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Feature: Ticket Booth Tyranny (Part One)
This week, I took a giant personal step towards Libertarianism and nearly got busted when I injected myself into a fracas between an out-of-control megaplex manager, a harried working mom and five geek kids trying to see "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut."
When it comes to violence, morality and the young, we're the Idiot Nation, the laughingstock not only of the civilized world but of the highly-wired generation of kids we're supposedly trying to protect. (Adults apparently need protection too. Only Europeans can see the sex scenes in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," cut out for Americans to avoid an NC-17 rating.)
Perhaps without noticing, you may have seen evidence of this new Ticket Booth Morals Squad, out to protect our allegedly vulnerable kids from dirty words and images. (Violent slaughter is, of course, fine anytime.) Signs posted all over theaters warn that rating policies will be strictly enforced. In some chains, even 17-year-olds aren't permitted in "R" rated movies. And Blockbuster Video announced last week that 17-year-olds can't rent "R" rated movies anymore either.
Adults are being grilled at the box office, informed that they must stay with the children for the duration of an "R" movie, or asked if they understand that the movie might be sexually explicit.
Of course, since most movie chains are owned by corporate fatcats but operated by diffident teenagers seething in their crummy, low-paying jobs, these Draconian rules merely pit kids against kids and sputtering adults. Teenagers are suddenly responsible for the moral policing of kids and films. Loopy but true.
The cultural lives of America's kids have long been uncensorable, anyway. Anything produceable in print or video is available on the Net or the Web.
Kids turned away at the box office will simply watch their movies and TV shows on a smaller screen, as the producers of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" learned last month when they cravenly cancelled the season finale (which featured a giant serpent at a high school graduation) to appease post-Columbine hysterics in politics and journalism.
The decision about what movies kids ought to see is clearly a decision for their parents to make, not Hollywood ratings boards, the video-store managers, discount retailing chains (like Wal-Mart) or movie-theater operators. If a parent thinks that "South Park" - available in bleeped form on cable every week - is appropriate for his her kid to see solo, that should be the end of the discussion.
It's not, though. Now, it's just the beginning.
I knew we were going to have trouble at the theater when the ticketseller refused to allow a dad to buy five tickets for a later showing because one of the kids hadn't shown up yet. "I just want to save him a ticket," the man objected.
"If I sell you an extra ticket, you might give it to some kid who will come in without a parent," huffed the teen behind the glass, in an encounter eerily similar to one in the movie itself.
So the guy gave up and a woman came up to the booth to buy five "South Park" tickets. Her son and four of his friends, all 14 or 15 --- regular viewers of the TV version - clustered eagerly behind her.
"You going in?," a the ticket-seller demanded; he couldn't have been 19 himself.
"No," said the mother truthfully. "I have to get to work. I'm giving them permission to see it, and I'll pick them up during my coffee break. " She stopped herself mid-explanation.
"Wait a minute!," she said suddenly. "Why am I telling you this? I'm their mom. It's okay by me for them to see the movie. What's it your business whether I'm there or not?"
The kid in the booth shook his head. "Can't sell you the tickets," he snapped. "You have to stay there the whole time, too. We have ushers watching for parents who try to leave."
The mother, nervously glancing at her watch, asked to see the manager, who was even more rigid and arrogant.
"It's our policy, lady," he said. "You got a problem? Call the company." He pointed to the General Cinema toll-free number on the wall.
I stepped up to the booth, intending to buy a ticket for "Eyes Wide Shut" - I'd already seen "South Park" twice - listening to this surreally pious claptrap and marveling at how American corporations - Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, the WB TV network, Loews, General Cinema - have mastered the art of appearing pious while being dependably greedy and manipulative.
I said I'd take the kids in. How reassuring, I thought, to know that these companies are making sure that Columbines will never happen again by keeping kids out of "American Pie" because it has some sex scenes.
"Wait! He's not with them," said the kid in the booth to the manager. Meaning me.
"Yes, I am. I'm the pastor of our local church. I'm here to show them "South Park" as an example of evil and immorality in the world. How can we fight Satan if we don't know him and can't see him? I hear he's in the movie. I hope you're not planning to interfere with religious teaching!"
