Fuck Review
By Joe Lozito
Obscene Stealer
On my way to watch "FUCK", writer-director Steve Anderson's light-hearted dissection of our culture's obsession with the "f-bomb", I had an experience which would have fit nicely in the film. The doorman at the screening room asked if I was there for the screening of - then he paused, looked at his notes and, after a moment, carefully spelled out: "F-U-C-K". Yes, I declared proudly. That's what I'm here for. What is it about this word that makes a grown man more comfortable spelling it than speaking it? Not a bad topic for a documentary. But, as is evidenced by Mr. Anderson's fun but less than enlightening film, there's just not that much to say about "FUCK".
This doesn't stop Mr. Anderson from rounding up an impressive array of interview subjects, both appropriate (David Milch, Kevin Smith, Hunter S. Thompson) and not so much (Janeane Garofalo?, Drew Carey?, Alanis Morissette?). Like
"The Aristocrats", another documentary about all things obscene, "FUCK" wallows in its own profanity like a pig in … well, you know.
Early interviews with scholars, some of which are winkingly subtitled "cunning linguists", point out that the word first appeared in literature centuries ago, but no one knows exactly where it came from. We do know, however, that "FUCK" is not, as popular myth holds, an acronym - a fact which the film makes abundantly clear. If this feels like padding, it probably is. After this brief foray into the history of the word, the film veers off into innumerable unstructured tangents (politics, sports, movies, etc), to fill out its running time.
Some of the archival footage (particularly Nixon's rampant use of the word and George Carlin's reaction to the furor over his "Seven Words You Can't Say On TV" being played on the radio) is interesting, but otherwise "FUCK" amounts to little more than sitting around with your friends giggling about how fun it is to curse. The interviews with right-wing conservatives are unsurprisingly prudish (Guess what? They don't like the word) and the liberals come off more like kids being given license to cuss. Mr. Anderson proudly declares that his film tops even "Scarface" and the oeuvre of Kevin Smith in number of uses of the f-word.
Perhaps there's so little to say about the word because the word says it all. It can be used in as any part of a sentence with equal aplomb, as a popular t-shirt sold in lower Manhattan makes abundantly clear ("Fuck you, you Fucking Fuck"). It's quite possible, the word needs no explanation. It just is what it is. As boisterous Scottish comedian Billy Connolly says, the word "fuck" is global, it has no translation. "It has no English-equivalent because, well, it
is English." Word.
