film

The double standard between violence and sex in US media

pnrj ethics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2458567

The video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion infamously had its ESRB rating upgraded from “Teen” to “Mature”, raising the minimum age to purchase it from 13 to 17. Why? Well, they gave two major reasons: One was that there was more blood and detailed depictions of death than in the original version submitted for review. The other was that a modder had made it possible to view the female characters with naked breasts.

These were considered comparable arguments—if anything, the latter seemed to carry more weight.

Yet first of all this was a mod: You can make a mod do just about anything. (Indeed, there has long since been a mod for Oblivion that shows full-frontal nudity; had this existed when the rating was upgraded, they might have gone all the way to “Adults Only”, ostensibly only raising the minimum age to 18, but in practice making stores unwilling to carry the game because they think of it as porn.)

But suppose in fact that the game had included female characters with naked breasts. Uh… so what? Why is that considered so inappropriate for teenagers? Men are allowed to walk around topless all the time, and male and female nipples really don’t look all that different!

Now, I actually think “Mature” is the right rating for Oblivion. But that’s because Oblivion is about a genocidal war against demons and involves mass slaughter and gruesome death at every turn—not because you can enable a mod to see boobs.

The game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas went through a similar rating upgrade, from “Mature” to “Adults Only”—resulting it being the only mass-market “Adults Only” game in the US. This was, again, because of a mod—though in this case it was more like re-enabling content that the original game had included but disabled. But let me remind you that this is a game where you play as a gangster whose job is to steal cars, and who routinely guns down police officers and massacres civilians—and the thing that really upset people was that you could enable a scene where your character has sex with his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, games like Manhunt, where the object of the game is to brutally execute people, and the Call of Duty series graphically depicting the horrors of war (and in the Black Ops subseries, espionage, terrorism, and torture), all get to keep their “Mature” ratings.

And consider that a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, rated “Everyone 10+”, contains quite a lot of violence, and several scenes where, logically, it really seems like there should be nudity—bathing, emerging from a cryonic stasis chamber, a doctor examining your body for wounds—but there isn’t. Meanwhile, a key part of the game is killing goblin-like monsters to collect their organs and use them for making potions. It’s all tastefully depicted violence, with little blood and gore; okay, sure. But you can tastefully depict nudity as well. Why are we so uncomfortable with the possibility of seeing these young adult characters naked… while bathing? In this case, even a third-party mod that allowed nudity was itself censored, on the grounds that it would depict “underage characters”; but really, no indication is given that these characters are underage. Based on their role in society, I always read them as about 19 or 20. I guess they could conceivably be as young as 16… and as we all know, 16-year-olds do not have genitals, are never naked, and certainly never have sex.

We’re so accustomed to this that it may even feel uncomfortable to you when I suggest otherwise: “Why would you want to see Link’s penis as he emerges from the cryonic chamber?” Well, I guess, because… men have penises. (Well, cis men anyway; actually it would be really bold and interesting if they decided to make Link trans.) We should see that as normal, and not be so uncomfortable showing it. The emotional power of the scene comes in part from the innocence and vulnerability of nudity, which is undercut by you mysteriously coming with non-removable indestructible underwear. Part of what makes Breath of the Wild so, er, breathtaking is that you can often screenshot it and feel like you are looking at a painting—and I probably don’t need to mention that nudity has been a part of fine art since time immemorial. Letting you take off the protagonist’s underwear wouldn’t show anything you can’t see by looking at Michelangelo’s David.

And would it really be so traumatizing to the audience to see that? By the time you’re 10 years old, I hope you have seen at least one picture of a penis. If not, we’ve been doing sex ed very, very wrong. In fact, I’m quite confident that most of the children playing would not be disturbed at all; amused, perhaps, but what’s wrong with that? If looking at the protagonist’s cel-shaded genitals makes some of the players giggle, does that cause any harm? Some people play through Breath of the Wild without ever equipping clothing, both as a challenge (you get no armor protection that way), and simply for fun (some of the characters do actually react to you being “naked”, or as naked as the game will allow—and most of their reactions would make way more sense if you weren’t wearing magical underwear).

Of course, it’s not just video games. The United States has a bizarre double standard between sex and violence in all sorts of media.

On television, you can watch The Walking Dead on mainstream cable and see, as Andrew Boschert put it, “a man’s skull being smashed with a hammer, people’s throats slit into a trough, a meat locker with people’s torsos and limbs hung by hooks and a man’s face being eaten off while he is still alive”; but show a single erect penis, and you have to go to premium channels.

