TAKE ONE: Puppet sex. Two naked marionettes “making love.” This explicit two-minute sequence fromTeam America: World Policewas given an NC-17 (no one seventeen and under admitted) in September 2004 by the Rating Board of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), the movie rating system operated by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated product (under seventeen requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) to Paramount, the filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone—who four years earlier had a similar ratings ruckus overSouth Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut(1999)—resubmitted the scene nine times...

Cultural critic Thomas Frank calls the equating (or conflating) of the free market with democracy “market populism,” which for him is the defining feature of American capitalism in the last few decades of the twentieth century. “Market populism,” he suggests, “imagines individuals as fully rational economic actors, totally capable of making their needs known in the marketplace and looking out for their interests.”¹ In this view American leaders believe the market to be infinitely diverse, perfectly expressing the will of supply and demand, and more democratic than elections themselves.² This mythology, Frank argues, may breed reverence for market forces and...

A regulatory facelift could not have come at a better time when the MPAA established the Code and Rating Administration (CARA—changed to Classification and Rating Administration in 1977) on November 1, 1968; the motion picture business in the United States was in shambles. Declining attendance, shifting cultural mores, cinematic free expression, and independent and foreign film competition led producers, distributors, and exhibitors to discard long-standing codes of industry conduct and cooperation for short-term personal gain. These abandoned “gentleman rules,” as Jon Lewis calls them, dissolved a business arrangement between the three branches of the motion picture business that guaranteed...

Not a single mainstream film was released with an X throughout the 1980s. The conscious abandonment of this product line by the MPAA and NATO solidified the R rating—the Incontestable R—as a seal of responsible entertainment for the Hollywood film industry. The X, in turn, fortified itself as a marker of obscenity, artistic worthlessness, and anything other than responsible entertainment for the moviegoing public. With the X rating’s stigma left over from the 1970s, most NATO exhibitors refused to play X-rated films, many newspapers prohibited ads for them, and pay cable networks like HBO refused to air them....

As we have seen, self-regulation in the classification era required the collusion and cooperation of the MPAA signatories and NATO exhibitors to adhere to an industry-wide standard that I have referred to as responsible entertainment. This standard called for the abandonment of the product line of the X/NC-17 rating by the major Hollywood distributors, as well as entrusting the negotiation of all R-rated entertainment to the Rating Board and Appeals Board of CARA. The channeling of most products into an R rating—what I have called the Incontestable R—functioned to safeguard the industry’s economic and political interests. This practice...

AfterHenry & Junethe Motion Picture Association of America, the National Association of Theatre Owners, and the Video Software Dealers Association overlooked the cosmetic change in the X rating and went back to business as usual: the business of the Incontestable R and responsible entertainment. The MPAA signatories shunned the distribution of mainstream NC-17 films. Few mainstream movie houses would play NC-17 films. Most major video-store chains refused to carry NC-17 films. The year after the rating change, film critic Peter Rainer lamented, “It’s one thing to sanction more adult-oriented movies; it’s another thing to make them.”¹ A number of...

If we return to the rating battles that began this book—the controversies over Team America: World Police and The Cooler—we can see that the line between the R and the NC-17 rating is about so much more than puppet sex and one and a half seconds of pubic hair. Boundary maintenance between these categories endows the Hollywood film industry with an affirmative cultural function in the classification era, what I have called “responsible entertainment.” Negotiating the terrain of this boundary is the Rating Board of CARA, which calls for the arranging and filtering out of particular images, words,...