The manager hesitated, said no, then yes, then went to make a phone call. Maybe I wasn't convincing as a pastor. In a minute, a cop sidled up and asked me if there was any trouble. "No sir," I said, "just the eternal battle between good and evil. We are trying to save some souls here."
He blinked, then stepped back. "Well, you have to move along," he muttered, bored. "Otherwise I'll have to ticket you for being disorderly."
I pictured calling my wife and telling her I'd been busted over "South Park;" could she bail me out? The idea kind of grew on me, although I wasn't certain she would bail me out.
The stymied manager and his moral aide conferred briefly. The ticket line was growing longer, the rumblings about the theater chain's intrusive and hypocritical policy getting louder. "Let the kids see the goddamned movie," thundered an enormous man from the back of the line. "Fox News is a lot worse!"
"I've already got the movie off the Net," one of the kids whispered to his friend's mother. "I just wanted to see it on the big screen. We can watch it at home if we have to."
I wasn't budging. The cop didn't seem anxious to get too involved with this particular kind of law enforcement. The manager, flushed, relented. "You can take them in, but you have to stay with them the whole time," he told me.
"Can I go to the bathroom?" I asked. "Is it okay with you if I stretch my legs? Can I come out for popcorn. Can I call my sick mom in Boise?"
The mother's jaw was open, but then she smiled, said thanks. "I've got to get to work," she said. I was going to reassure her, tell her that I watched "Beavis & Butt-head" with my daughter when she was eight or nine, both of us howling with laughter, but I thought better of it. "Good luck," she said. "Kids, call me if you can't get in or something happens."
So I marched in with the five boys, who were looking at me warily, hoping I wasn't actually some preacher. A teenaged usher followed us inside and stood nearby with folded arms. When I got up to go see my movie (I'd bought tickets to both), she stepped in front of me. "You have to stay," she said.
"I've got a rare kidney disease," I told her. "I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?"
She didn't really know what to say, and we both knew she wasn't doing this voluntarily. She smiled and sat down, and I sent to see "Eyes Wide Shut." Every fifteen minutes or so, I popped back to check on the kids, at one point catching the great "Uncle Fucker" song. They were convulsed, but seemed other unchanged, morally speaking.
But this was a small and temporal victory. It's time to start fighting back against Ticket Booth Fascism. Who put these arrogant movie chain execs and clerks in charge of our movie-making decisions? What gives them the right to interfere with our ability to decide what our kids can see? How can movie chains - of all institutions -- buy into the profoundly stupid and demonstrably false idea that movies featuring explicit language and sex contribute to tragedies like Columbine?
In practical terms, don't they grasp that they are simply teaching a whole generation how to get their movies on the Net and the Web - something that will be quite simple in a year or so for millions of Americans -- rather than go to theaters and subject themselves to patronizing, humiliating - and completely pointless - hassles? Haven't theater chains ever ever heard the term "MP3?"
Monday, Part Two: a proposal: Take a Geek Kid To A Restricted Movie Day.
Libertarianism is NOT the philosophy of "the hell with you, I'm going to do what I want." Maybe it's the philosophy of "the hell with the government..." but it's definately not about dismissing other individuals. For a libertarian society to work, it requires us to be MORE respectful of other's rights, not less.
In other words, if I own a movie theatre and I require 17-year-olds (or 30-year-old idiot writers, for that matter) to be accompanied by a mature adult in order to see certain movies, that's MY RIGHT just as much as it's YOUR RIGHT to go to a different movie theatre.
I think it's a shame that well-meaning people can't try to help society back towards decency without some self-righteous, self-styled "libertarian" getting all bent out of shape about it.
Last time I checked, "lying" was bad. Let's not call evil good and good evil.
***KNOCK,KNOCK,KNOCK***
Shouts can be heard from outside the locked door. "Open up! Open up I say!"
The old woman answers in a frightened voice "Who's there?"
"The police! Open up! Now!"
She unlocks the door and begins to open it. Immediately several armed secret police push her aside and enter the small building.
The old woman aproaches the head officer. "What is this about?"
Seemingly noticing her for the first time, he gives her a long cold look before replying. "We're looking for unregistered jews."
She laughs, "There are no jews here."
With a look of distain he disregards her and barks out orders to the others. Turning over breaking furniture, they search the four small rooms. She watches silently, not moving.
Satisfied with their throughness, they stop. Out the front door they go as quickly as they came in.
