American puritanism still reigns at the movies

What is it with the United States and sex? For most of the 20th century – whatever went on in decadent hellholes like France – Ireland could safely regard itself as more buttoned-up than the nation that gave us Deep Throat, Henry Miller and Prince. Some sexually explicit US films arrived sliced down to near-incoherence. Others were banned altogether. We were perfectly okay in our repressed misery, thank you very much.

By at least one measure, Ireland now seems more comfortable with its procreative urges than does the US. News arrives that the Motion Picture Association of United States (MPAA) has awarded Ira Sachs’s incoming Passages, an acclaimed French study of a menage à trois, a potentially ruinous NC-17 certificate.

The most recent series of Karina Longworth’s excellent You Must Remember This podcast explains how, in the 1990s, NC-17 was introduced as a more mainstream alternative to the X cert, but rapidly fell foul of conservative cinema chains and advertisers who saw it as an indicator of “pornographic” content. Studios will do everything possible to avoid that classification. Last year just one film ended up so cursed (about which more shortly).

Aware that the classification system is voluntary, the distributors of Passages have elected to release their title unrated. Meanwhile, the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) didn’t even stretch to its most severe 18 cert for domestic release. Passages arrives here on September 1st with a 16 and a warning about “sustained scenes of a sexual nature”. Oppenheimer received an R certificate in the United States – the most severe apart from that almost unheard-of NC-17 – but avoided 18 and 16 to score an unthreatening 15A in Ireland. Last year, the only film to land an NC-17 was Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. That got just a 16 from IFCO. Apparently harmless releases such as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade have, over the last decade, ended up with an R in the US. Both were mere 15As in Ireland.

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What will not be immediately apparent from all the letter salad above is that the prohibitive decisions in the US were almost entirely related to sexual content. Even with Oppenheimer. It wasn’t the bombs that did it; it was the bosoms. “Some sexuality, nudity and language” the message next to the “R” reads. There has been some understandable criticism of the film’s shallow treatment of female characters, but let’s not pretend the MPAA is taking a stand against Christopher Nolan’s male gaze.

One still detects a sense of pince-nez being dropped at the slightest hint of groan or grind. You need to go way back to 2007 to find a film rated NC-17 for bloodletting alone. “There seems to be a strange double standard between sexuality and violence,” Bo Burnham, director of the charming Eighth Grade, said after his film landed the R. “It’s a little weird how much violence you can have in a PG-13 movie.”

[ It’s time for Ireland to stop compulsory film classification ]

Sooner or later in such conversations, the US’s religious origins will always pop up. “I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores,” Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French diplomat, wrote after visiting the still-new nation. Maybe it really is harder to shake off that pursed Protestant cat’s-bum mouth than it is the more extravagant repressions of Roman Catholicism.

Just look at the state the US gets in after somebody utters what, with excruciating primness, its media continues to call an “f-bomb” on broadcast television. Surely no other western nation would have gone similarly ballistic over the famous “wardrobe malfunction” that didn’t actually reveal Janet Jackson’s nipple at the 2004 Super Bowl (people often forget the offending flesh was covered by a metallic sunburst). How did the nation not die of shame at the hysteria? French telly has, for decades, been waving around that part of the woman anatomy at all hours.

Americans are expected to work harder. CNBC recently reported that “the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee paid time off”. You too would, on a trip to Europe, run through the Louvre at breakneck speed if, like the average American, you had only 11 days paid vacation a year. A survey published in the New York Times a decade ago revealed that “American students judged promiscuous women more harshly than British students did”. I saw Goody Jackson snogging Master Timberlake!

This is no longer just about the formal practice of religion. Finger-waggy traces of puritan censoriousness can be also be found among secular scolds in the great coastal universities. It looks to be hard-wired.

Oh well. Hard work and unyielding focus got Americans to the moon. It helped them build the atomic bomb. It allowed Hollywood to spring from the desert. Let them enjoy their scarlet NC-17.

Well ... not “enjoy”, obviously.