Thursday, March 10, 2011
Looking back on our censorship attempts
After talking with Matt and discussing what we have gone through I am going to make a few posts that I think we should discuss. One is Matt had suggested we look at the idea of creating rating boards that are "like" minded in order to prevent certain discrepancies. This is based in the fact that when it came to our discussion on the censorship of the rape scene, primarily on the statement of becoming a man after raping/having sex we had two different ideas behind the censorship of the line. One comes from trying to shape society with censorship while the other seems to be based on purely the obscenity of the statement. Do we think that it is more beneficial for a group to get ALL "like" minded individuals to prevent such occurrences, or that it is worth having such conflicts in a group?
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im having difficulty understanding your question, could you elaborate?
ReplyDeleteI think what he means to say is the effects/reasons why we have been so ready to agree with the offensive borat scenes, but disagreed so much with the last house on the left line.
ReplyDeleteBasically what I am saying is unlike where we wanted to ban scenes in Borat because we considered them obscene, we encountered an issue in The last house where instead of wanting something censored for obscenity, some people wanted to censor something to effect the society directly. The idea of banning something because it is obscene is very different from that of banning something that someone feels reinforces immoral/wrong ideas within a society. I guess this could be considered to fall more under the idea about why we censored the running of the jew scene, it wasn't overly obscene, it just reinforced prejudices. Since these are two different viewpoints of our board, one who is basing things on obscenity, one who wanted to try to stop ideas from continuing to be mainstream in society, do we know understand why a group would want a board of officials to be like minded. The more differences you have, the less movies you would get through, however, this could in turn also bring forth ratings that are only from one side of the spectrum. Is censorship from one viewpoint ok if it means you can deal with the large volume of moves, or does it result in only allowing movies that the person who picked the rating board likes?
ReplyDeleteI think in the idea that we are a rating board trying to represent the parents of america so having that sort of diversity would be really effective in creating solid ratings. I do think that time would be an issue however so there would probably have to be multiple boards. Having people that have different mind sets on what they think should be culturally acceptable would be more advantageous to censorship. This of course brings up the question of, are we ok to be the ones that are trying to shape society instead of merely giving them censorship rules. I myself am ok with not wanting to show/reinforce ideas that condone improper ideals so I am ok with this happening, as well as censorship as it is shapes society, even if you aren't just stopping obscene images.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I did the project more to see from the perspective of what the MPAA does etc. I really dislike the idea of the MPAA because of the sole argument that is being discussed and that is whether there should be one review board with everyone of like minds or should people with differing viewpoints make up the board. I think having a board with all the same viewpoints (as I feel like the MPAA is now) makes things very one sided, and essentially whomever is in charge of hiring for the MPAA is singlehandedly controlling the messages or how movies are censored which I don't think is right and I feel like that is completely an indirect dictatorship.
ReplyDeleteI also don't think that there should be multiple boards with like minds on different issues. I think that just requires movies to go through more steps and I can only assume would keep many movies from entering society even though I am sure most of society would not think they were obscene.
As far as the differing in opinions directly related to Last House and Borat, I feel like the opposing viewpoints weren't exactly like one side thinks it is censoring things that would be bad for society and the other side disagreeing. The other side merely argued that the scene did not promote a negative (rape) and actually the movie supports the justice to bad decisions (rape). With that in mind, I don't think it is appropriate to reinforce ideas that condone improper ideals at all (i.e. the running of the jews). I merely think that the line "I'll make a man out of you" by no means implies anything regarding condoning improper ideals. If it did then you would see the child rape the girl. Instead the father gets punished (death) for the raping of a girl.
Very Well said, and I agree with Jessica. In the end of the movie justice is carried out. If nothing happened to the father I could see where we would of had a different view point.
ReplyDeleteIf you have different boards with like minded people the movies would never get ratings or the ratings would be so crazy that people would never see the movies because, the movie business would stop producing them. It would make it to hard for movies to meet the requirements of each board, because group might like one thing in a movie and then another group might disagree with it.
I definitely agree, I was interested in seeing how hard /easy it would be to "rate" a movie and determine what is considered OK for the general public to see and what wasn't. i do agree with Jessica on the importance of having differing viewpoints, especially since it would become easier for the board to censor the public based on their own values and beliefs which i do not agree with. However it does make things harder when there are two very opposing viewpoints. I could only see people staying in those rooms longer, just like us when we had our Last House discussion, had we all had time after class, i am pretty sure that conversation would have been dragged out a longer.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the line that we disagreed about, i stil believe that the line "i;ll make a man out of you" is condoning improper ideals. The fact that rape is happening is still showing that there are people out there who don't see rape as a problem. It is showing the balance between the choices that we have as adults to make, the good and bad in society, but this scene definitely shows an improper ideal that this murder has. Granted he isnt the role model in the movie, but younger adults who are still developing may not see this difference.
All i am saying is that if the movie were to be turned off at that very point what kind of message does it leave in the minds of the viewers. You cant assume that a movie will be finished in its entirety, just how Sarah couldn't finish Borat in one sitting.