[Culture Op-Ed] Why Is *Parasite* Rated R in the U.S. but 15+ in Korea?

This is a controversy that comes up all the time. It begins when the film screening rating issued by the Korea Media Rating Board does not match the views of ordinary consumers. It becomes an even bigger issue when Korea’s rating for the same film differs from the rating given overseas, such as in the United States—especially when the Korean rating is more lenient than the foreign one. This very controversy arose again with *Parasite*, which recently won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Below is an excerpt from Money Today’s June 4, 2019 article, “‘Don’t watch it with your children’… 3 reasons *Parasite* feels uncomfortable to watch.”

“If you look up online reviews of *Parasite*, quite a few internet users express doubts about why the film was rated suitable for ages 15 and up, writing things like, ‘Don’t watch it with elementary or middle school children,’ ‘It would have been awkward if I had watched it with my parents,’ and ‘Why isn’t this rated 19+?’ The reasons audiences are raising concerns about *Parasite*’s screening rating can largely be summarized in three categories: sexual content, violence, and theme/fear.

First, the most controversial part is the ‘love scene’ between Mr. Park and Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), who are husband and wife in the film. It is the film’s only such scene, but many viewers say it feels sexually explicit because the depiction is detailed and intense. (Omitted) A college student identified only as Choi, 21, said, ‘A father who came to see the movie with a son who looked like an elementary school student handed him a smartphone when the sexual scene came on. It disrupted the viewing experience,’ adding, ‘It was a problem to bring a child under 15, but even as a college student I found the movie embarrassing to watch.’

Second, many viewers also say the film is somewhat brutal. In the latter half of the film, physical assaults occur frequently, and bodily violence and weapon-based fighting are portrayed in a gruesome way. In screening ratings, violence refers to ‘the degree of depiction of torture, bodily damage and oppression due to bloody fighting, expressions of pain, humiliation, sexual violence, and so on.’ During *Parasite*, quite a few audience members covered their eyes or expressed discomfort during the brutal scenes.

Third, some say that adolescents would have difficulty accepting the film’s theme based on their general level of knowledge and experience. The film has a fairly dark atmosphere—to the point that many viewers say they ‘feel bad after watching it’—and its themes, such as the gap between rich and poor, are expressed in a blunt manner. A parent identified only as Kim, 40, said, ‘After seeing the movie, I’ve been telling other mothers around me not to show it to their children,’ adding, ‘It wasn’t the violent or sexual scenes so much as the content itself that was shocking.’ Kim went on to say, ‘There were even a lot of elementary school students in the theater, and I think it was inappropriate for them to watch it.’”

The U.S. R rating and Korea’s “Restricted to Youth” rating are not similar concepts

The “film screening rating controversy” is almost a standing controversy that resurfaces quarterly. As for why this happens, some suspect that ratings are intentionally lowered to benefit box office performance as a way of “giving Korean films a push.” In other cases, when incomprehensible ratings are handed down, many people also suspect so-called “connections.” Films such as *Parasite*, with its strong anti-capitalist sentiment, or *May 18*, dealing with the May 18 uprising, have even drawn criticism that their ratings were excessively lowered for political agitation purposes.

But the controversy over *Parasite*’s rating lasted much longer than that of other films. A large reason was that the film itself had an unusually long theatrical run, but also that as it was exported and shown around the world, curiosity grew about how foreign film industries would rate it. Eventually, in February 2020, the Korea Media Rating Board directly released information on *Parasite*’s ratings by country. The intention was to show that other countries had assigned ratings not very different from Korea’s 15-and-over classification—in short, to make the point that “we did not do anything especially wrong.”

According to the Korea Media Rating Board, the film received the same 15-and-over rating in the United Kingdom and Australia, a 16 rating in Germany, a 14 rating in British Columbia, Canada, and even a 13 rating in New Zealand—more lenient than Korea’s.

The problem was the United States, the very mecca of the global film industry. In the U.S., which awarded *Parasite* four Academy Awards including Best Picture, the film received an R rating. R stands for Restricted, and many people regard it as a strict classification comparable to Korea’s “Restricted to Youth” rating. As a result, the country-by-country ratings chart released to defend *Parasite*’s Korean rating actually sparked a new round of controversy. Critics argued that if even the culturally more open United States gave it what seemed equivalent to a no-youth-admitted rating, then Korea’s 15-and-over classification made no sense.

