By Doug Atkinson
May 6, 1997
Republished with permission

Last night I saw the movie Seven. The fact that I saw a movie is no big deal. I'm in the business. It's my job. And in fact Seven was the third movie I've seen in as many nights.

It was revolting.

Oh, the film was brilliant enough; ironically, its very brilliance was the main reason it was revolting; in fact, the movie is practically a film-noir horror masterpiece. David Fincher's directing was quirky and well-managed, the chase scenes were expertly staged - as hair-raising as any I've seen. Morgan Freeman was solid, Brad Pitt was angry and brooding, Kevin Spacey was chilling, and the supporting cast was, well - suitably supportive.

But the result of all this skill, all this craft, all this excellence, was to logarithmically magnify the impact. Seven's grotesque brown-grey world evolved into a dark, devoted homage to the grisly physical excesses of medieval torture theology.

The hopeless brutality and macabre, stomach-wrenching, cockroach-infested gore, woven together with a cruel retribution theme and the not-so-subtle message that our civilization is in utter decay; that an individual can do nothing about it, and that evil runs rampant and utterly unopposed through a weary, cynical world, combined to strike me with mind-numbing force.

I have seen just about everything in mainstream cinema and pride myself on my resistance to the negative power of film; nevertheless, I fought the almost overwhelming urge to leave more than once. But the film was too brilliant, too well-crafted, just to abandon. I was hoping beyond hope that a film so well made, so carefully written, so ingenious, would offer up some unimaginably unique twist, something that could possibly justify the ugly, vomit-inducing atrocities. But as Morgan Freeman's Lieutenant Sommerset warned me at the two-thirds mark of the film: There ain't going to be no happy ending to this.

Still, I sat there through to the end despite myself, overriding my flight-instincts in the vain hope of some redemption. There was none. The filmmakers' brilliance, as it turned out, was to be used only to devise ever-more inventively grotesque forms of torment. Even as the credits started to roll, I rose and stumbled out.

As I said, Seven was revolting.

But so what? It was revolting because it was supposed to be revolting. The film was expertly crafted to be just that. Now, whether it was intended as social commentary or the producers were simply appealing to the very worst in human beings because they know it's guaranteed to make a lot of money, I couldn't possibly say.

Don't get me wrong. I don't intend to make this a tirade against a society that has elevated power-drill in the back of the head style atrocity to the level of entertainment. It is not intended as an indictment of the culture that made this treatise on torture number one at the box office. I'm against censorship in almost any form myself, and I'm not particularly concerned whether adults are going to be offended, or appalled, or disgusted by a certain film, or even that they would run from the theatres screaming and throwing up. This is, after all, the price we pay for freedom of expression. But that's not the point.

The Rating

The point is that Seven is not a restricted film. It is rated AA. The kind of rating given to a cop film. This is what I expected but this is not what I got. For those of you unfamiliar with the rating system, AA means Adult Accompaniment, which means that anyone can see this film. Anyone.

Children over 14 can go absolutely unescorted, while children under 14 are permitted to see the film as long as they are accompanied by an adult (an adult being anyone who according to the law appears to be 18 or older).

Needless to say, after I saw this film, I thought there must have been a publishing mistake in the newspaper ads. Children, unattended or otherwise, at this vicious gorefest? But sure enough, when I rechecked all the papers again, they listed the film AA. I called the Ontario Film Review Board, certain there must be some catastrophic error. Nope. Seven was rated AA.

Certain that there must have been a substantial information piece attached to this rating that I missed, I looked to see if I had overlooked any obvious warnings.

Sure enough, there were warnings. In the newspaper ad, I was warned about violence and coarse language. The poster outside the theatre made no mention of violence. It warned only of coarse language and drug and alcohol use. Both ads did, however, assure me the film was not suitable for children.

Fair enough. The film is oh-so not suitable for kids. And the characters did use coarse language. And they shot at each other and hit each other on the head, too. As for the alcohol and drug use, Morgan and Brad drank wine and beer a couple of times and mentioned going to a bar. The only drug use I remember was peripheral.

