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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Watching movies turns teens into drunks; to fix it, let's create more R-rated movies
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Mike Blakesley
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Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-15-2015 01:32 PM
To fight teen drinking, experts call for stricter movie ratings
By KAREN KAPLAN April 13, 2015
Should a movie that depicts any type of drinking automatically earn an R rating from the Motion Picture Assn. of America? The authors of a new study argue that the answer should be yes – and that this would make teenagers less likely to binge-drink or use alcohol in other risky ways.
The study, published Monday by the journal Pediatrics, offers fresh support for the idea that teens who see drinking on the big screen are more likely to drink themselves.
Among a group of 5,163 15-year-olds from England, those who watched the most minutes of drinking on film were twice as likely to have alcohol-related problems as those who watched the fewest. They were also 2.4 times more likely to drink at least once a week and 70% more likely consume five or more drinks in a single day.
Different groups of researchers have made similar observations about adolescents in the United States, Germany and elsewhere. Although the link between movie drinking and teen drinking turns up again and again, none of these studies can prove that watching James Bond quaff a martini or seeing the cast of “The Hangover” down shots on the roof a Las Vegas hotel actually causes teenagers to drink more than they would otherwise.
But the new report strengthens the circumstantial case. That’s because researchers have been collecting data on the study volunteers since before they were born. They’ve also been tracking their families as part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. This allowed the study authors to control for a host of factors that might contribute to teen drinking, including the drinking habits of their parents and whether the kids had a history of behavioral problems or sensation-seeking behavior.
When the teens were 15, they answered a host of questions about their own relationship with alcohol. By this age, fully 86% had tried alcohol at least once and 21% were drinking on a weekly basis. What’s more, 47% acknowledging at least one episode of binge drinking and 43% admitted to at least one problem tied to drinking, such as letting it interfere with school or work, getting into trouble with the police or suffering withdrawal when going too long without a drink.
The study authors also tried to gauge the teens’ exposure to drinking in movies. Researchers had watched 366 popular movies and counted up the amount of time that drinking was depicted in each of them. The teens were presented with a random sample of 50 of these movies and asked whether they had seen them. All of the minutes of drinking in all of the movies seen by each kid were added together, and the average was 47.3 minutes.
The 25% of teens with the lowest exposure – less than 28 minutes in total – served as the baseline. Those in the group with the highest exposure had seen at least 64 minutes of drinking.
After controlling for a variety of demographic and other factors, the researchers found that the more minutes of drinking the teens had watched, the greater the odds of all kinds of alcohol use. Compared with teens in the lowest-exposure group, those with the highest exposure were 20% more likely to have had a drink at least once; 70% more likely to have a history of binge-drinking; twice as likely to have an alcohol-related problem; and 2.4 times more likely to be drinking at least once a week.
These correlations were found despite the relatively modest amount of big-screen drinking watched by English teens, the researchers noted. In the U.S. and Germany, for example, the average teen had seen about three hours’ worth of movie footage that involved drinking. However, the totals used in this study probably understate the true exposure of the English teens because they were asked only about 50 movies, not all of the movies – and TV shows – they’d actually seen.
To the extent that movies contribute to teen drinking, one remedy would be to eliminate all drinking in movies made for minors, the study authors wrote. That means any film with even a glass of wine or a can of beer would invoke an R rating from the MPAA (or the equivalent from the British Board of Film Classification).
It may sound extreme, but “this is justified because movie rating systems exist to protect children from seeing media that may adversely affect their behavior,” according to the study. “Adverse outcomes from alcohol use are a large societal public health problem.”
If the MPAA and BBFC were to follow the researchers’ advice, a lot of movies would get stricter ratings. A 2011 study in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that 72% of the top-grossing movies in the United Kingdom between 1989 and 2008 included scenes of drinking, but only 6% of them were rated for adults.
In the U.S., 83% of box office hits between 1998 and 2003 included alcohol, including 57% of movies rated G or PG, according to a 2008 study in the journal Addiction.
L.A. Times article
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Stephen Furley
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Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 04-15-2015 05:44 PM
Martin, the BBFC is not government; it is an independent organisation. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be the case that the licensing authority had the final say. Some films were refused a certificate by certain local authorities even where the BBFC had given it one, Last Temptation of Christ is one example which was banned from cinemas in some areas, while it was not unknown for a film to be shown as X(GLC) where X was the highest rated certificate at the time and GLC was the Greater London Council, which was the licensing authority for cinemas in this part of the world until abolished in the '80s.
