Wrong Channel recently did a substack on played-out words and I would like to nominate (and abominate) the f-bomb and its various forms in fiction and on TV. Why? Because it’s grossly over-used.
The problem is so endemic that my writer spouse will jokingly note after we’ve watched a show or movie, “Isn’t it amazing? They haven’t used ‘fuck’ as a crutch.”*
When I was the crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press, I remember being disappointed reading the second book in a mystery series whose debut won a major award. I struggled not to give up despite different many forms of “fuck” that were carpet-bombed on page after page.
It was hard for me to concentrate on the story itself because the noise those words made was like one of those thunderstorms that doesn’t just shake your whole house but hits you with a migraine too.
What made it worse was that the voice of the book had changed completely from the previous entry in the series, so much so that it could have been written by someone else entirely. Maybe it was. I have a friend who’s a ghost writer and he’s often been called in to help writers meet a deadline. This book was a sophomore effort and the author might have felt under too much pressure to do a solid follow-up.
To be clear: I have nothing against obscenity and cursing on screen, in fiction or nonfiction. I used to tell my anxious creative writing students at Michigan State University that they should use obscenity when it fit. Fit the character and fit the moment. But if they overused “fuck” and various declensions of the word, eventually readers might tune out. It could become a kind of fog and not reveal very much about the character or advance the story.
I recently tried watching We Were the Lucky Ones. As the son of Holocaust survivors who’s widely recognized as an American pioneer in writing fiction and creative nonfiction about survivors and their children, I’ve been reading Holocaust memoirs, histories, and novels for decades. I’ve also read just as many books about Nazi Germany and W.W. II and the concentration and extermination camps across Germany and Poland.
About a half hour in, a young woman shouts “Fuck!” and I gave up. Here’s why: I found it both unbelievable and anachronistic, the result of lazy writing and a tin ear. It sounded both too contemporary and unbelievable for this particular woman. My Polish-Jewish mother used to regale me with a litany of Polish curses because she found them so amusing, so the writers had many choices. They went with the easy one and I’ve seen shows set in many different historical periods that follow the same tiresome path of least resistance.
I enjoyed the new Shogun because of its deep look at 17th century Japanese culture, even though Cosmo Jarvis is no Richard Chamberlain. But every time he or someone else dropped an F-bomb, it was disappointing. And I gave up on streaming Anybody But You because there were at least five versions of that word in the opening scenes and none of them seemed necessary.
The period series I plan to binge watch this month, Mary and George, has outstanding reviews, but even a reviewer raving about the show admitted that in one episode “nearly every sentence is interspersed with expletives—especially, it seems, ones that hadn’t yet been uttered by 1617.”
I made it through most of the Franklin miniseries despite Michael Douglas’s affectless performance that is on-screen quicksand, but stopped after Franklin’s grandson yelled “Fuck off!” following two other F-bombs. It was a glaring lack of wit amid French esprit that had been glowing like the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
P.S. 5/20/24: I’ll take a hard pass on Deadpool & Wolverine out in July based on 6 F-bombs in the short trailer. That doesn’t augur anything good.
Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery; has taught creative writing at Michigan State University; and now mentors, coaches, and edits writers at www.writewithoutborders.com.
Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
*I’ve chosen to spell it out, since **** or &%$@ or F——- or any substitute is still read as the word itself, so that feels like putting a transparent veil over it.
I agree with this...obscenities are verbal pollution. They only belong in extreme anger or when being used in a piece of fiction as part of the plot and character. A gangbanger in the Bronx would not say, "Gadzooks!"
I am so happy you wrote this. The lazy writing that results in the overuse of curses is mirrored in the business world, and it does such a disservice to language and to the curses themselves. There is a time and a place for everything but overuse of profanity diminishes its power, and that sadly devalues them in our lexicon.
There is a scene in Casablanca in which Rick calls Ilsa a whore but the writers make it far more powerful by describing the word rather than using it. The dialog reads:
"I heard a story once - as a matter of fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began.
[laughs]
Well, I guess neither one of our stories is very funny. Tell me, who was it you left me for? Was it Lazlo, or were there others in between or... aren't you the kind that tells?"
It cuts Ilsa to the core and leaves so much greater an impression on the audience.
By comparison, back in the late 1970's in the largely forgettable film 10, when Dudley Moore asks Bo Derek what she does when she puts Ravel's Bolero on the turntable, her reply ("Fuck") was the perfect use for the term, and it had the perfect combination of shock and titillation. Of course, now it is old hat while, at least to my ears, Casablanca's dialog remains eloquent, at least from my perspective.