F-BOMBS ARE BLOWING US UP
F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-word, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb, F-bomb. They drop casually in movies, relentlessly and effortlessly, disappearing like soiled raindrops in the vast ocean of American vulgarity.
Had enough?
It’s tiresome, pointless, distracting, guttural, and detracts from the enjoyment of the show.
Media critic, talk show host, and Substack writer, Michael Medved, writing in Hollywood vs. America, reported on a 1989 poll that found a whopping 80 percent of the public believes there is “too much” profanity in films. The Entertainment Research Group noted that the 1990 film, Goodfellas, used the F-word 246 times. It had a major obscenity once every 32.2 seconds.
We rented Glengarry Glen Ross, a flick starring Jack Lemon, about real estate agents under pressure to make sales. They used the F-word seemingly hundreds of times. It was an echo chamber of F – you, F-this, F-that, F- everything. Here an F, there an F, everywhere an F F. It was so pervasive and distracting that we could not enjoy the film.
In a recent (2023) multi-episode science fiction series, Earth sends a delegation of around seven people far out in the galaxy to contact aliens for the first time. Who do they send? Well-seasoned professionals? The best, the brightest, the bravest? Nope. They send twenty and thirty-somethings who drop their favorite word all over the spaceship, destroying the crew’s credibility. I’m guessing that after the aliens meet Earth’s best, they will warn the rest of the galaxy to steer clear of the third planet.
Defenders of profanity argue that people talk that way, so why not put it in the film? True enough, but would watching people on the big silver screen coughing, scratching, stammering, stumbling, sneezing, snoozing and picking their noses, enhance the film? Besides, swearing in films serves as a model for kids to emulate.
Does profanity improve movies? Does it make them more interesting, dramatic, profound, meaningful or entertaining? Medved quotes literary agent Richard Pine who said, “Nobody ever walked out of a movie and said, ‘Gee, that was a great picture, but the only problem is they didn’t say F--- enough.’ Who thinks like that?”
Hollywood thinks like that. Would Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, Casablanca, or From Here to Eternity, have been better films with “realistic” language?
Medved’s most telling point is that R-rated films, with their sex, violence, nudity, profanity and gore, do not make as much money as G and PG flicks. In the 1980s, for example, only 25 percent of all titles were PG, yet six of the top ten films of the decade were PG. Of the twenty biggest grossing films of the eighties, 55 percent were rated G or PG, while only 25 percent were rated R.
Looking at the 221 films released in 1991, industry consultant Robert D. Cain concluded, “…R-rated films generate substantially less revenue, return less profit, and are more likely to ‘flop’ than films aimed at teen and family audiences.” Moviegoers have responded to films in general by staying home.
In spite of our growing population, movie attendance had declined precipitously. Between 1953 and 1965, an average of 40 to 49 million people went to the movies every week. When R-rated films began increasing in the mid-sixties, attendance plummeted to 17.5 million per week, and has stayed around that figure to the present. (Note - home videos and cable were still more than a decade away when the decline started. Streaming has transformed the industry, making it difficult to measure.)
Why does Hollywood persist in wrapping its films in profane packages in spite of their lower profit margins? It’s hard to say. Maybe they like shocking audiences, maybe it’s arrogance. I’ve got the power, I own the studio, I’m a big star, I can do what want. I can force you to watch, and I enjoy making you cringe.
When people call for limits, film makers shrug and invoke the First Amendment; they gasp in horror at the specter of censorship. Well, 80 percent of us have been gasping in horror at the big screen.
And we’ve been staying away in droves.
Update – This piece was published in the Pacific Stars & Stripes thirty years ago. I added a couple of recent examples. Nothing has changed, except perhaps, an increase in numbers. Movies released in 1985, had 500 F- words. Movies released in 2023 had 22,177. Movie Ratings And Content: Judging Profanity In Film | Kmburtt (patheos.com)
My nine-year-old granddaughter told me yesterday that the kids in her charter school “curse all the time. They drop F-Bombs.” She added, “sometimes when I hurt myself, the bad words come out of my mouth, without me even thinking about it.”
I laughed and confessed, “I do that too, Louisia. When Grandpa’s computer isn’t working right, he sometimes uses bad words and wants to throw it out the window.”
The coarsening of culture is one more sign of The Crisis Train hurtling toward the cliff.
Next stop, the Roman Empire’s illegal alien problem.