Even children’s television is full of astonishing levels of violence. Watch Tom and Jerry sometime, and you’ll realize that the only difference between it and the Simpsons parody Itchy & Scratchy is that the Simpsons version is a bit more realistic in depicting how such violence would affect the body. In mainstream cartoons, characters can get shot, blown up, crushed by heavy objects, run over by trains, hit with baseball bats and frying pans—but God forbid you ever show a boob.

In film, the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated shows convincingly that not only are our standards for sexual content versus violent content wildly disproportionate, furthermore any depiction of queer sexual content is immediately considered pornographic while the equivalent heterosexual content is not. It’s really quite striking to watch: They show scenes with the exact same sex act, even from more or less the same camera angles, and when it’s a man and a woman, it gets R, but if it’s two men or two women, it gets NC-17.

The movie Thirteen is rated R for its depiction of drugs and sex, despite being based on a true story about actual thirteen-year-olds. Evan Rachel Wood was 15 at the time of filming and 16 at the time of release, meaning that she was two years older than the character she played, and yet a year later still not old enough to watch her own movie without parental permission. Granted, Thirteen is not a wholesome film; there’s a lot of disturbing stuff in it, including things done by (and to) teenagers that really shouldn’t be.

But it’s not as if violence, even against teenagers, is viewed as so dangerous for young minds. Look at the Hunger Games, for example; that is an absolutely horrific level of violence against teenagers—people get beheaded, blown up, burned, and mutilated—and it only received a PG-13 rating. The Dark Knight received only a PG-13 rating, despite being about a terrorist who murders hundreds and implants a bomb in one of his henchmen (and also implements the most literal and unethical Prisoner’s Dilemma experiment ever devised).

Novels are better about this sort of thing: You actually can have sex scenes in mainstream novels without everyone freaking out. Yet there’s still a subtler double standard: You can’t show too much detail in a sex scene, or you’ll be branded “erotica”. But there’s no special genre ghetto you get sent to for too graphically depicting torture or war. (I love the Culture novels, but honestly I think Use of Weapons should come with trigger warnings—it’s brutal.) And as I have personally struggled with, it’s very hard to write fiction honestly depicting queer characters without your whole book being labeled “queer fiction”.

Is it like this in other countries? Well, like most things, it depends on the country. In China and much of the Middle East, the government has control over almost every sort of content. Most countries have some things they censor and some things they don’t. The US is unusual: We censor very little. Content involvingviolence and political content are essentially unrestricted in the US. But sex is one of the few things that we do consistently censor.

Media in Europe especially is much more willing to depict sex, and a bit less willing to depict violence. This is particularly true in the Netherlands, where there are films rated R for sex in the US but 6 (that’s “minimum age of viewing, 6 years”) in the Netherlands, because we consider naked female breasts to be a deal-breaker and they consider them utterly harmless. Quite frankly, I’m much more inclined toward the latter assessment.

Japan has had a long tradition of sexuality in art and media, and only when the West came in did they start introducing censorship. But Japan is not known for its half-measures; in 1907 they instituted a ban on explicit depiction of genitals that applies to essentially all media—even media explicitly marketed as porn still fuzzes over keys parts of the images. Yet some are still resisting this censorship: A ban on sexual content in manga drew outrage from artists as recently as 2010.

Hinduism has always been more open to sexuality than Christianity, and it shows in Indian culture in various ways. The Kama Sutra is depicted in the West as a lurid sex manual, when it’s really more of a text on living a full life, finding love, and achieving spiritual transcendence (of which sex is often a major part). But like Japan, India began to censor sex as it began to adopt Western cultural influences, and now implements a very broad pornography ban.

What does this double standard do to our society?

Well, it’s very hard to separate causation from correlation. So I can’t really say that it is because of this double standard in media that we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and homicide in the First World. But it seems like it might be related, at least; perhaps they come from a common source, the same sexual repression and valorization of masculinity expressed through violence.

I do know some things that are direct negative consequences of the censorship of sex in US media. The most urgent example of this is the so-called “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (it does more or less the exact opposite, much like the “PATRIOT ACT” and George W. Bush’s “Clean Air Act”). That will have to wait until next week’s post.

Why are movies so expensive? Did they used to be? Do they need to be?

pnrj ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 10, JDN 2457611

One of the better arguments in favor of copyright involves film production. Films are extraordinarily expensive to produce; without copyright, how would they recover their costs? $100 million is a common budget these days.

It is commonly thought that film budgets used to be much smaller, so I looked at some data from The Numbers on over 5,000 films going back to 1915, and inflation-adjusted the budgets using the CPI. (I learned some interesting LibreOffice Calc functions in the process of merging the data; also LibreOffice crashed a few times trying to make the graphs, so that’s fun. I finally realized it had copied over all the 10,000 hyperlinks from the HTML data set.)