She steps outside into the morning sun. Its a bright day, unusual for this time of year. Sitting on the stoop watching the police go from house to house she listens to their shouts. Listens to them turn today upside down, turn lives upside down. Hours pass before they are through.
The last band of the thugs leave just as dusk comes, their duty finished for the day. She listens to them leave as she looks at the new night sky. Cold winds begin to blow. Time to go back inside to warmth, to life.
Closing the door behind her and pushing debris away she makes her way to the hearth. There, she kneels. She strains to pull the large stone lose. Small hands push from the other side as the stone is lifted away. "Its alright now. They're gone." A small face in the darkness squints against the fading light and smiles. She smiles back. "I won't let them have you. Never."
I think one of the greatest things about South Park: Bigger Longer, and Uncut, is that one of the main themes is exactly what Katz is talking about here. I saw an interview with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and they had a lot to say about the Motion Picture Association of America. For those of you who don't know, the MPAA is the agency that rates movies, and all that fun stuff. One of the best quotes about them goes something like this [not a direct quote]:
"What we did was create a movie with all the gore we possibly could, with a huge war scene, people dying left and right, and immense amounts of death, destruction, blood, and all around violence. We showed it to the MPAA, and all they said was 'take out the rimjob joke, and it's ok'."
The hypocrisy that is prevalent in today's morality movements is ridiculous. You can turn on cable TV (sometimes even good old network tv!) and see people being eviscerated, but if a program contains a "dirty" word, or (*horror!*) a breast, it is relegated to pay-per-view or a premium channel.
Another non-direct (but close) quote from Kyle's Mom:
"As you go into battle, just remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is OK, as long as nobody says any naughty words!"
The morality pushers are mostly hypocrites, and usually hypocrites who are too lazy to raise their own kids, and want the government to do it for them. It is not the governments job to make sure your children don't watch movies you feel are inappropriate. It is YOUR job as a parent to do so. If you don't want your kids watching porn on the playboy channel, DON'T ORDER THE PLAYBOY CHANNEL. Or how about actually talking to your kids about things, or making an effort to raise your kids yourself?
Of course, you could just bitch and moan and take freedom away from everybody in the name of morality so that the government can police everything you watch because you're too lazy to watch your own kids. That would be the easy thing to do. Sounds great. [/sarcasm]
The motion picture rating system is a voluntary system created by the motion picture industry. Unless local jurisdictions say otherwise, these ratings are recommendations, not legally binding requirements. Local jurisdictions usually have laws only regarding "X"-rated pictures, since those qualify as "obscenity" under Supreme Court rulings and thus are not considered to be a "free speech" issue.
In other words, you can't blame your local politicians for the theatre hassling your kids. This is something the cinema chains are doing themselves, and that, as private businesses, they have every right to do (no matter how much we disagree). It's like Wal-Mart refusing to carry "skin" magazines and "obscene" albums. While I disagree vehemently with their reasoning, forcing them to do something they don't want to do is just as wrong.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I am not sure quite how to respond to a story like this... You see, I happen to be a part of a minority (?) group of Slashdot readers who actually think that such moral limitations and the so on are actually worthwhile. I think the real problem I see here is on the part of the author and the mother. First off, the author. I am amazed that the author of this story can turn himself into a hero by lying and cheating. Now, I am sure that you can come up with all kinds of reasons to tell me all that doesn't matter - they can already get it off the web, nobody was getting hurt, yada yada yada. The truth of the matter is this: IT WAS WRONG. It was a lie and an embarrassment to the concept of freedom which you chose to abuse on that day. Shame on you. And to the mother. That a woman when even consider to take her children to such a show is an embarrassment to the word mother. "Mom" is a word which represents a caring, nuturing class of women who have the BEST interest of the children in mind. Come on, figure it out here, people. How can anyone ignore the crud that comes out of South Park. As a Christian in this nation I say enough is enough. I don't want to see the people on the fringe of society et abused whenever something like Columbine happens. I do, however, want to see americans start standing up for a little decency and the like. And about the "Ten Commandments" comment in the first part of your story - give me a break. Our country is closer now to "religious discrimination" then in ever has been - but only in the context of restricting prayer in school and the like. I'd say more, but I don't have the time. Other Christian Slashdot readers: SPEAK UP! Don't fight with me over ANY of the little details in my post here and just band together to raise the voice that we DO HAVE.
Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.
I saw "South Park" this Friday at my local Lowes googleplex - it was a riot. There were a few young'uns there, but it was mainly college-age kids and thirtysomethings with a sense of humor (I like to put myself in that category). It's outrageous how the fallout from Columbine has triggered such a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Clinton administration ("You really _should_ ID kids - we wouldn't want to have to regulate you, would we?"). As if a potty-mouthed crude cartoon (and it's 'R' rated competition) is going to be the one influence that corrupts our "precious youth"!
The truly disgraceful thing here is that we're gradually giving up our freedom of speech, and we're doing it voluntarily. I guess if "adult" themes like sexuality and language now must be kept from our impressionable youth, we'll just have to send them to see good, clean violent PG-13 movies. I'm so glad that we're protecting our young ones...
When I was a teenager, I worked at an "alternative" cinema in Connecticut that showed all sorts of fare, mostly unrated. I remember 14-year old kids going to midnight Rocky Horror screenings (I didn't go to one of those until I was 16!) - underage kids seeing foreign films with extensive nudity, teenagers filling the place for the annual "splatterfest" (with movies like Basket Case, 10,000 Maniacs, and the original TCM), and all the classic John Waters films like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos.
Interestingly enough, we had no age policies at all, yet somehow our patrons didn't emerge from the theater to rape and pillage downtown Norwalk on a nightly basis. Go figure.
Bottom line: people who are doomed to be the nutcases of society will find a trigger - regardless of our misguided efforts to protect them. If there are more of them nowadays I'd look first at the trend to absentee parenting and easy access to weaponry before I blame the media - though that's the "easy" answer. But this is a society that doesn't like to look any deeper than
the surface.
Remember - those who would willingly exchange liberty for security deserve neither.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
You shouldn't be "afraid" of stating your point of view here. It is unfortunate that expressing a pro-restriction POV is likely to attract flames from the ultra-liberal section of the Slashdot readership.
Is there anything anywhere which says all geeks have to be libertarians, totally opposed to all forms of restriction?
FWIW, I agree with you on the movie ratings thing. I use them as a guideline myself; I skip anything with a 15 or 18 rating and wait for the edited-for-TV version.
The rating rules were set in place to keep underage children from seeing things that they probably aren't developed enough to see.
Ahem. By whose standards, exactly?
Kids are allways going to tell the parents it's not that bad. If the parent is in the theater with them, they see just how bad it really is.
My, my. You certainly have a low opinion of teenagers. I'm glad I'm not your daughter. (Then again, since I'm 21, it's a moot point by now.)
Ok, so you just gained the respect of every 15year old male that reads slashdot. You just lost the respect of most of the parents that read
I like Katz anyhow, but this made me like him more. And I'm a 21-year-old FEMALE, thank you very much. Again, your low opinion of young people is showing.
And that's actually one of the biggest parts of the problem here. Treat kids like they are jerks, or like they are delicate flowers in need of "protection" from the big bad world (R-rated movies, dirty pictures, books that contain "bad language," availability of condoms, or what have you), and they will consistently live down to your expectations.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
*siiiiiiiiiiigh*
OK, here goes:
[WARNING: this post is written in Rant Mode.]
First of all, the ratings system is FUBAR to begin with. As I recently posted on another thread, Dharma and Greg can roll around making out on the couch before heading off to their bedroom and only get a TVPG rating, but if Ellen merely kisses her girlfriend, it's an automatic TV14. One use of the "F-word," one glimpse of a joint, and a movie becomes PG-13, minimum. One look at a naked female breast (BTW, in my state it's legal for women to go topless, so this is really silly), and the movie gets rated R. Meanwhile, SW:TPM can have all sorts of stuff get blown up and not only stay a PG movie but also be thought of as a perfectly lovely move for kids. BWAH?!
Secondly, any number of serious movies out there get rated R at least; some are NC-17. And some of those movies are ones that my mom would have been perfectly happy to take me to if I had asked, and would have had no problem leaving me off at the theater to see.
