Cloak & Dagger and Cinema’s Parental Leave from the PG Rating

As a latchkey kid, I never wished for an imaginary friend nor my own thrilling adventures to embark upon. Instead I had an ever present desire to be grown up. I wanted to stay up late, drink all the sodas, eat all the candy, and watch all the R-rated movies my mom didn’t want me to see. 

As someone who lives in one of the proverbial villages it takes to raise the next generation, I realize no matter the upbringing, we all have a burning desire to walk before we crawl, tell stories before we know structure, and be recognized as individuals capable of choice and understanding. Somebody saying “you’re too young” or “you wouldn’t get it” is the ultimate challenge to a kid seeking to understand the world—and that’s where child-empowerment in cinema comes into play.

A few months back, while watching a 12-year-old Henry Thomas kill a grown man on screen in 1984’s Cloak & Dagger, I found myself asking: Have kids films quietly been saying those things to my generation and all that follow? Why are contemporary PG movies injected with so many telegraphed story beats, padded perils, and muted conflicts? It has something to do with the introduction of the PG-13 rating, and I think Cloak & Dagger is a key to exposing the invisible impact.

In 1984, the release of Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom resulted in a parental outrage so immense the MPA’s existing ratings structure experienced a rapid revision. Both films contained dark content, but were assumed kid-friendly due to their PG rating. In reality, the PG of 1984 was a bucket for anything that wasn’t explicitly sexual or hyper violent, but also not fully wholesome for family viewing. Spaceballs, Jaws, and Logan’s Run are excellent examples of films rated PG that include adults doing adult things in adult situations that might shock, confuse, or scare children. The MPA made a critical decision to introduce a scapegoat category for future films of a similar nature.Thus PG-13 emerged on July 1 of 1984, 13 days before Cloak & Dagger hit theaters.

With the introduction of this new category, a shift in the content and character of PG films was unavoidable. Cloak & Dagger, alongside The Neverending Story, were unknowingly harbingers of their PG generation’s end. Over the next decade, formerly PG elements would be carved out into the new, protected space of PG-13, an excellent landing pad for exploitative and titillating semi-mature content. 

Now, if you take a sample of popular 1984 PG films against a 1994 set—let’s call it neo PG—you’ll notice a natural trend toward softer elements of mature struggle, with 1994 PG-13 films capturing the adult elements of 1984’s PG. With films like Blank Check, Getting Even with Dad, and Trading Mom, there’s a more noticeable consumerist, Disneyfied formula that can be observed from the posters and plots. Smug smirks, cool shades, and stories centered around kids in control, each build a demonstrable case toward PG-13’s impact on child-empowerment films.

Let’s stack Blank Check (1994) against Cloak & Dagger (1984) to drill deeper into this divergence. In Blank Check a mobster accidentally gives a blank check to kid con-artist Preston Waters. Preston cashes in for beaucoup bucks, then spends the ill-gotten fortune on an unsustainable upper-class lifestyle, and is eventually knocked back to boring suburban life. In Cloak & Dagger a latchkey kid stumbles onto a conspiracy around an Atari game cartridge, is forced to fend for himself, thwarts adult spies, and mends his relationship with his father along the way—and will never be the same.

Blank Check speaks to a kid’s desire to wield unlimited wealth in a safe environment, to comfortably satisfy personal desires and assert autonomy without repercussions beyond a smack on the wrist. Why was this kind of neo-PG fairytale popular 10 years after the introduction of PG-13? Campy youth-rebellion is a safe, palatably amusing absurdity. Consumerism is second nature in a capitalist system. And there’s no way a kid version of Scarface could retain a PG rating, so sandbox theatrics and a wholesome ending makes for easier family friendly labeling.

Cloak & Dagger stands in contrast, telling the story of a kid who yearns to have importance in an isolating home environment, and he’s ultimately given more than “just some kid” should be able to handle. What is the appeal in rendering this kind of story at this point in time? Latchkey kids were a major demographic of middle-class America in the 1980s. This demographic wanted to be seen as capable, and a film that saw them is one that represented them as such—it’s also a film where their parents are reminded of that capability. 

Both films are rated PG. Both speak to the cultural norms of the times. One speaks frankly to a maturing generation yearning to be seen, the other whispers sweet infantilizing nothings to a generation of trained consumers. The contemporary data-driven decisions of Hollywood continue to carry the torch for neo-PG’s most patronizing elements. They sap the art, soul, and life from a feature before it can truly engage curious young minds. 

PG-13 changed PG, to the point where the cinematic films released for kids now fail to challenge them or dip their toe into the reality waiting outside of their household. PG-13 has made parental guidance easier by setting up a firm barrier between the dark and light elements of fiction, even empowering parents to hinder their child’s relationship within the art form until a hardline age. 

When a parent makes a decision to show a film to their child, they’re implicitly making the decision to take on conversations around complex topics. Why throw on something from Illumination Studios when it’s going to teach your kid “Minions are funny. You love Minions. You want to buy Minions”? Put something on with spice and edge, something with stakes capable of stimulating emotional growth. I’m not a parent, and you’re free to use that to disqualify me, but I know that I would’ve preferred that my parents guide me through the simulated shock, confusion, and trauma of cinema, rather than leave me to exclusively watch clamshell, straight-to-video movies about dogs learning to play basketball.