If you just look at the nominal figures, there does seem to be some sort of upward trend:

Movie_Budgets_nominal

But once you do the proper inflation adjustment, this trend basically disappears:

Movie_Budgets_adjusted

In real terms, the grosses of some early movies are quite large. Adjusted to 2015 dollars, Gone with the Wind grossed $6.659 billion—still the highest ever. In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs grossed over $3.043 billion in 2015 dollars. In 1950, Cinderella made it to $2.592 billion in today’s money. (Horrifyingly, The Birth of a Nation grossed $258 million in today’s money.)

Nor is there any evidence that movie production has gotten more expensive. The linear trend is actually negative, though with a very small slope that is not statistically significant. On average, the real budget of a movie falls by $1752 per year.

Movie_Budgets_trend

While the two most expensive movies came out recently (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Avatar), the third most expensive was released in 1963 (Cleopatra). The really hugely expensive movies do seem to cluster relatively recently—but then so do the really cheap films, some of which have budgets under $10,000. It may just be that more movies are produced in general, and overall the cost of producing a film doesn’t seem to have changed in real terms. The best return on investment is My Date with Drew, released in 2005, which had a budget of $1,100 but grossed $181,000, giving it an ROI of 16,358%. The highest real profit was of course Gone with the Wind, which made an astonishing $6.592 billion, though Titanic, Avatar, Aliens and Terminator 2 combined actually beat it with a total profit of $6.651 billion, which may explain why James Cameron can now basically make any movie he wants and already has four sequels lined up for Avatar.

The biggest real loss was 1970’s Waterloo, which made back only $18 million of its $153 million budget, losing $135 million and having an ROI of -87.7%. This was not quite as bad an ROI as 2002’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which had an ROI of -92.91%.

But making movies has always been expensive, at least for big blockbusters. (The $8,900 budget of Primer is something I could probably put on credit cards if I had to.) It’s nothing new to spend $100 million in today’s money.

When considering the ethics and economics of copyright, it’s useful to think about what Michele Boldrin calls “pizzaright”: you can’t copy my pizza, or you are guilty of pizzaright infringement. Many of the arguments for copyright are so general—this is a valuable service, it carries some risk of failure, it wouldn’t be as profitable without the monopoly, so fewer companies might enter the business—that they would also apply to pizza. Yet somehow nobody thinks that pizzaright should be a thing. If there is a justification for copyrights, it must come from the special circumstances of works of art (broadly conceived, including writing, film, music, etc.), and the only one that really seems strong enough is the high upfront cost of certain types of art—and indeed, the only ones that really seem to fit that are films and video games.

Painting, writing, and music just aren’t that expensive. People are willing to create these things for very little money, and can do so more or less on their own, especially nowadays. If the prices are reasonable, people will still want to buy from the creators directly—and sure enough, widespread music piracy hasn’t killed music, it has only killed the corporate record industry. But movies and video games really can easily cost $100 million to make, so there’s a serious concern of what might happen if they couldn’t use copyright to recover their costs.

The question for me is, did we really need copyright to fund these budgets?

Let’s take a look at how Star Wars made its money. $6.249 billion came from box office revenue, while $873 million came from VHS and DVD sales; those would probably be substantially reduced if not for copyright. But even before The Force Awakens was released, the Star Wars franchise had already made some $12 billion in toy sales alone. “Merchandizing, merchandizing, where the real money from the movie is made!”

Did they need intellectual property to do that? Well, yes—but all they needed was trademark. Defenders of “intellectual property” like to use that term because it elides fundamental distinctions between the three types: trademark, copyright, and patent.
Trademark is unproblematic. You can’t lie about who you are or where you products came from when you’re selling something. So if you are claiming to sell official Star Wars merchandise, you’d better be selling official Star Wars merchandise, and trademark protects that.

Copyright is problematic, but may be necessary in some cases. Copyright protects the content of the movies from being copied or modified without Lucasfilm’s permission. So now rather than simply protecting against the claim that you represent Lucasfilm, we are protecting against people buying the movie, copying it, and reselling the copies—even though that is a real economic service they are providing, and is in no way fraudulent as long as they are clear about the fact that they made the copies.

Patent is, frankly, ridiculous. The concept of “owning” ideas is absurd. You came up with a good way to do something? Great! Go do it then. But don’t expect other people to pay you simply for the privilege of hearing your good idea. Of course I want to financially support researchers, but there are much, much better ways of doing that, like government grants and universities. Patents only raise revenue for research that sells, first of all—so vaccines and basic research can’t be funded that way, even though they are the most important research by far. Furthermore, there’s nothing to guarantee that the person who actually invented the idea is the one who makes the profit from it—and in our current system where corporations can own patents (and do own almost 90% of patents), it typically isn’t. Even if it were, the whole concept of owning ideas is nonsensical, and it has driven us to the insane extremes of corporations owning patents on human DNA. The best argument I’ve heard for patents is that they are a second-best solution that incentivizes transparency and avoids trade secrets from becoming commonplace; but in that case they should definitely be short, and we should never extend them. Companies should not be able to make basically cosmetic modifications and renew the patent, and expiring patents should be a cause for celebration.

