Fuck

by Rufus Lodge

  Three F-Word Steps to Heaven

  There’s a chart on Wikipedia – look it up for yourselves – which lists the ‘Films that most frequently use the word “fuck”’. At the top is the documentary Fuck, which is probably cheating. In second place, with 625 usages in just ninety-six minutes, is the 2008 horror movie Gutterballs – the title of which is proof that sometimes the makers of a film simply can’t stop themselves from reviewing their own product.

  But simple statistics aren’t enough. Any fool can fill an hour and a half of motion picture with the F-word: what takes skill (as anyone who’s ever seen the BBC’s The Thick of It can confirm) is to create a memorable scene out of something as everyday as swearing. With that in mind, may we bring you … the Three Greatest F-Word Scenes in History.

  In third place, please welcome one of the most ambiguous matinee idols of all time, the romantic comedy star turned campaigner against the evils of the press: Hugh Grant. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) was the film that brought him to international fame. It opens with Grant where he is destined to end up, in bed; but this time he’s alone and late for a wedding. In a scene that is repeated through the movie like a leitmotif, Grant is stunned into wakefulness by his alarm clock, and utters a procession of F-words as he and Charlotte Coleman stumble towards the church. He breaks up the pattern of ‘fucks’ with an occasional ‘fuckity-fuck’ and even a ‘fuckadoodledoo’ for light relief. But, amusing though the scene is, it’s hard in retrospect to escape the feeling that screenwriter Richard Curtis is merely indulging in gratuitous use of the forbidden four letters to appear daring – a trick he has repeated, with progressively reduced impact, several times since. TV footnote: American television edits of this movie frequently replace ‘fuck’ with ‘bugger’ throughout. Somehow ‘buggity-bugger’ sounds ruder than ‘fuckity-fuck’.

  In second place, with a special award for concentrated profanity, it’s time to accompany Steve Martin, harassed beyond human endurance, to the airport car rental desk. There, in the solitary R-rated scene of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, he encounters clerk Edie McClurg, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and keeping her customers waiting by chatting on the phone with her folks. When she finally greets Martin in a voice that sounds like the world’s most annoying cat, he explodes into an epic fusillade of eighteen F-words in exactly a minute, only to be trumped by Ms McClurg. Once again, American TV viewers missed all of Martin’s expletives: in the censored version, McClurg simply tells him that he’s screwed. The fact that the scene is still funny is testament to the dramatic skills of both actors.

  And our winner … from the censor-free HBO television network, it’s a scene that not only exhibits the vast emotional range of the F-word, but also propels the action and shows off the arts of film editing and directing at their finest. I’m referring, of course, to the double-handed efforts of Dominic ‘McNulty’ West and Wendell ‘Bunk’ Pierce. In episode four of the first series of The Wire, two of Baltimore’s finest revisit an old crime scene. Once they’re inside the room where the victim died, they spend four minutes sizing up the location, uncovering lost evidence and revealing how the crime was committed, without uttering anything other than variations on the word ‘fuck’. As soon as they step outside again, normal (foul) language is resumed. Contrived? Of course. But the scene is constructed with such skill, and the plot advanced with such unnoticed ease, that the cavalcade of F-words is both cunningly paced and deliciously effective. As Bunk would say: moth-er-fuck-er.

  Our Special Guests This Week Are …

  Bands who will never appear on prime-time TV:

  Fuck

  Fuck Off

  The Fuck Ups

  Fuck Buttons

  The Fat Dukes of Fuck

  The Fuck Off and Dies

  Fuck the Blonde

  Head Fuck Terrorist

  Holy Fuck

  Filthy Fuck

  The Fuck You Man

  Fuck U All

  Exploding Fuck Dolls

  Seething Fuck Patties

  Fuck Him He’s a DJ

  Fuck You the Hobo Clown

  Fuck the Mainstream

  Suffocate for Fuck Sake

  Scum Fuck Chuck

  Nuclear Raped Fuck Bomb

  Prohibitions

  From Here to Fugging Eternity

  ‘When I start creating characters, I have to believe in their speech as it comes out,’ said the young novelist Norman Mailer when he was plugging his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The book had already been rejected by one major publisher on the grounds of obscenity – their esteemed literary advisor telling them, ‘I swear. My wife swears. In fact, my whole family swears. BUT …’ His inference was clear. It was one thing to swear in private; another to suggest that all those secret swearers, who kept up a discreet veil of decency in public, would want to read a book filled with the same language they used at home.

