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When I saw the 1975 movie Nashville, in which a female country singer is shot while performing and bleeds all over her white dress, I felt a chill. This type of thing had not happened in America before. Assassinations had been attempted or succeeded against political targets, not entertainers. The movie pre-dated the assassination of John Lennon in 1980. The director of Nashville, Robert Altman, was questioned by the Washington Post as to whether his film had sparked a copycat killing. He denied all responsibility.

There are some scenes that are "thought porn", and should not be allowed out without an X-rating. Since WW2, Hollywood has been on a spree of pushing increasingly degraded or horrific scenes and fighting for the G, PG and PG-13 ratings that would guarantee the widest audiences.

I felt the same way in 1963 about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, in which hundreds of thousands of 1963 dollars' worth of cars and properties were crashed and wrecked onscreen, a first-of-its-kind that has been widely copied since; and also about the 1996 film Independence Day, the first I recall that featured graphically realistic coordinated destruction of New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC—pre-dating 9/11.

Some things cannot be unseen. Altman claimed the moral high ground by suggesting that his vision should have been taken as a warning. I think that's crap.

In the midst of the current free-speech debates, the idea of film censorship is bound to seem particularly antiquated. I do not think that a ratings system is quite the same as censorship, however. I view it more as consumer protection. What is lost in today's society is the idea that we must all agree on some limits for the protection of society itself. That would include our military defense and police as well as the minds of our citizenry and resident aliens, and particularly children.