Just before our family holiday I managed to get tickets to an early showing of The Dark Knight at the BFI IMAX. I highly recommend the IMAX version as certain scenes are filmed in the format; so rather than get blown-up close ups with 6ft nostrils, you get panoramic cityscapes in gorgeous detail. Superb film, but that's not the reason for this blog; rather this is my two cents on the ongoing debate regarding the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) rating of '12A' for the movie. The BBFC's vision statement includes the following goal:

we give the public information that empowers them to make appropriate viewing decisions for themselves and those in their care. We help to protect vulnerable viewers and society from the effects of viewing potentially harmful or unsuitable content while respecting adult freedom of choice.

The key part for me, as a father of three, being ...and those in their care. Now, this is important because clearly I want to be able to ascertain in advance whether to take my 8-year old son to see the superhero he loves from the animated series. My personal view is that I'm glad I didn't take him, mainly due to the power of Heath Ledger's brilliant, nihilistic portrayal of The Joker, but specifically due to the two scenes where The Joker holds a knife inside a person's mouth, threatening to slice their lips open (not to mention the creative, but undeniably unorthodox, use of a pencil eariler in the film).

The 12A criterion for violence states


Violence

Violence must not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood. Sexual violence may only be implied or briefly and discreetly indicated.
Imitable techniques

Dangerous techniques (eg combat, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on imitable detail or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.

...whereas the BBFC's (somewhat rushed) analysis of the Dark Knight is:


There are also scenes in which the Joker threatens first a man and then a woman with a knife and whilst these do have a significant degree of menace, without any actual violence shown they were also acceptably placed at ‘12A’. In the final analysis, THE DARK KNIGHT is a superhero movie and the violence it contains exists within that context, with both Batman and the Joker apparently indestructible no matter what is thrown at them.

Not sure how holding a knife in someone's mouth is either 'not actual violence' or 'superhero violence', or how it is inimatable, but there you go. Compare with the violence rating for the new extended cut of The The Good, The Bad and The Ugly:

As for Imitable techniques, the film features some hanging scenes that often involve a man being saved from death by his colleague shooting the rope that hangs around his neck. These scenes appear to be harm free and are not allowable at '12A', although they do no dwell on imitable detail so they are permissible at '15'.

Notice that hanging is explicitly mentioned here (rightly so), but the knife threat, which is a huge concern for parents at the moment, has been omitted from the Dark Knight rating. The BBFC have made an attempt to help parents determine film suitability for their children with http://www.parentsbbfc.co.uk, which is a good idea since only the child's parent can really know what is suitable for their child. However this simply leads back to the same Dark Knight review with litte detail.

Many of the online debates about the rating have included comments along the lines of: 'Blame the parents - if they can't be bothered seeing what is suitable for their kids, then it's all their fault'. An argument which spectacularly fails to spot the obvious: a parent probably doesn't have the time, and very likely not the money, to watch the film on their own before deciding whether it is suitable. Hence we rely on NGO's such as the BBFC for this advice.

Now, this blog is not supposed to be an attack on the BBFC; rather a suggestion that by declaring in more detail the specific content of a film, it will save parents time/money/worry in knowing whether to take their kids. Technical solutions exist, for example, by making use of the ICRA tagset, you can describe accurately the nature of a web resource (such as a movie homepage). The ICRA vocabulary is XML so can be extended with namespace-bound extensions; but most importantly it allows a machine to process a film's description and hence either output that description to another website, or perform a calculation based on a parent's preferences, and hence highlight movies which may not be suitable for that parent's children. The upcoming POWDER (Protocol for Web Description Resources) standard will allow such descriptions to be easily bundled and published for discovery, and hence facilitate such services - as soon as it is stable I will produce a version for Betavine so that applications for particular devices and platforms can be discovered more easily via remote search applications.

Such an application can alleviate concern for parents as more movies are watched in children's bedrooms, on mobile phones and PCs. Note that some movies, such as say 'Aliens', would significantly lose horror impact on a tiny mobile screen, whereas those with opressive dialogue and theme (Dark Knight) rely less on the screen size and more on acting to convey a threat.

Now, if only ICRA tagging could go back in time and make more explicit the 'A' rating for Jaws, which I watched on home video when I was 6, then I might still be able to swim in the sea for more than 30 seconds at a time....