Hollywood actually formed in Los Angeles precisely to escape patents, but of course they love copyright and trademark. So do they like “intellectual property”?

Could blockbuster films be produced profitably using only trademark, in the absence of copyright?

Clearly Star Wars would have still turned a profit. But not every movie can do such merchandizing, and when movies start getting written purely for merchandizing it can be painful to watch.

The real question is whether a film like Gone with the Wind or Avatar could still be made, and make a reasonable profit (if a much smaller one).

Well, there’s always porn. Porn raises over $400 million per year in revenue, despite having essentially unenforceable copyright. They too are outraged over piracy, yet somehow I don’t think porn will ever cease to exist. A top porn star can make over $200,000 per year.Then there are of course independent films that never turn a profit at all, yet people keep making them.

So clearly it is possible to make some films without copyright protection, and something like Gone with the Wind needn’t cost $100 million to make. The only reason it cost as much as it did (about $66 million in today’s money) was that movie stars could command huge winner-takes-all salaries, which would no longer be true if copyright went away. And don’t tell me people wouldn’t be willing to be movie stars for $200,000 a year instead of $1.8 million (what Clark Gable made for Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation).

Yet some Hollywood blockbuster budgets are genuinely necessary. The real question is whether we could have Avatar without copyright. Not having films like Avatar is something I would count as a substantial loss to our society; we would lose important pieces of our art and culture.

So, where did all that money go? I don’t have a breakdown for Avatar in particular, but I do have a full budget breakdown for The Village. Of its $71.7 million, $33.5 million was “above the line”, which basically means the winner-takes-all superstar salaries for the director, producer, and cast. That amount could be dramatically reduced with no real cost to society—let’s drop it to say $3 million. Shooting costs were $28.8 million, post-production was $8.4 million, and miscellaneous expenses added about $1 million; all of those would be much harder to reduce (they mainly go to technical staff who make reasonable salaries, not to superstars), so let’s assume the full amount is necessary. That’s about $38 million in real cost to produce. Avatar had a lot more (and better) post-production, so let’s go ahead and multiply the post-production budget by an order of magnitude to $84 million. Our new total budget is $113.8 million.
That sounds like a lot, and it is; but this could be made back without copyright. Avatar sold over 14.5 million DVDs and over 8 million Blu-Rays. Conservatively assuming that the price elasticity of demand is zero (which is ridiculous—assuming the monopoly pricing is optimal it should be -1), if those DVDs were sold for $2 each and the Blu-Rays were sold for $5 each, with 50% of those prices being profit, this would yield a total profit of $14.5 million from DVDs and $20 million from Blu-Rays. That’s already $34.5 million. With realistic assumptions about elasticity of demand, cutting the prices this much (DVDs down from an average of $16, Blu-Rays down from an average of $20) would multiply the number of DVDs sold by at least 5 and the number of Blu-Rays sold by at least 3, which would get us all the way up to $132 million—enough to cover our new budget. (Of course this is much less than they actually made, which is why they set the prices they did—but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal from society’s perspective.)

But okay, suppose I’m wrong about the elasticity, and dropping the price from $16 to $2 for a DVD somehow wouldn’t actually increase the number purchased. What other sources of revenue would they have? Well, box office tickets would still be a thing. They’d have to come down in price, but given the high-quality high-fidelity versions that cinemas require—making them quite hard to pirate—they would still get decent money from each cinema. Let’s say the price drops by 90%—all cinemas are now $1 cinemas!—and the sales again somehow remain exactly the same (rather than dramatically increasing as they actually would). What would Avatar’s worldwide box office gross be then? $278 million. They could give the DVDs away for free and still turn a profit.

And that’s Avatar, one of the most expensive movies ever made. By cutting out the winner-takes-all salaries and huge corporate profits, the budget can be substantially reduced, and then what real costs remain can be quite well covered by box office and DVD sales at reasonable prices. If you imagine that piracy somehow undercuts everything until you have to give away things for free, you might think this is impossible; but in reality pirated versions are of unreliable quality, people do want to support artists and they are willing to pay something for their entertainment. They’re just tired of paying monopoly prices to benefit the shareholders of Viacom.

Would this end the era of the multi-millionaire movie star? Yes, I suppose it might. But it would also put about $10 billion per year back in the pockets of American consumers—and there’s little reason to think it would take away future Avatars, much less future Gone with the Winds.