My CTY class, full of 13ish-year-olds, needed to see Apocalypse Now for a reason: we were comparing it with the book it was based on, Heart of Darkness. Still, on at least one other campus, someone's parents complained because it was an R-rated movie. As my teacher said, "It's a WAR movie. People are getting injured and killed, and they aren't going to say 'oh golly gee' about it." Ironically, the movie probably got its R rating due to language and not violence.
I started college when I was 14. I had to watch R-rated movies for a class on more than one occasion before I turned 17. Fortunately, I was 18 by the time I encountered the NC-17 movie, Wide Sargasso Sea, (wonderful movie BTW), that I had to watch for an English course I was in because we were reading the book as well as Jane Eyre, which it is somewhat based on. Then again, it wouldn't have irrevocably harmed my brain if I had been *gasp* 16 when I saw it. While in college, and still 15, I also went to the $2 theater to see The Crying Game and Three of Hearts, both R-rated movies. Nobody gave me any trouble about getting in.
Most kids who have not been extremely sheltered have heard all of the seven dirty words by the time they're 10 or so, and are probably using them at least occasionally shortly thereafter. Even if they don't quite understand the meaning. A family friend's then-9 year old son was suspended for telling his teacher "I want a blow job out of town," when he didn't understand what it meant, but had seen "blow job" written on the bathroom wall and thought it sounded cool. Sheesh.
Which reminds me, again we have a certain play by a certain William Shakespeare that is taught in high schools around the country. BTW, it happens to be chock-full of gang violence, kids disrespecting their elders, the occasional bit of dirty humor, kids (we assume) having sex, and teenage suicide. But It's a Classic, so there's nothing wrong with that. And look at the Bible. It's got every bit of nastiness I can think of in it other than actually using the Seven Dirty Words. But most censorship advocates see NOTHING wrong with the Bible; so what if there's sex and violence, it's the Word of God and must be treated as such. Logic, anyone????
Locally, the silliness started with RHPS, which now won't let kids under 17 in even if they have parental consent, and probably even if they have a parent with them. There go a lot of people's Saturday night fun. *sigh* I know my parents would much rather that I was at RHPS and then the diner afterwards than out partying who-knows-where and ingesting who-knows-what substance.
Stupid. VERY stupid.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I do find a certain amount of humor in the fact that a movie which satirizes censorship is drawing such ire from would-be censors.
It's sort of like Ray Bradbury's essay at the end of the new version of Fahrenheit 451. Some young readers of his wrote in to comment on the irony of the "bad words" being cut out of a book about censorship! Apparently, this prompted RB to look into the matter, find out the kids were right, and order them to put all the "damns" and "hells" back where he wrote them.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
So, when exactly would you say kids are ready for this stuff? (stuff=swearing, nudity, etc.)
My mother is a very liberal parent. She raised three daughters who are non-violent, intelligent (I flatter myself), capable people who do not smoke, drink, or do any other drugstuffs (excepting perhaps caffeine, meds).
As long as I can remember, I have been allowed to do whatever I liked. If my parents were having a drink, they'd offer me or my sisters one as well. We could watch any movie they rented, and I (an avid reader) could read anything I wanted. We had no curfew, and also no allowance (Mom would pay for school/special things, but all other $$ we had to make on our own). I'm not saying my life with my parents was idyllic, but Mom treated us with the same respect and dignity she used with adults. And we were responsible for our behavior in the same way that adults are.
I guarantee that at 11 I had more knowledge about the world and how to survive in it than all my classmates put together. My vocabulary was more extensive than that of my gr.6 teacher (sorry, Mrs. Luff, but it's true). And today I am 22, a reasonably successful adult, moving forward in the world while people I knew at 11 have 5 year olds and work at the Quik-E-Mart.
I'm not perfect, but I've never brutally murdered anyone, I've never kidnapped children to sell into child-porn-slavery, and it's been a good 15 years since I stole any penny candy from the convenience store.
I guess what I'm saying is if you shelter children, you take away most of their capacity to become reasoning, thinking adults. We have to make mistakes, be punished, get hurt, or else we never learn. When released into the world, lots of sheltered kids fall apart and run back home, to the safe haven of their parent's loving, protective arms.
"Oh, Mr. TVman, don't say fuck, our little Jimmy's back home from university again! He's moving back home while he thinks about changing his major to Cultural Studies..."
