My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, “R” movies weren’t automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks — well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies — would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I’d already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one’s bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what’s now euphemistically called “intense content” by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out — I was around nine, as I recall — but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine… well, I probably would’ve had nightmares for years.)
Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn’t get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn’t be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny’s hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother’s wishes — i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of “getting in trouble” — I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would’ve. If Mom didn’t think I ought to see something, I didn’t see it. And that’s how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky’s.
