ages of five and fifteen at the time of their appointment oversees the ratings system, which has been in place since 1990. They are from various regions of the nation. It makes sense on paper. Critics have long claimed that the board is strangely consistent in its treatment of sexuality and language, treating them far more harshly than it does violence. It is possible for a comedy and a drama with nearly identical content to receive completely different ratings at the end of the process. Parents take notice.
At CinemaCon in Las Vegas in 2013, then-chairman Chris Dodd announced the MPAA’s “Check the Box” campaign, which attempted to address some of the noise. The concept was straightforward: show the precise justifications for a rating in a bigger, more noticeable font so parents could truly comprehend what they were choosing. In response to concerns about violence in the real world, the White House had been advocating for something similar. The majority of observers described it as, at best, a slight improvement. “A distinction without a difference,” Parents Television Council member Tim Winter stated. Some others pointed out that regardless of what the new labels stated, the ratings themselves continued to show choices that frequently defied logic.
Let’s go back to Bully. Hirsch consented to remove three instances of the offensive language after the petition reached the half-million mark and pressure from Congressmen, educators, and students increased. In the context of the assault scene, three others were retained because their removal would have sanitized something that had to be seen in its entirety. The MPAA released a PG-13. The movie was released in theaters. Adolescents witnessed it.
It is difficult not to interpret that result as both an indictment and a victory. Only after persistent public pressure, widespread media attention, and a director prepared to make compromises he would prefer not to have made did the system yield. On principle, the ratings board did not reconsider. It had to reconsider. Somewhere in there is a lesson about who the ratings system really benefits, and it’s not just the teenagers riding those school buses.