The Visuals

But what the information pieces failed to tell me was that I would also see: a dead person bound hand and foot with barbed wire, a naked disembowelled corpse on an autopsy table, pictures of a man who had been forced at gunpoint to cut off parts of his own body, pictures of human beings in mortal agony as they were being torn apart, a lurid scene of a man fastened to a bed for a year by the most disgusting means having been tortured by methods worthy of any medieval inquisitor and still clinging horribly to life when found, and the pièce de résistance, two separate scenes of mutilated, bound and blood-covered young women, one horribly violated because she was lucky enough to be a prostitute, and one disfigured simply because she was attractive and happened to be proud of it.

This, of course, is to mention only a few of the macabre visuals. The information piece also did not tell me that, in addition to hearing the dreaded coarse language, I would also be a party to the detailed descriptions of each victim's horrific agonies, including things like being forced to eat sharp pieces of plastic, having tubes inserted into one's genitals, that I would hear about a man being forced at gunpoint to rape a woman with a razor-sharp strap-on steel blade, and about a man chewing his own tongue off in mortal agony, to mention only a few incidents in this literal litany of suffering.

Where were the information pieces that mention brutal violence or torture or sexual violence? Do we have to actually see these events occur in the film to justify fair warning? Isn't the grisly aftermath and a graphic description of these events good enough?

And what about Seven's mature theme?

Aren't the themes of hopelessness, despair, the inability of the individual to effect any change, murderous insanity, unthinkable cruelty administered in the context of warped religion, and the triumph of evil over everyone and everything it encounters mature enough?

In my opinion this is the worst part of all, this is the very worst message you could possibly send to any child of any era, particularly a 14-year-old child of today's high-tech, pressure-packed, information-loaded, over-crowded and maybe even doomed society. You can't do anything. Everything is hopeless. Evil and cruelty rule the day.

Imagine. This rating allows a 4-year-old into Seven, provided that someone who has just turned 18 is with that 4-year-old. And that's helpful in the case of this film, because the killer writes messages in human blood, so the preschoolers are going to need someone to read the words for them.

So what, you say? No conscientious adult would take a little kid to something like this, right?

The Reality

I have bad news for you. I was at a matinée of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator (rated AA) a few years ago, and there were plenty of little kids in the audience. The one advantage to this is that you can see over their heads. But imagine the nerve of these kids! I could barely hear the alien ripping people apart over their annoying blood-curdling shrieks. Especially the one near-apoplectic 5-year-old whose parents finally got the message that maybe he wasn't having fun and left.

But believe me, that's not the worst part. Think on this: your Grade 9-age children can go to Seven all by themselves.

Of course, the film's information piece does say not suitable for children. Sure. Find me a 14-year-old anywhere who thinks he or she is a child. And while you're at it, find me a 14-year-old who would be diverted by the warning coarse language, or violence. You might find a couple. Maybe.

But the bottom line is that your 14-year-olds can see this movie without your consent, without you ever having the chance to discuss it, its horrible message or gut-wrenching, nauseating violence. In fact, without your ever even knowing they've seen it at all.

You think 14-year-olds haven't seen this film? I have more bad news for you. When I canvassed the staff of a couple of theatres about the age level of the attendees, I was told that part of the audience was unescorted and definitely under 18. Big surprise: Brad Pitt is huge with teenage girls. They'll flock to see him no matter what he's in, and get the rest of the package like some kind of hellish bonus.

The Solution

Now, perhaps the criteria the Ontario Film Review Board uses needs to be re-examined, and I'm all for that. But it isn't the board's job to watch out for our children. It's our job. Its job is to make sure that films meet certain restrictions, and to provide us with as much information on those films as possible so we can make informed choices of our own.

But the bottom line is that kids who are just old enough to think they're not kids any more can go to films like Seven. And the theatres won't stop them; in fact, they're not allowed to stop them.

Okay, then. Let's give such films an R-rating. That'll take care of that, right?

