How Wes Anderson Fought Asteroid City's R Rating And Won
Despite a moment of full nudity, Wes Anderson's latest film, "Asteroid City," will hit theaters with a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association. The film, Anderson's metanarrative take on the science fiction genre, is being called classic Wes Anderson fare by reviewers and was originally slated to be released with an R rating due to "graphic nudity." However, Anderson appealed the rating in February, and as reported by the Independent, it now appears he has won, a rarity for those who appeal MPA (previously MPAA) ratings.
The film is now rated PG-13 and bears a warning for "brief graphic nudity, smoking, and some suggestive material."
According to those who have seen the film, Scarlett Johansson, one of the film's leads, briefly appears fully nude. That moment is likely what earned "Asteroid City" its initial R classification, but the decision to allow it instead to bear a PG-13 is frankly a huge surprise. The MPA's standards regarding nudity are notoriously broad, and ratings tend to err on the safe side when dealing with such content.
The downgraded rating has led some to wonder whether "Asteroid City" is the first PG-13 movie to bear a warning for "brief graphic nudity." But while that precise language may be unprecedented for a PG-13 film, it is far from the first PG-13 film to depict nudity.
Despite nude scene, Asteroid City will be PG-13, reviving concerns with rating system
Speculation around the rating downgrade for "Asteroid City" suggests that the nudity in the film is not presented in a sexual context. Since the MPA guidelines for an R rating specify "sexually-oriented nudity," there was presumably just enough wiggle room to allow a PG-13 rating. But the ruling calls into question the entire rating system, which has come under fire many times over the years for its inconsistencies.
The decision to downgrade "Asteroid City" from R to PG-13 demonstrates some of the flaws inherent in the notion that films can be neatly sorted based on the age-appropriateness of their content. The MPA rating system is a crude remnant of the Hays Code, which was instituted in 1934 by the Association's first president, William Hays, in response to the specter of government censorship looming over Hollywood at the time. The Code banned, among other things, the usage of the words "God" or "Jesus," depictions of interracial relationships, anything disparaging the institutions of marriage or police, and even "lustful kissing."
In 1968, the Hays Code was reworked to become the MPAA rating system, which rid itself of the more odious aspects of those previous statutes but nevertheless has been criticized by major figures, including the late Roger Ebert, who wrote, "The MPAA cannot have values; it can only count beans, or nipples, or four-letter words." It has been seen as a blunt and overbroad tool attempting to sort a broad spectrum of human creativity into a few small boxes based on an outdated and culturally specific sense of invented morality. Were "Asteroid City" packed full of gun violence, it would have cruised to PG-13 without issue, but it crossed a line in revealing the human form, however briefly.