If Our Lives Were Rated by the MPAA…

Spending too much time in movie theaters watching previews has led me to wonder: What if our lives (or portions of our lives) were rated like movies?

Most of us of an adult age would have lives rated PG-13, R, and NC-17. Obviously. But that's not the part of the ratings I mean...I mean the rating reasons that follow the letters. These are the intriguing little bits where the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) lists why a movie earned a rating.

Many people think of rating reasons as containing obvious warnings like:

• Violent content
• Sexual innuendo
• Partial nudity
• Drug references
• Vulgar language

And yes, sometimes they do. But there is actually no standardized list of the reasons that the MPAA can state for assigning a given rating, which means they can just make up whatever they like for any given film. And they do!

Not infrequently, a ratings reason will resonate with my past experience. Certainly, I can think of whole passages of my life that would (regrettably) be rated PG-13 for the tenuous reason of brief sensuality. Similarly, I could tag months with macabre humor, intense life/death situations, and, my favorite, mild peril. I'm pretty sure I had a whole relationship that could be rated for continuous crude sex-related language.

I am not making up a single thing when I tell you that movies have earned their ratings for everything from intense depiction of very bad weather to non-stop frenetic animated action to adolescent sensuality. Which, come to think of it, seems to describe the year I turned seventeen.

I will say that, thankfully, in my life I've managed to side-step demented mayhem and torture, some intense whaling action/violence, and an abundance of outrageous gore. Not all films have been so lucky.

The MPAA is remarkably specific in differentiating between issues such as types of violence. Oh, I don't mean degrees of violence, just type. For example, based on the ratings I have looked at, there is horror violence, sci-fi violence, monster violence, western violence, comic violence, war violence, military violence, political violence, and vampire violence. When I think of "real life," I think that the MPAA is clearly missing more opportunities. Where, for example, is elaborately fantasized but-not-committed violence, mom pushed-way-too-far violence, and violence directed at technologically-advanced inanimate objects? Maybe those are not quite as common in film as they are in real life, but they do happen. Where's the ratings reason for them?

While the MPAA pretends to protect us, it's clear that not everything in used for ratings reasons is a bad thing. After all, what's inappropriate for a five-year old can be absolutely delightful to an adult. After reading through hundreds of ratings reasons, I found myself aspiring to have a life that achieves a number of them. Why anyone would turn down strong stylized action, some double-entendres, and racy dialogue is beyond me.

Thus, keeping my priorities in mind, I have chosen the following rating as my life goal:

Yes, salty language, frank dialogue, quirky situations, swashbuckling action, and other action sequences in an adventure setting. I'll bring my ID; I'm ready!

So what about you? If, say, the last year of your life was rated by the MPAA, what reasons might they make up to explain the rating? What rating reasons do you wish your life lived up to now? I'd love to hear!

For those of you who are just having a dull day at work and don't want to think about your life, you can play "match the movie to the ratings reasons." I've jumbled 26 of them up in the table below. All you have to do is correctly match them up again. I'll post the answers next week. If you like, email your best guesses to me at info [at] alixnorth [dot] com, by end-of-day Saturday, July 21st and I'll announce the name of the person who matched the most movies in next week's entry.

Gotta go, I think the swashbuckling part is just about to start!

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