  Mailer had the opposite problem. His novel was set in the US Army during the Second World War, a scenario which was based on his personal experience. It captured with more realism than any previous book the atmosphere of life at war: the fear, the tedium, the divisions between officers and other ranks, and through it all the existential struggle to survive, as men and as human beings. And to tell that tale with any kind of veracity, Mailer needed his characters not only to act like soldiers, but to speak like them as well.

  That’s the artistic excuse for bad language in the movies, on TV, in hip-hop records: you can’t show the truth without telling the truth. There are exceptions, of course. The two bizarre traits displayed by every single character in EastEnders are (a) they don’t watch EastEnders or Coronation Street; and (b) they never swear. In real life, the F-word would comprise about 45 per cent (in a scientific estimate, which I made up a few seconds ago) of all the conversations in the Queen Vic. To compensate for this lack of foul-mouthed invective, the entire cast gets REALLY ANGRY really quickly, and SHOUTS where they would normally swear.

  That’s not an option for the author of a 600-page novel. Mailer needed his men to curse as casually and instinctively as the men with whom he’d served in conflict. But he knew that in the late Forties, no reputable publisher would dare to publish a book that was littered with the F-word. So he invented a replacement – a one-time-only substitute for the word ‘fuck’, which would sidestep an obscenity charge and yet retain the authentic flavour of the mess-room and the battlefield. What he didn’t realise was that his short-term solution would enter popular culture, and the American language, and stick around for the rest of the century.

  The word he concocted was ‘fug’. ‘I used to rationalize it to myself, right from the word go,’ Mailer recalled several decades later, ‘saying to myself, “They didn’t really say ‘fuck’ in the army, they said ‘fug’.” Even if I could use “fuck”, I wouldn’t. “Fug” works better. It’s closer to the deadness of the word the way we used to say it: “Pass the fuggin’ bread.” So “fug” was it from the beginning.’ And ‘fug’ it remained, from the opening chapter to the last: around 400 appearances in 600 pages, which is still pretty restrained compared to real life.

  ‘The word never gave me any pleasure,’ Mailer complained later. ‘I used it because I felt that it was a fair word to use to give the quality of the Army experience … it was used to fill certain spaces in the thought waves that you had in the Army. In other words, it was really a way of filling gaps. It was used to give a kind of rhythm in speech. It has nothing to do with obscenity.’

  Having created his stop-gap, achieved his best-seller, and invented what soon became a humorous euphemism for the real F-word among millions who had never actually read The Naked and the Dead, Mailer embarked on a writing career in which the confrontation of taboos, and the defiance of social conventions, were central to his art. Why else would he have directed a 1967 movie called Wild 90 in which, he boasted, ‘The language is absolutely sensational. There must be something like 500 four-letter words used in ninet
y minutes.’ Mailer himself starred in the picture, tossing off lines like ‘I could fuck a girl with my ears better than you can with your triple prick’ with such evident relish that it distracted him from the serious business of making a film anyone would want to watch.

  For Mailer, ‘fug’ and ‘fugging’ were two decades in the past by 1967 – a symbol of the necessary but slightly shameful compromise which he’d employed to trigger his career. But the word had long since passed out of his control. In late 1964, he’d contributed a poem to Fuck You, the magazine edited by his friend Ed Sanders. The following issue contained an announcement that must have taken Mailer by surprise: the arrival of a new rock band, entitled the Fugs.

