NC-17

By R.J. Jones

Passages, 2023’s arthouse breakout by Ira Sachs, is certainly not for kids.

Yet the film - which features two minute-long scenes of passionate sex involving Franz Rogowski’s Tomas - offers nothing particularly profane. Sachs, from his debut work on The Delta (1996), through his celebrated semi-autobiographical Keep the Lights On (2012), has long championed frank expressions of queer sexuality. “When I think about the lack of sex in cinema,” Sachs has remarked, “I think of it as a lack of films about adult life in general.”

By this logic, perhaps we are not all ready to be adults - least of all those in charge. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the board charged with dispensing film ratings, bestowed Passages with a rare “NC-17” rating, a classification Sachs has publicly denounced.

“We’re talking about a board that is not visible, that does not makes its rules known, that exists in silence,” Sachs observed, going on to accuse the MPA of both “anti-sex” and “anti-gay” sentiments. Since the dissolution of the rigidly puritanical Hays Code in 1968, the MPA has been distributing film ratings to demarcate “family-friendly” movies from more adult fare. Whereas a stringent set of rules accompanied all Code-era films, as Sachs identified, the MPA’s evaluations occur on an individual basis. Technically voluntary, the MPA thus undergoes no regulation process, yet the board wields a considerable influence over a film’s ability to be widely distributed. While most films ruled unsuitable for minors receive the near-ubiquitous “R” rating, “X” ratings, originally meant to denote pornography, could often spill over into racier prestige dramas. John Schlesinger’s Best-Picture-winning Midnight Cowboy (1969), wherein Jon Voight stars as a gay sex worker, famously nabbed an “X” rating due to its “homosexual frame of reference.”

In 1990, parrying calls for an extra rating to distinguish adult drama from

pornography, the MPA - then called the “MPAA” - inaugurated the use of “NC-17” with Philip Kaufman’s steamy Henry Miller biopic Henry and June (1990). Though occasionally deployed for excessive violence, the new rating, over its short history, has been disproportionately applied to address perceived gratuitous sexual content. An “NC-17” label has thus been viewed by some as a sort of death knell for a film’s theatrical prospects as many films - Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995) notwithstanding - have suffered from its application. Numerous directors, in

response, have either challenged the rating (with rare success), recut their films, or simply released the films unrated, a decision that comes with its own complications, seeing as most theaters will refuse to screen films that have not had a rating attached.

The relationship between “X” and “NC-17” ratings and queer content has a storied history, and the MPA has received numerous accusations of singling out queer films unfairly. Pedro Almodóvar - for his queer thriller Bad Education (2004), which likely falls on the tamer half of the director’s catalog - famously challenged “NC-17” classification, to no avail. Just this year, the relatively fluffy Red, White, & Royal Blue (2023) even received an “R” rating for “some sexual content,” a decision some met with groans. A similar fate befell earlier Sachs’ family comedyLove Is Strange (2014), which contains no sexual content, but was rated “R” on the basis of profanity, of which it contains little.

Whether the MPA has outlived its usefulness has been another point of contention, with many positing its very existence as a kind of anachronism. Sachs, for one, has been clear on this front, having, along with his earlier statements, grouped it among the conservative push to ban books containing LGBT+ content. What has remained clear since the dissolution of the Hays Code is that any system of evaluation that stratifies pieces of art along fixed spectra - whether “acceptable” v. “unacceptable,” or some bizarre alphanumeric concoction - is destined toward confusion. Perhaps it’s time to let the viewers decide.

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