No one I knew in elementary school was unaware of the 'dirty' words, and most could tell you how to load a gun. However, very few had any concrete information about sex or condoms. I would say that those people out there "Protecting" youth are doing a damn fine job, wouldn't you? Lets teach kids the truth, instead of feeding them confusing, cutsie, transperant lies.
Wonderful article as usual. It's really sad to see so much buck-passing going on in the wake of Columbine.
Everyone turns into a pundit after something like Columbine happens. We all had our $0.02 to contribute. Mine consisted of talking about parental responsibility. It's sad, however, when parents aren't allowed to take responsibility. The kids Katz mentioned in his article all seemed to have responsible parents. They knew what the kids were seeing and approved. And yet they weren't allowed to parent. That's just stupid.
I'm personally not a big fan of bootlegging. I think it's wrong to not pay the artists for their work. But I'm not a fan of censorship, either, & I think it's great when people use their resources to overcome censorship. The kid with the downloaded copy of the South Park film was great! Thanks to the Net, I got to see the season finale of Buffy before it aired. I've also got in my grubby little hands a video tape of "Earshot," the episode WB has yet to air, which, as it turns out, was one of the best episodes they made last season &, oddly enough, had a message very appropiate to the post-Columbine atmosphere. It was supposed to air the week after Columbine, but WB got scared. Ironically, it could have been shown as an anti-school violence episode with the message of "everybody hurts so don't kill people 'cause you're hurting, too." Instead, they chickened out.
I'm hoping that the neo-Puritanism through which this country is going is reaching the end of its swing and the pendulum starts to head back the other way. If not, we're going to continue to have kids not being able to see South Park, but we are going to continue to see kids being abused by their peers in schools, ignored by the pundits (I'm still pissed that the kids in Columbine got front-page coverage and people writing songs about them and the like, but black boys like my cousin who get shot down in the street continue to be constantly ignored as if their lives weren't of equal value to those of suburban white kids) & ignored by their schools' administrations. Things aren't going to change as long as people continue to avoid taking responsibility.
Geeks getting abused in school is old-news, now, I suppose. I was one of them, so I know. It just a shame that the things that make us geeks (i.e. infatuation with silly things like South Park) are being taken away from geek kids, but the real problems continue to be ignored. Kudos to Katz for getting those kids into the movies. Unfortunately, getting into movies seems to continue to be the least of geek kids' problems.
Sorry for the long post.
Think like a person of action, act like a person of thought. --H. Bergson
Well as much as I disagree with the theater's overreactive policies I can understand somewhat where they are coming from. They're being hit right and left by politics and all they want to do is make money, not fight moral wars.
Its really up to people to 'get a grip' and tell the politicians where the boundaries are. As it stands the politicans are (and always will being a class of useless leeches) aiming towards whatever they can to make themselves look proactive towards a social problem. Even if the actions are silly.
Businesses by their very natures have no spine, they want money and political battles are costly. They will bend when the wind blows.
Contrary to what many of you think here, kids are impressionable. They are not born with an already intact sense of morals, values and an understanding of our world and society. They learn if from their surrounding environment-mostly when they are young, but people always adapt to their surroundings. I think many of the ultra-liberals, concerned more about their freedoms, forget that people abuse these freedoms to make money. A good example of this is the media-TV and movies which open people's eyes, usually due to sex and violence. Most of the movies people see now have significant amounts of both.
The problem with violence in our society, as I see it, is not directly linked to our media (TV/movies), as is the current mainstream opinion. However, the whole 'generation X' and the one after has been completely saturated with violence-and it has to have SOME impact upon the viewer. I must have seen thousands of people die on television, and killed millions more on quake type games. I'm not about to run out and go on a shooting rampage, as I'm sure millions of other gamers won't either. But when you have kids in an unstable family, where the parents don't teach a good sense of values and morals in the first place, the addition of gatuitous violence doesn't help. This is where violence in our society starts-a combination of violence and lack of morals and standards.
Seems to me that the American family needs more help than anything, and government regulations and theatres refusing to sell tickets to minors are mere stopgaps to help prevent a bad situation from getting worse. Unfortunately, these have little real impact, because we live in a society where we have a lot of freedom, so government intevention is minimal.
Instead of bitching about the government, why don't you take a look at the bigger picture, and issues such as the general degradation of the quality of life in the freest country in the world?