Counting Curses and Blunt-Force Injuries

As befits these times, the strangest job in Hollywood now involves sitting in the back of a movie theater with a light-up pen and a clipboard, categorizing every curse, sexual act and moment of violence. It’s like being the anti-Pee-wee Herman.

Every Friday afternoon, employees of PSV Ratings go to the first showings at the Mann and AMC theaters on the Third Street Promenade and record every moment that potentially could be worrisome for a parent. After the data capturer finishes, he goes to the lobby, cleans up his notes and hands them to a data validator, who catches the second showing of “The Pacifier.” Duck bites, by the way, go under the category of “Injury & Abuse: Physical Injuries: Screaming in Pain.” Though I have to wonder if that last part was just describing the audience reaction to Vin Diesel.

David Kinney, the president and chief executive of PSV Ratings, is not a religious man, isn’t extremely conservative and doesn’t have kids. He just thought this would make a good business. He owned a small DVD review magazine and got the idea for an objective, quantifiable ratings system while watching, for reasons I could not get out of him, the 1996 congressional hearings on TV ratings.

Kinney says he and his investors have spent $7 million since 1998 collecting data on movies and video games. Now they hope to sell this information to parents, either directly or through outlets such as Amazon.com and Yahoo.

Based on the data he gathers and rules created by a board of children’s educators and psychologists, PSV assigns each movie a green, yellow or red light for profanity, sex and violence. It also records data on smoking, product placement and political messages. “We hope to one day sell this information to China, and they care about that,” Kinney said.

Each moment of sexual activity is time-stamped to the second. “Maybe that’s the only part you’re interested in, so you can fast-forward to that part of the movie,” Kinney said. It is the first time I considered renting “Catwoman.”

Though the 63 full-time employees in Brentwood have been punching in hundreds of codes for illicit behavior for years, the data have only been made available -- at psvratings.com for $20 a year -- for the last few weeks. Kinney hopes parents will use it to make more personal, nuanced decisions than they can by blindly trusting the MPAA ratings. Some parents, for instance, might not like the f-word, but they might be fine with man-on-anthropomorphic-creature-blunt-force-injury-causing-unconsciou sness.

Since the release of a DVD means a brand new, even more detailed, second-level review, I sat down on Tuesday with data capturer and aspiring screenwriter Aaron Lyles to find out just what was objectionable about “The Incredibles.” Besides the fact that it revived the career of Craig T. Nelson.

It didn’t take long. Two minutes and 15 seconds in -- and that’s including titles -- we witnessed acts of “evading authority,” “threat of gunshot injuries” and “driving recklessly.” It got worse. There was a “cutting injury with scraped skin,” four “Gods,” one “darn” and a “touching buttocks playfully.” It’s a pretty exciting movie when you break it down like that.

The strangest thing about the kid-drawing-decorated office is that the hallway talk is filthier than a “Friends” writers’ room. Common work questions not only involve words that only drunk British men and “Deadwood” characters use, but how to categorize the moment in “Jackass” when a Matchbox car is put to inappropriate anatomical use. Not even 25 million rule combinations can keep up with the creative mind of Steve-O.

There’s no doubt that these ratings will provide information that parents desperately want. But with satellite radio, digital cable and the Internet, you’re an idiot to believe you have any control over the information your kids are getting. To combat that feeling of helplessness, we’ve convinced ourselves that we can quantify morality. We think that if we can identify concrete, quantifiable events that poison the soul, and then block them, we can prevent the overall corrupting influence of society. This leads us to insanely literal-minded interpretations of morality. Unable to stop a child from seeing T&A; without a permanent blindfold, we redefine an exposed breast as a nipple and buttocks as the crack a thong covers. E! has entire shows based on this loophole.

So we have insane rules that permit horrific behavior as long as specific details are avoided. Howard Stern can say “f this” all day as long as he doesn’t say the whole word. MTV has videos in which they bleep out the word “pot.” We freak out about Janet Jackson’s nipple but not the fact that Justin Timberlake was simulating sexual assault. Are the 23 “f-words” in “Gunner Palace,” the Iraq war documentary, as harmful as the 20 in “Seed of Chucky”? Or any of the words in “Seed of Chucky”?

As unpleasant as it may be to let go of the fantasy of childhood innocence, isn’t it more important to teach kids how to contextualize reality than to try to shield them from it? And even if I’m wrong, at least it’s easier.