"Eighth Grade" and the Troubled State of the R Rating

Eighth Grade is a movie directed by Bo Burnham about growing up in the age of Snapchat and Instagram. It shows how hard it is to battle inner demons and put on a happy face at the same time and gives everyone (but especially teens) a great lesson on self-image and the dangers of our electronics dominated world. This is something that teens could greatly benefit from, and I recommend everyone see it. There aren’t a lot of movies that focus on modern day problems for teens. Here’s the problem though, teens under 17 years of age can’t see it. It’s rated R. For language and some sexual material, the target audience of this movie can’t even see it. The movie contains nothing that anyone that has gone through eighth grade hasn’t seen or heard before. 5 F-words and a scene that shows a dirtbag teen named Aiden (No relation to me) pressuring Kayla into sending explicit pictures of herself. She feels uncomfortable and doesn’t do it. She is growing herself as a person, and this scene is crucial to showing her developing her values. Rotten Tomatoes’ Christy Lemire agrees with me: “Eighth Grade carries a rating that may make it seem too mature for your kids, but it’s probably exactly what they need to see right now as they figure out their place in the world.” But here’s the thing, it is “Mature”. It is a movie that treats its audience (teens) with respect and shows the positives and negatives of smart-phone driven life. So why doesn’t the rating reflect that? Deadpool, South Park, Team America, The Hangover, Bridesmaids, and more relish in their immaturity, and have the same rating as Eighth Grade! How is that okay? People do need some sort of rating to warn people of the content inside the movie, but it can’t be as vague and corrupt as the current rating system. So, what do I propose? In 2004, AMC Theaters (then called GKC) released a product that raised quite a bit of controversy: R Card. R Cards were little cards that can be purchased by a parent that allows their children to see R rated films without an adult. Many people were outraged. They thought that GKC Theaters were corrupting children’s brains in order to get extra money from an untapped market. Others supported the R Cards and said that it allowed mature young adults to see important movies that usually go unappreciated by teens. The cards didn’t last too long, only lasting a few months. I think it was a step in the right direction, but it was held back by the R rating. I want the MPAA (the government funded group that rates the movies) to sort movies into categories based on the content that is deemed “mature”. Then parents could get a card like the R Card and check off the movies that they are comfortable with their child seeing. If the parents are fine with over-the-top violence, but don’t want their kid exposed to sexual content, they can let the child see the movies that the parents feel are mature enough to see, but still censor some movies. I’ll leave you with words of wisdom from James Whitman: “You can't say it's a parental guideline and then say the parents have no choice.”