  Two of the creative forces behind the Fugs were Sanders himself and another, much older poet, Tuli Kupferberg. He too was a Fuck You contributor, who had enlivened a 1962 issue of the magazine with his poem, ‘Fuck Is God’. ‘I say: to masturbate is human,’ it began, ‘to fuck divine … I say fuck or die … I say governments oppose fucking/Because old men oppose fucking … I say come all ye fuckful/I say fuck is beauty/Fuck is God.’

  So it was inevitable that the Fugs would not only be unconventional as a rock band: they would also be unashamedly confrontational. An early poster demonstrated their approach: ‘Fugs want to thank you,’ it read harmlessly, but if it was folded carefully in keeping with their instructions, that slogan now became: ‘Fuck you’. Between 1965 and 1970, the Fugs were a constant, grit-in-the-eye feature of American culture, forever tweaking the nipples of Lady Liberty and scrawling obscenities on the Flag. They were at the forefront of every major demonstration against the Vietnam War; helped to ‘levitate’ the Pentagon; championed the outrageous and fearless against the staid and repressed; and managed to persuade so many like-minded freaks to sign up for their cause that they propelled three albums onto the American chart.

  Along the way, without any fanfare, the Fugs succeeded in becoming the first recording artists to score a hit record (albeit a very minor hit) with a bunch of songs that included the F-word. The initial run of their debut album was gently censored by their record label, who were more used to dealing with orthodox folk singers than prototype hippies with an anarchic attitude towards the conventions of songwriting (thereby pre-empting the much more celebrated Velvet Underground by at least a year).

  In truth, the sound quality of the original release was so mediocre that it was hard to tell exactly what the Fugs were ranting about. But when The Fugs’ First Album was reissued in 1966, and climbed all the way to No. 142 on the US LP chart, the cuts were restored and the sonics improved. As a result, one could hear the unmistakeable sound of the line, ‘Mmm, fug me like an angel’ on the song ‘Supergirl’; relish the throwaway remark, ‘I’ll give up heifer fucking’ towards the end of ‘My Baby Done Left Me’; and join in the chaotic singalong of ‘Fucking nothing, sucking nothing’ on the anthemic ‘Nothing’. All this in the summer of 1966, when radio censors were only just waking up to the possibility that pop songs might be starting to include references to illegal drugs. Within two or three years, the F-word would become an underground rock cliché, as common as the protestations of undying teenage love on the pop charts. And thanks to Norman Mailer’s almost-but-not-quite rendering into print of the same forbidden letters, the path was cleared for ‘fuck’ to take its place at the heart of American literature.

  Mailer’s verbal invention prompted one of the most famous anecdotes in post-war American literature. A woman of great social stature – some sources say it was the actress Tallulah Bankhead, others the wit Dorothy Parker – is supposed to have sidled up to the author at a cocktail party, and accosted him like this: ‘So – you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck?’

  Messing with America’s Mind

  For more than fifty years, satirist and radical activist Paul Krassner has been pricking the sensitivities of every part of the American establishment. Like Jonathan Swift before him, Krassner specialises in extending an argument so far beyond the bounds of absurdity that even his most philosophically coherent opponents are forced to confront the full repercussions of their sacred cows and heartfelt beliefs.

  His primary vehicle for this assault on pomposity, repression, and stupidity was, for many years, a magazine entitled The Realist. Its most notorious stunt involved the publication of what was presented as a deleted section from William Manchester’s ‘official’ chronicle of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So accurate was Krassner’s pastiche that thousands of readers came to believe The Realist’s account, which involved JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, taking sexual advantage of the late president’s corpse.

  An earlier escapade was simpler, arguably more tasteful, but every bit as effective. At a Fourth of July party in 1963, Krassner was offered a poster design for the magazine by a friend, featuring (as he recalled) ‘the word FUCK in red-white-and-blue lettering emblazoned with stars and stripes. Now he needed a second word, a noun that would serve as an appropriate object for that verb.’ The designer suggested AMERICA, which Krassner rejected as being both too obvious and also unfair: ‘I was well aware that I probably couldn’t publish The Realist in any other country.’

