Paul Gallagher
Scottish Book Trust
Scotland Young Thinker of the Year 2009

The winning paper

The UK film ratings system: certifiable?

The film ratings system in the UK should be abolished. Its arbitrary categorisations not only devalue film as an art form, they also patronise intelligent audiences while catering to film distributors' marketing instincts.
     Films in cinemas are currently given one of five ratings – U, PG, 12A (where under 12s must be accompanied by an adult), 15 or 18. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) claims that this system gives people 'information that empowers them to make appropriate viewing decisions for themselves and those in their care', but actually these limited categories are more useful for giving film distributors clearly defined audience groups to market their product. What is so different about a 15 or 16-year-old, compared to a 13 or 14-year-old, that makes it more 'appropriate' for them to take in certain depictions of sex and violence, and hear greater levels of swearing? Why allow a 12-year-old to hear the f-word once or twice in the course of a couple of hours, but deem more regular utterances 'inappropriate'?
     Categorising films in this way is more limiting to the audience than empowering, as it declares films 'appropriate' not largely based on overall content and theme but on easily manipulated criteria. If producers want to market their film as more adult or edgy they can just throw a few f-words in during post-production, a tactic that helped the entirely juvenile movie 'Snakes on a Plane'. It secured a 15 rating after some last-minute re-shoots, assuring its internet fanbase that Samuel L Jackson really would use a certain oedipal epithet when bemoaning the number of reptiles in the cockpit.
     Conversely, films rated 12A and PG are guaranteed to come to the attention of parents and guardians taking children to the movies; the film's rating, rather than the film itself, will be the first check-point to suitability. Film distributors know this, and also know precisely how to achieve the desired category for each film. In this way the cinema-going audience is certainly not empowered by these arbitrary age restrictions; in fact the power is very much in the hands of the film distributors.
    
One of the biggest films of last year was the 12A-rated 'The Dark Knight'. The Times letters page featured a long-running debate over the suitability of the film's certificate, and the BBFC reasserted their defence, as with ratings given to the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, that the questionable content – violence – takes place in a 'clearly fantastical' environment. This rationale highlights the major failure of the current ratings system; the attitude towards film that it cultivates.
     The amazing thing about film is that, through storytelling, it can take us into the reality of others' lives and circumstances. But today we are in the bizarre situation where a film is penalised, in terms of the audience it is deemed appropriate for, if it appears to be too much like real life. Two recent examples are 'This Is England' and 'Sweet Sixteen', films that take a realistic and moving look at the lives of young people in the UK. Both were rated 18 because of elements that, according to guidelines, could be contained in no lower category – 'This Is England' has a scene of racial violence accompanied by strongly racist language, while 'Sweet Sixteen' contains aggressive uses of the c-word. This is certainly material that could be deemed offensive on face value, but the context in both cases in no way glamorises the content and, more importantly, the content is representative of the filmmakers' aims, to investigate the real world that we all live in; using film to seriously question the state of the country and the lives of people in it. These are the kinds of films young people should be encouraged to watch, provoking them to think, question and, yes, be offended.
     Instead the ratings system suggests it is more appropriate for children and young people to watch films as a way of 'switching off' from the real world; films that continually emphasise one narrow way of viewing life, where might is always right, women are perceived as sex objects and success is secured through the exertion of heroic abilities.
    
Imagine for a moment that a similar method of categorisation was applied to other art forms – paintings and books for example. You can't. Because the whole reason we engage with these disciplines, and encourage young people to do the same, is to investigate reality, not to soothe ourselves with a censored version of the world. We look at a painting, we read a book, we think about it, we discuss it, we ask what it means to us here now. We don't set rigid criteria of what can and can't be read or viewed by certain age groups because we understand that these art forms are discursive – we don't switch off our brains and simply accept what is offered.
     But when it comes to films, the ratings system suggests that audiences – particularly young people – can't be trusted to keep their brains switched on, so need to be steered away from anything too challenging.
     A system as simplistic as this can never cater to the real and relevant issues of difference across the age ranges. Some eight-year-olds can handle more than some 45-year-olds, as evidenced by film critic James Christopher's ridiculous statement in his recent review of 'Coraline' that 'Anyone under the age of 18 will be terrified of this eerie cartoon...it's madly out of sync with [its] PG certificate'. He obviously didn't ask 'anyone under the age of 18' their opinion, as the screening of 'Coraline' that I attended, packed with families, saw young children leaving chattering with delight while parents were stilled and chilled by the experience. It's not as simple as it seems.
     If the BBFC is really going to inform, empower and maybe even educate audiences in their viewing choices, it needs to rethink this patronising, reductive and unhelpful system, and start crediting us all with a little more intelligence.

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The 2010 final

[click here] for the day in photos
[click here] for the winning paper
[click here] for the runner-up paper

Winning papers

2010:
Kris
Anderson
[click here]

2009:
Anthony
Silkoff
[click here]

2008:
Mairi Clare Rodgers
[click here]