But this issue requires a closer look. First, one has to understand that the American R rating differs significantly from Korea’s concept of “Restricted to Youth.” In the United States, an R rating simply means that minors under 17 may watch the film only if accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. That is fundamentally different from Korea’s “Restricted to Youth,” under which anyone under 18 is categorically barred from watching it.

So it is entirely possible to argue that the U.S. R rating is, strictly speaking, not all that different from Korea’s 15-and-over rating. Minors can still see the film as long as they persuade a parent or a similarly situated adult guardian to accompany them. In other words, from the standpoint of global standards, the Korea Media Rating Board’s judgment was not especially radical after all.

But the real point to note in this episode lies elsewhere. The real issue is not what judgment the Korea Media Rating Board made. It is why this sort of argument over ratings is bound to break out every single time in the first place.

The American film rating system gives that “freedom of choice” to parents of minor children

As the explanation of the U.S. R rating above shows, what matters is that the American system ultimately does not “force” consumers. In the United States, the body that determines film ratings is the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), a private organization composed of members of the film industry, including producers and distributors.

As the U.S. film industry expanded rapidly in the 1920s, low-grade products—including obscene films—also increased, prompting the U.S. government to step in directly with large-scale film censorship. In response, the MPAA was established on the premise that the social problems caused by films would be handled “within the film industry itself,” and that public authority should not intervene. The industry first conducted self-censorship internally, and then from 1968 onward evolved into a system under which a ratings board would assign ratings and merely provide guidelines instead of censoring content outright.

American film ratings are divided into X (unrated), NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted), R (restricted, under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian), PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned for those under 13), PG (parental guidance suggested), and G (general audiences). Of these, NC-17—the highest actual rating—refers to films at the level of pornography, where the limits are obvious by any socio-cultural standard. X can be viewed under almost the same standard, but strictly speaking it refers to films outside the rating system. Such films cannot be advertised and generally cannot even be shown in ordinary multiplex theaters.

As explained above, films rated R can be watched if accompanied by a parent or equivalent adult, while PG-13 does not even impose such an accompaniment requirement; it is quite literally closer to a life guideline. It simply means the content includes one or another element potentially harmful to youth, so parents or equivalent adults should at least be aware of that. It is a sign telling them to understand the nature of the content in advance and then decide, as a matter of guidance, whether to permit their children to go see the movie at all. PG has almost the same meaning, while only at the G level does the label indicate content that “anyone may come and watch without concern.” Most animated films fall into that category.

So the idea is not to impose even these guidelines on actual consumers. Final judgment is left to parents or equivalent adults who bear real responsibility for raising minor children. The ratings body itself is private; the ratings apply only at theaters that choose to accept them; and the final judgment is left largely to private autonomy.

This is fundamentally different from Korea, where the Korea Media Rating Board—a special corporation under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and thus a state body—sets the standards, sends them down to theaters, and then imposes them uniformly regardless of what actual consumer parents may think. The United States, grounded in individualism and liberalism, places maximum importance on private autonomy, whereas Korea clearly follows a line of uniform regulation through public authority.

The social philosophy visible here is simple. The American position is that whether someone watches a particular film or not, the authority and responsibility for that should not be placed on the state or other public entities. It holds that it is neither proper nor healthy to shift the primary responsibility of individuals and families onto society, much less the state. In the end, society should not become a totalitarian environment in which a single uniform set of values is imposed across the board; rather, it should be one in which differing values are adjusted within the bounds of not infringing on each other’s freedom. This is in line with the broader evolution of individualistic consciousness in advanced societies.

Of course, Korea and the United States differ in their assumptions about the role of the “family,” which is the precondition for the American-style ratings system discussed above. The United States has a familistic environment rooted in Christian ethics. The relationship between parents and children is highly individualistic, yet at the same time firm and complex in terms of parental authority and responsibility. Put simply, it is natural there for parents to pay attention to and even accompany their children to a movie.