  Yet this was a land which still, years after the madness of McCarthyism, lived in terror of any taint of Marxism. Krassner recalled reading the comments of pop singer Pat Boone at a recent anti-Communist rally in New York: ‘I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes that have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into heaven than taught into Hell by the Communists.’ (For once, reality was more surreal than Krassner’s imagination.)

  What better, then, than for the poster to read FUCK COMMUNISM? The design was enacted in vivid red, with hammers and sickles adorning the lettering. Unable to find an engraver who would prepare a plate of the design for the pages of The Realist, Krassner decided to offer ‘full-size color copies by mail. And if the post office interfered, I would have to accuse them of being soft on communism.’

  It was a classic Krassner manoeuvre, pitting two American obsessions – anti-Communism and censorship of obscenity – at each other’s throats. As he had hoped, the consequences were chaotic, as the same authorities who shared the poster’s disdain for Communism were forced to censor it just the same. And, typically, Krassner decided to push the saga one step further, inventing the perfect anecdote to illustrate the stupidity of the moral outrage he had concocted:

  ‘At a Midwestern college, one graduating student held up a FUCK COMMUNISM! poster as his class was posing for the yearbook photograph. Campus officials found out and insisted that the word FUCK be air-brushed out. But then the poster would read: COMMUNISM! So that was air-brushed out too, and the yearbook ended up publishing a class photo that showed this particular student holding up a blank poster.’

  You won’t be surprised to learn that The Realist was also the first ‘underground’ paper in America that dared to commit the F-word to print. It emerged in a March 1960 interview with psychologist Albert Ellis, who offered an insanely sensible suggestion about the usage of this forbidden word: ‘My premise is that sexual intercourse, copulation, fucking or whatever you wish to call it, is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damned good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner.’ Instead of saying ‘fuck you’, Ellis noted, we should surely say ‘unfuck you’. He concluded: ‘Lots of times these words are used correctly, as when you say, “I had a fucking good time.” That’s quite accurate, since fucking, as I said before, is a good thing; and a good thing leads to a good time. But by the same token you should say “I had an unfucking bad time.”’ After which, distinguished psychologist or not, a number of Realist readers immediately cancelled their subscriptions, proving that not every disgusted person lives in Tunbridge Wells.

  There Are Four Letters in ‘Howl’

  More than 450 years after the four-letter word first appeared in print, it still had the power to pr
ovoke police raids and obscenity trials. In the case of Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem ‘Howl’, there was no shortage of provocative material from which to choose: ‘cock’, ‘balls’, and ‘cunt’ were among the words crammed into this lustrous assault on American conformism and bourgeois literary conventions. But there was no doubt which image prompted customs officials in New York to seize a consignment of Ginsberg’s first publication, or persuaded an undercover cop in San Francisco to arrest the manager of a bookstore for selling him a copy.

  Like his peers, poets or otherwise, Ginsberg casually bandied around all the variants of ‘fuck’ in his conversation and (as his collected correspondence proves) in letters to his friends. But he was more wary of echoing this freedom in print, as he weighed up the liberation on which he insisted as a writer, against the feverish conservatism of America in the early 1950s.

  When he circulated copies of his 1952 poem ‘A Crazy Spiritual’, several key words – at least one of them doubtless beginning with the letter ‘f’ – were replaced by asterisks to avoid confronting the law. By the end of 1954, he was prepared to include the word ‘fucking’ in his poem ‘Over Kansas’, though it remained unpublished. So entwined was the desire for unfettered speech with the free-rolling rhythm of his versifying, however, that it was inevitable that his masterpiece, ‘Howl’, would push all limits of decency aside. Yet when Ginsberg was asked by fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti to prepare a manuscript of ‘Howl’ and other works for publication by the City Lights Press in early 1956, Ginsberg kept one foot on each side of the fence.