Relishing the expletive

If you hold up your middle finger, and hold the two adjacent fingers at half-mast, it means the same thing as "Fuck You!" because it vaguely resembles a penis and two balls. And in this way, an ordinary hand becomes something obscene. And maybe this tiny gesture then begs the question (or doesn't, depending) as to how four letters, in the sequence F-U-C-K, became something similarly obscene. And so, armed with this very question, so set out the makers of a little documentary called F*CK.

And while this documentary seems well-intentioned, I suppose I liked it more because it left me thinking about all the things it didn't cover adequately than because it's really that last word on the curse word. Among moments of note, though, were Pat Boone offering a deeply insightful (read: racist) analysis of so-called foul language in hip-hop culture and some conservative talking head (I can't remember his name) claiming that artists produce BETTER art when stringent social rules are imposed upon them (i.e., by rule-imposers like the FCC, the Nazis... you know, all those prescient, halo-wearing political entities so well-known for spreading the good news of innovation and broken ground amongst the creatively inclined). Those two had me standing on my sofa, shouting "WHAT???!!!" Oh, and there was a creepy thin-lipped woman, with eyebrows to match, claiming that it's so much more fun to do it than to say it, so then, why say it at all? Curious logic, methinks... me also thinks thinking about her doing it is icky. Let me dramatize what a conversation between me and this woman might sound like (here I take a page from Damon who likes to blog in script form sometimes):

A play in 9 lines

Dramatis personae:
Marjorie (to be played by Little Orphan Annie wearing a leather corset, fetish boots and bearing a riding crop in her left hand)
Creepy Thin-Lipped Lady (to be played by a pterodactyl with an Aqua-Netted bob)


Marjorie: So, I gather you think the f-word is uncouth.

Lady: Yeah.

Marjorie: Do go on.

Lady: If the f-word denotes sexual congress, wouldn't you say it's a lot more fun to do it than to say it?

Marjorie: Sure.

Lady: So then why say it at all?

Marjorie: (sarcastically) Uuuummmmm.... because we like to use these things called words to describe our world and our actions? Because we humanfolk like to name things? Didn't god tell us that was one of our jobs way back in Genesis?

Lady: But why does it have to be such a bad word?

Marjorie: Uh, lady? You're the one who named it "bad," not me. See what I'm saying about the naming thing? Dammit. Can you quit flapping those skin-wing things around so much? It's distracting. (Marjorie flails riding crop at the pterodactyl)

Curtain



So that was fun. Anyway, some of the issues that are really at the heart of the matter of why the f-bomb is, indeed, incendiary were really glossed over in this film. Por ejemplo, Drew Carey briefly mentions the fact that part of why the f-word is taboo at all is because it was part of the diction of a lower class and therefore not acceptable vocabulary for anyone who aimed to keep his/her nose pointing way too high to catch even a whiff of the masses. But it's an ever so brief off-hand comment... and I really think this relativity between class strata is pretty central to the issue.

Beyond that, the trajectory of this movie barely glanced off the idea that the word "fuck" is only deemed obscene on arbitrary contrivances. In fact, it was one of the stuffed-shirt Republicans who even used the word "arbitrary," but he did not seem to possess the critical tools to adequately discuss the sign-signifier relationship. But after all, that is what's at stake, right? I mean the combination of the four letters F, U, C, and K is not inherently prurient. The aural effect of pronouncing them together isn't either. This is really already an overly hashed-out argument of semiotics, here, but really... I just find it so baffling that so many folks, both historically (the movie talks a lot about Lenny Bruce going to jail for "word crimes") and presently, get so up in arms about a dinky little WORD!!! And one to which we are all complicit in ascribing its meaning!

Now, don't get me wrong. A person such as myself, who trades in the currency of language, would be foolish to denounce the notion that words have power. But I'd also be foolish if I didn't acknowledge the fact that something as temporal as a word would be useless if we all didn't agree to imbue it with such power... thus shifting the onus of meaning from the speaker to the listener, right?

And I guess there's not really much room in a pop-culture documentary to discuss why it's okay to talk to our doctors about our vaginae (spell-check tells me this is the proper way to pluralize this word. Who knew?) and penises but not our cunts and cocks (oh, Connotation, oh what a heavy burden you bear!). But it is a movie that tries to provide an accessible in-road into the world of socio-linguistic semantics and that's kinda noble, I guess. True, it suckers us (me) in via use of a blatant appeal to the titillation sensors in our (my) brains-- I mean, you can't really say the word "fuck" without having ears perk, for an assortment of different reasons (all cursorily covered in the movie)-- but you gotta capture attention while the sun shines, right? After all, one of the repeated heedings uttered in the movie is that we're just all too inured to profanity these days. I mean, following that argument, the word "coitus" is gonna fall right out of the OED and the only word we'll ever need to know will be endless iterations of fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... fuck...fuck.


Damn. That's kinda sexy.