"They are always very lax about putting restrictions on violence for children's movies, which I think is much more harrowing than sexuality for children"
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Kaufman’s line lands like a quiet indictment of the American ratings system: we treat bullets as wholesome spectacle and bodies as a scandal. Coming from a director who’s spent a career navigating studio anxieties, it reads less like a hot take and more like field notes from inside the machine. The word “lax” is doing real work here. It suggests not just tolerance but negligence, an institutional shrug that lets violence slide because it’s culturally legible as “action,” even when it’s designed to jolt and excite.
His provocation hinges on “harrowing,” a term you rarely see applied to the sanitized mayhem of family entertainment. Kaufman is pointing at the emotional reality behind the choreography: violence, even cartooned, teaches fear, dominance, and the logic of consequence-free harm. Sexuality, by contrast, gets treated as inherently corrupting, despite being a domain where context, consent, and self-understanding can be taught with care. The subtext is about what adults are protecting children from: not trauma, but discomfort; not harm, but embarrassment.
The context is a long-running moral bargain in mainstream cinema, especially in the U.S., where ratings and advertisers reward bloodless carnage while punishing anything that hints at desire. Kaufman isn’t arguing for more explicit content as much as calling out the hypocrisy of our cultural gatekeepers: we police pleasure and normalize aggression, then act surprised at what sticks.
His provocation hinges on “harrowing,” a term you rarely see applied to the sanitized mayhem of family entertainment. Kaufman is pointing at the emotional reality behind the choreography: violence, even cartooned, teaches fear, dominance, and the logic of consequence-free harm. Sexuality, by contrast, gets treated as inherently corrupting, despite being a domain where context, consent, and self-understanding can be taught with care. The subtext is about what adults are protecting children from: not trauma, but discomfort; not harm, but embarrassment.
The context is a long-running moral bargain in mainstream cinema, especially in the U.S., where ratings and advertisers reward bloodless carnage while punishing anything that hints at desire. Kaufman isn’t arguing for more explicit content as much as calling out the hypocrisy of our cultural gatekeepers: we police pleasure and normalize aggression, then act surprised at what sticks.
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| Topic | Movie |
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