Why bleep?

Okiedoke wonders why people would use a service like Clean Flicks to edit the bad stuff out of the movies they rent for home viewing:

A company called CleanFlicks is taking movies and editing out all graphic violence, nudity, profanity, and sexual content.

What I don’t get is why folks who are offended by immorality in certain movies want to rent those movies in the first place.

I think I can offer an example. Last night, my wife and I went to see "The Terminal", which stars Tom Hanks as an eastern European tourist who gets stuck for nine months in the international lounge at Kennedy Airport because of a coup in his home country and an inflexible bureaucrat here. It was the kind of movie my wife and I seem to gravitate toward -- a quiet little movie about a fish out of water, and the comedy inherent in cross-cultural encounters. Afterwards we both agreed it was a great choice.

Thinking back on the movie, it occurred to me that there were only two reasons to rate the film PG-13. The flight attendant, played by Catherine Zeta Jones, talks about her long-term affair with a married man (art imitates life!); you don't see anything untoward on screen, but I guess that would count as an adult theme. She also makes use of some barnyard epithets which aren't integral to the plot -- you could have easily substituted minced oaths without losing anything. It was pretty close to being a film the whole family could enjoy together, but I certainly don't want to expose my kids to bad language anymore than necessary. I don't want them growing up thinking this is the way grownups normally speak to one another.

I sometimes think they throw in a little garbage to prevent a film from being rated G, for fear of losing at the box office. I give David Lynch, of all directors, credit for letting "The Straight Story" (another film we enjoyed) keep its G rating, and not dirtying it up to get the PG.

That's the point of CleanFlicks: There are movies that come pretty close in their original form to being something that the whole family could enjoy together, and with a little editing they are. It would be better if modern filmmakers learned to exercise the kind of creativity that their predecessors of 50 years ago did -- getting the point across without resorting to foul language and gratuitous sex and violence.