Why Children Are Not Recommended, And Teenagers Should Not Be Taken To Films With A Rating Of 18+ (for Example, "Kingsman: The Secret Service")

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In February 2015, the film "Kingsman: The Secret Service" was released on Russian screens. I watched it in a full auditorium, noting the large number of couples who came to the session with children and teens, despite the 18+ rating, which implies that the film may contain episodes of extreme violence, profanity and explicit sex scenes. I will say right away that I liked the film: it featured excellent actors, including a couple of stars, it skillfully combined American and English mass aesthetics, stylized as a classic spy thriller and the use of the latest technologies, black humor, a couple of greasy jokes and many, many scenes comedic ultraviolence, filmed in the style of Tarantino

All this will be highly appreciated by an adult - a lover of this genre. But let's look at this film through the eyes of children and adolescents.

By children at the moment, I mean the age group of boys and girls from 6 (there seems to be no less) brought into the hall, and up to 9 years old, of whom there were many in the hall, and by adolescents - the age group from 9 to 18 years old, including such way, pre- and post-pubertal periods.

A child up to about 9 years old is a carrier of mythological thinking, which means that in fact everything that he sees on the screen, everything he reads about in fairy tales and fiction, without encountering the described events in his own life, he perceives as a kind of parallel reality, that is, completely indifferently, unconsciously integrating only common images (archetypes) of good and evil, man and woman, father and mother, and so on.

At the same time, the child does not take seriously what is not included in the circle of his everyday life. The child does not let what he sees through himself, does not keep the plots and images of the heroes in his memory for a long time, although, of course, scenes with noise, explosions, turmoil, shooting will attract his attention, but only what he encounters in his everyday reality can fully attract the attention of his mind. So, for example, in the scene when the hero drives up to the pub in a black London taxi cab, the child sitting in the back happily exclaimed - "We drove such a typewriter!" Scenes of violence, of course, can unhealthily arouse his fantasy, and for several days the child will quite possibly imitate the themes of the film in his games, copying them, but the sight of blood, entrails and severed limbs will not be perceived by him as something real, and therefore dangerous for him personally …

The child will not understand the fact of repeated violation of social taboos (not to fight, not to steal, not to swear, not to kill), just as he did not realize the whole horror of the plot of the fairy tale he reads like "Hansel and Gretel", where the girl Gretel is shoving a witch into the stove, or fairy tales about Vasilisa, who brought from Baba Yaga a talking glowing talking skull, burning in the finale all her unkind relatives, or fairy tales about a tsar who, in pursuit of youth, was boiled in boiling water at the instigation of a young beauty. Such films can be imprinted in vivid shots in his memory, flickering later in disturbing dreams, most likely the child will leave the cinema in an overexcited state, ask questions, sleep poorly at night, but in fact, the film will not cause serious damage to his psyche, unless the child faced real violence in his life that will cause him to relive the traumatic experience again. Just in case, I will clarify that we are talking about films like this, the above does not apply to thrillers and horror films, where the images of evil are most often represented by mythological images, respectively, have a deep influence and can seriously scare or even traumatize the psyche of a child.

But a teenager will take everything that happens on the screen much more seriously. The child's thinking is gradually transformed and in the interval from prepubertal (from 9 years old) to postpubertal (up to 18 years old), it no longer acquires a mythological, but a social character. For a teenager, this is the time for the active formation of a personal moral and ethical complex.

At the same time, the intra-family influence on him is seriously reduced: the teenager ceases to see in the parents people who open his eyes to the world, teach and protect him, their educational value decreases, and the main source of knowledge about the world and about the norms of behavior in this world becomes the surrounding its reality, be it real life, or a movie, or a computer game. Simply put, the difference between the real world and the on-screen one for a teenager is minimal! The teenager unconsciously sees in everything the schemes of existence in society and unconsciously integrates these schemes. This is how he learns. At the same time, when watching films with fights and shooting, the adrenaline level usually rises in a teenager, respectively, he becomes more receptive to information going to the screen, more suggestible, prone to unconscious copying.

What for an adult is black humor, for a teenager it is propaganda of violence. His memory works in recording mode, his psyche, like a sponge, absorbs everything that concerns adult life without any critical thought, his ethical boundaries, due to the peculiarities of his age, are as labile as possible, therefore, from the movie "Kingsman: The Secret Service" he may well draw the following conclusions: Fights, murders and other violence are good, easy and healthy (which is confirmed by the noisy approval of adults in the audience, because on these scenes they laugh), and human life is worthless.

In a brilliant genre scene in a church at the speed of light, a huge number of ways and tools to hurt and kill a person are demonstrated - and all this is accompanied by a seemingly appropriate laughter of adults. A violent death in this film is generally very joyful: fireworks from exploding heads and an impressive scene in a church for an adult are strong elements of black comedy, but for a teenager it is a direct devaluation of human life. Nobody says that after watching one or two such films, a teenager will go to implement a similar scenario in life, but another one will be added to the set of behavioral patterns in his mind. senseless violence = fun ”And who knows how, when and in what form it can be performed.

If desired, you can see in that film something seemingly instructive for a teenager: the hero of Colin Firth is quite a classic English gentleman and in a scene in a pub, for example, he did not provoke a conflict, trying to resolve it peacefully, and then said a wonderful phrase: “Manners - the face of a man ", before starting to effectively" wet "the hooligans, but what happens to this hero afterwards? He dies, quickly and ingloriously from the bullet of the main villain, and his pupil - on the contrary, impudent, nimble, criminal - survives, achieves success and even receives an award … the princess's ass in the literal sense. Yes, an adult will see in this situation a reason to troll the theme of the classic final kiss of a secret agent who saved the world and a gorgeous blonde, but, for example, a 15-year-old teenager, again, will see in this the norm of intersexual behavior, which he unconsciously integrates: it is anal sex that is the best what can be obtained from a girl is the highest sign of her disposition.

Are you sure you want to put such thoughts in your child's head? Many parents frivolously think - “oh, yes, he / she is already big for me”, buying a ticket for such a movie or simply do not pay attention to the age rating, but do not even suspect how the teenager's thinking works. Films like Kingsman: The Secret Service are now being made quite frequently (Quentin Tarantino, Coen Brothers, John S. Baird, Robert Rodriguez, and others). Their humor and plot twists and turns are based on an inverted morality and constant violation of taboos - this is a very specific genre, the message of which is available only to mature personalities, which cannot be attributed to adolescents, who in the films they watch often see a direct guide to action.

Irina Janssen, analytical psychologist.

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