Wrong. I have more bad news for you. Even had Seven received an R-rating, and the kids weren't allowed into the theatre, many of them will still see it, sooner or later. Because the real problem is that these restricted movies are not restricted at all. Once they go to video, it's game over.

The Inevitable

Obviously, children cannot legally go to an R-rated film in the theatre (but they do). And nearly every major theatrically released R-rated film ends up on video. It is, of course, just as illegal to show a restricted video to anyone under 18, but we all know the video business.

A lot of video stores will rent anything to anyone. They have to. They can't afford to turn down a single rental. And while many reputable stores strictly refuse to do so, there are a lot of parents out there, weary of the constant battle with their teenagers, who will rent R-rated films and allow their teens to watch them or even use these films as quality time together.

In many cases this is not a total disaster. The teens usually live, and a few even go on to lead useful, productive lives. And anyway, what are you going to do about it? The point is, the kids are seeing restricted stuff, and they're going to continue to do so.

The Solution (2)

I therefore propose a new rating: the S rating; that is, suitable only for sadistic adults. Of course, it could have any name you like; for instance, the J rating, as in jaded palates only. Or maybe the RV rating, for really vile, or maybe the TF rating, torture is fun, or the IEI rating, insensitive and emotionally immature viewers only, or maybe even the KKGHTF rating; the kicks keep getting harder to find rating.

For myself, I prefer the simple S rating. It has a certain sliminess that is somehow fitting.

All right, then. What are the problems of implementing an S rating? First of all, any film tagged with the S stigma would instantly lose a huge portion of its audience (just like the U.S. dreaded NC-17 rating or our bogus X rating), and Hollywood knows it. By keeping the rating categories as broad as possible, they get everyone to go: Mr. and Mrs. I-Heard-This-Is-A-Good-Movie, the jaded sadists who can spot a film like this a mile away, and the pubescent Brad Pitt fans.

Voila! Big box office bucks.

So the studios will obviously object to any new rating like our hypothetical S. It's bad enough for them when a film gets an R or NC17-rating and the lucrative 14-to-18 audience is supposedly shut out. Imagine if a film were listed as being suitable only for sadistic adults, hell, even the sadists would be embarrassed to show up! An S rating would be the kiss of death in the theatres.

And just as with films that we know are sex films, no parent in his or her right mind would allow a child to see an S-rated film when it comes out on video. But the way things stand right now, children will continue to be exposed to this material.

The Reality (2)

The thought that we are creating, marketing and serving up gruesome banquets of horrific impressions to these most precious beings, our children, is even more revolting than the theme and content of Seven and the swelling host of films like it. We are sending our children into huge cinemas to be bombarded by scenes of torture and murder on 30-foot screens, with giant sound systems to add to the punch, and we are shipping these same impressions right into our homes via video and pay-per-view so that our kids can feast on these images of atrocity again and again and again and again.

We're showing our kids snuff films. Torture films.

If you did something comparable to a dog, you'd probably get arrested. It's bad enough that a society would allow one of its industries to offer images of gruesome death as high entertainment. To me the sickness in this is so evident that it barely needs pointing out. But as high entertainment for its children?

It's obvious that the film industry is way out of control. It's not just the level of violence that is sky-rocketing, it's the nature and the focus of the violence. Fetish violence, turn-on violence, increasingly authentic, increasingly horrific, increasingly frequent images of atrocities are vomited onto us and our young in the guise of cutting-edge social commentary and art, often accompanied by themes of apocalyptic despair.

To quote Jim Carry's Riddler in Batman Forever: Was that over the top? I can never tell.

The movie industry has the same problem. If it can't control itself, then someone's going to have to bell that cat. Before it's too late.

The following is the text of a letter from Doug Atkinson to the Ontario Film Review Board. Doug Atkinson is co-author of a video column for Sesame Street's parent magazine and the book Videos for Kids: The Essential, Indispensable Parent's Guide to Children's Movies on Video (Prima Publishing, 1995), as well as co-founder of The Original Kids Video Company, 40 Scollard St., Toronto.