WTF?

Champing at the bit, faithful readers have been awaiting with baited breath my viewpoint on the first of several Netflix rentals that will come to my mailbox. The first, aptly titled F**k arrived earlier this week. Since my free time is consumed with blogging and exercise, allotting 90 minutes to watch a film is considered a bonus, and in this case, the bonus time was mostly wasted, and not as enlightening as I had hoped.

The film is an interview style documentary centered around the use and interpretation of the "F-word". Several of my favorite people are in it: Drew Carey, Lenny Bruce, Janeane Garofolo, Hunter S. Thompson, Ice-T, Ron Jeremy, Tara Patrick and Billy Connelly. Their viewpoint is supposedly balanced by others on the right side, including Pat Boone, who claims to use his own surname as an expletive. Go figure.

The film explores several of the word's uses, from music, film and comedy; and highlights the arrests and conviction of Lenny Bruce, while anointing him as the groundbreaking comic of his time. Suffice it to say that the world was a much different place then.

The biggest revelation came about half-way through. In 2000, the FCC received 111 indecency complaints. By 2004, that number had grown to 1,068,802. 99% of those were by a watchdog group called the Parents Television Council, resulting in almost $8 million in fines. So goes the legacy of the George W. Bush administration and its ilk. We may be moving backward rather than forward.

It is at its best when it examines the history behind the word and its subsequent use in the general public. These times, however, are short-lived, and the film doesn't break much new ground into the understanding of a word that most of us use and already understand.

The film has a decidedly left-leaning slant, but in my view it is warranted. After all, does anyone have a horror story about a child who was irreparably harmed from hearing fuck used in conversation or out of the mouths of their parents? In the realm of words as weapons, none is so destructive as fuck. It has hundreds of uses, some erotic and others nonsensical. Whatever the case, it is merely a word. The Christian-conservative point of view is represented here, but merely as a balance to the common-sense approach taken by the majority of the film's interviewees.

I cannot recommend the film as a rental, since it really doesn't break much new ground, but it might make for a good ice-breaker in such cases where a relationship has grown to the point where the couple cannot either broach the subject or find the passionate excuse to execute the action. In either case, one could bring the film home and find an appropriate reason to watch it, and afterward, the topic of conversation may lead to the act itself.

Art for art's sake.

NEXT UP: Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.