High-flying movies and kids

CHAPEL HILL -- While "This Film Not Yet Rated" explores the mysterious underbelly of the Motion Picture Association system for rating movies, I want to know who's rating the films we see on the airlines.

For instance, is it legal -- never mind the right thing to do -- to show a PG-13 movie to a 3-year-old held captive on a cross-country flight? On a recent Delta flight, Helen and I had to shield our children (ages 3 and 1) from watching "King Kong" when the movie screen dropped from the overhead bin just in front of their eyes.

In addition to a monster of a gorilla who destroyed buildings, cars, elevated trains and tossed human beings aside like used Kleenex, the latest King Kong incarnation included frightening zombies, gunfights, fistfights, SUV-sized insects which attacked people in the dark and my personal favorite -- the spiked club which someone uses to (nearly) impale a human being in the face.

Helen and I got lucky. Our kids slept through the film. But had they been awake, tell me how to stop my kids from watching these gruesome images.

And after you tell me that, you can tell me how to get my 3-year-old to share his toys with his little sister.

Recently I was on a US Air flight that entertained us with a showing of "Mission Impossible III." Forget the explosions, of which there are many, let's talk about the men and women duct-taped and tortured, the one man nearly dropped to his death (intentionally) out of an airplane, the rather disturbing sequence in which Tom Cruise is chained and muzzled like Hannibal Lector, or another scene in which he electrocutes himself and yet another scene which he runs off the edge of a building. That last one in particular is fun to watch. But try explaining to my 3-year-old that these are things he shouldn't try at home.

Fortunately, my kids weren't with me on this flight.

While Helen and I are comfortable watching our kids explore their physical boundaries, climbing and jumping off increasingly taller objects and occasionally hurting themselves, part of our role as parents is to protect them from seeing gratuitous violence, never mind understanding that disturbing violence exists at all, until they're old enough to process it properly.

The MPA is a nonprofit organization that rates films and is funded by movie theaters. Movie theaters then enforce the voluntary MPA guidelines, I suspect as a way to avoid government regulation and perhaps, ultimately, litigation. I asked an MPA spokeswoman if their guidelines extend to airlines.

"Absolutely not," she said. MPA and the airlines have no relationship whatsoever. I asked if it was appropriate to show "King Kong" or "MI3" to 3-year-olds. "It's all in the edit," she said. When I described the scenes I'd watched on my last two flights, the spokeswoman drew an audible breath. "That's not appropriate," she said.

I've contacted several airlines and have yet to understand how they decide what they're going to air on a pop-down screen (individual screens, obviously, are another matter entirely).

How odd that despite all our best efforts to shield our kids, the violent imagery to which Americans have grown so accustomed has finally found a way to reach our children -- by throwing it in their faces when they're held captive on an airplane. The next time I'm on a flight and these images are thrust in my kids' faces, I'll ask the flight attendant to change the film. I doubt I'll get far.

Perhaps a lawyer wants to make a class action case out of PG-13 images thrust in the face of kids younger than 13. Or perhaps in this election cycle full of war and scandal, a politician will raise the threat of government regulation to save our kids. My hope is that America's airlines will pull the violence from their in-flights all on their own.

(Jesse Kalisher is a commentator for public radio and author of the new book of photographs, "If You Find the Buddha.")