I know things have changed somewhat in recent years with the BBFC rating things like VHS and DVD versions of films for home use, and more recently video games. These cannot be sold to persons below the age for which they have been rated. The rating systems for home and cinema use are slightly different, but it all gets rather complicated at that point.
The certificate that a film actually gets is sometimes effectively chosen by the producers. The BBFC can say something like 'As it stands it's a 15, but if you remove the last 14 frames of this scene and the last 2 seconds and 9 frames of that one it would be a 12a.' If the producers or distributors feel that the film would lose much of its intended audience at the higher rating they may be prepared to make the cuts necessary cuts to make the lower one.
I find BBFC ratings puzzling; some are considerably higher than I would expect, while others are lower.
As far as I remember, the age for drinking over there is 21; is a federal law, or does it very state by state? this already seems very high; it's 18 here. We do have excessive drinking here, Croydon where I am seems to be something of a national centre for moronic behaviour by drunken night clubbers, but they mainly seem to be older people, maybe around mid 20s or so. I seldom see drunk teenagers, and a recent report says that heavy drinking by teenagers has declined rapidly in recent years, with many not drinking alcohol at all. I don't know what to make of reports, they always seem to contradict each other, but this one did seem to reflect my experience.
My own drinking has hardly changed since my mid teens, a long time ago now, typically less than a half litre bottle about two or three times a year.
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Scott Norwood
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Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-15-2015 05:56 PM
quote: Stephen Furley As far as I remember, the age for drinking over there is 21; is a federal law, or does it very state by state?
It is a state law, but the age-21 limit is "encouraged" by a federal law which reduces the amount of highway funding that is available to states with lower minimum drinking ages. The practical side is that all states now have 21 as their "drinking age," although there are a few exceptions for religious ceremonies and such. In the past, different states have had lower drinking ages (as low as 18).
Regardless of the law, enforcement tends to be lax, and alcohol use is common among minors, especially on or near college campuses. There are arguments that lowering the drinking age would reduce binge drinking and drunk driving, as adolescents would have a chance to become familiar with alcohol and its effects under more controlled circumstances.
In any case, I seriously doubt that movies have any effect on underage consumption of alcohol.
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Leo Enticknap
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-16-2015 01:59 PM
quote: Stephen Furley Martin, the BBFC is not government; it is an independent organisation. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it used to be the case that the licensing authority had the final say.
It still is, as far as movies shown in cinemas (defined as a business that shows films to customers on its premises in exchange for money): the legal framework put in place by the 1909 Cinematograph Act is still in force.
However, the waters are muddied by the Video Recordings Act 1984, under which the BBFC is designated as the official classifying body. So as far as rating DVDs, BDs, games and that sort of stuff is concerned (AFAIK the 1984 Act only applies to offline media, and online streamed stuff is not subject to any direct regulation as yet, though I could be wrong on that point), the BBFC is effectively acting as a government agency, in that its decisions carry legal force. If you sell a DVD of I Spit on Your Grave to a 10-year old, you can be sent to jail. If you sell that same 10-year old a ticket to see it in your cinema, the worst that can happen is that you lose your cinema licence.
Returning to the topic, agreed completely with everyone else that this "study" is a pile of shite. To add to all the other arguments against it already here, the depiction of smoking has effectively been banned from mainstream movies and TV dramas for 10-15 years now (except in films set in the past and/or by villains).
But has smoking in the general population diminished during this period? My understanding is that in the developed world, it's held steady at around 20-25% of the population smoking tobacco regularly. We're now down to the hard core, everyone who is going to buy the propaganda has already bought it, and the only way you're going to decrease smoking even further now is by prohibition, which would bring its own problems. Though as a side note, a doctor friend of mine recently mentioned some research done recently, which argued that far from being a failure, prohibition (of alcohol in the 1920s) was actually a huge success in terms of public health, with reductions in alcohol-related diseases (both acute, e.g. accidents, and chronic, e.g. liver disease) contributing far more to the economy than organized crime sucked out of it. So maybe wackos such as Carrie Nation (who IMHO is sorely overdue to have a big movie made about her) and her ilk weren't so wacko after all...
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