By contrast, in Korea there has long been an atmosphere in which only the implicit discipline of patriarchy existed, while children’s various interests were either lightly suppressed or simply ignored. As a result, rather than making the effort for those responsible for raising minors to “manage” things one by one, people repeatedly shift responsibility onto public authority and then, when something goes wrong, shift blame right back onto that same public authority.

And that dynamic is exactly what leads to the “film screening rating controversy” being reheated once every quarter. Every time, the blame is relentlessly directed only at the public institution, the Korea Media Rating Board. The responsibility of guardians who are actually responsible for child-rearing is reduced to little more than “criticizing the Korea Media Rating Board.”

Korea willingly accepts state control “to escape responsibility”

The dilemma most similar to this “film screening rating controversy” is the gaming industry’s “shutdown law controversy.” Consider the relevant legal provision:

“Youth Protection Act, Article 26 (Restriction on hours of provision of internet games during late-night hours)

(1) Providers of internet games shall not provide internet games to juveniles under the age of 16 between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.”

This system, implemented on November 20, 2011, emerged out of concern over excessive immersion in internet games among youth. Naturally, it provoked enormous backlash, but that was essentially ignored and the policy went ahead as planned. The similarity to the “film screening rating controversy” above is that, once again, instead of adopting the American-style ratings concept, public authority stepped in to enforce what it regarded as the “ideal direction.”

The problem is: why is public authority enforcing that through a uniform standard in the first place? The people who actually possess both the responsibility and authority for raising minors are parents or equivalent adult individuals—not the state or any other public concept. Only when adults responsible for child-rearing are free to judge “which direction would be more beneficial for minor children” can the lives of individuals—each with different characteristics and capacities in different environments—be properly respected and rewarded.

To put it simply, one can easily imagine a case in which allowing a child who hopes to become a professional gamer to play games during those hours would better serve that child’s future. Even apart from that kind of vocational aspiration, there can certainly be parents who want to allow their children that kind of recreational freedom and to teach them autonomy by having them regulate themselves. Yet the shutdown law takes that freedom away from individual citizens and pushes them all toward the same “ideal life” as conceived by the state.

As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “We value the individual not because everyone is the same, but because every person is different.” It is worth recalling that point. Because people are all different—having grown up under different conditions, in different environments, and with different philosophies—the aim is not to judge them all by a few uniform yardsticks, but to grant them as much freedom as possible.

Even so, the reason systems that hand over a substantial portion of child-rearing freedom and authority to public authority continue to survive is, as explained earlier, fundamentally rooted in the shallow desire of parents themselves to reduce their own “effort.” Put simply, managing each detail of children’s lives is “annoying and burdensome.” They do not want the conflicts with children that may arise from it; they do not want the strain of persuading them; and, beyond that, they do not want to bear responsibility for the “results” of parental judgment. So they prefer a system in which the state or other public authority manages things in their place and even takes responsibility for them.

That is profoundly irresponsible. In any case, as long as this kind of laziness and desire to evade responsibility persists, controversies like the one over *Parasite* will never cease. Once parents have handed over to public authority even the power to decide whether a child should watch a movie, if they dislike the result, they can simply go to some portal site and leave a critical comment and feel they have fulfilled their role as parents. This is a case where “the enemy of freedom is sloth.”

A social climate in which controversies like *Parasite* are bound to repeat forever

In fact, during the *Parasite* controversy, some internet communities frequented by the generation raising minor children did mention the American ratings system above as a possible alternative. But most of the responses were the same: “Do not place on individuals the burden of what the state should do.” Then the conversation simply returned, over and over, to the complaint that the U.S. gave it an R rating, so why was it rated 15-and-over in Korea?

In an atmosphere like this—where people either do not even think about the meaning of an R rating or actively refuse to do so—it is hard not to think that controversies like the one over *Parasite* may be repeated forever. What is needed is not merely to compare the difference in ratings, but to think carefully about the difference in the systems themselves. Yet on that very point, people’s conclusions are already firmly and stubbornly fixed. It is a frustrating situation.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 미국에서는 <기생충>이 청소년관람불가인데 한국에서는 15세 관람가?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-07-16

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=7&idx=22934