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Cinema is an industry of constant evolution. It’s always interesting to find that a film accomplished something before any other did. The first film with sound, color, with computer-generated effects, how things have changed, improved, degenerated. The subject that concerns us now is less about what could and couldn’t be done, but what was and what wasn’t allowed. Tracking the evolution of language, and what was considered taboo, would take a whole novel, but finding the first use of a single word is a bit more direct. With that said, let’s find out about the incredibly fun word, which starts with F, and ends in CK: And it’s not a firetruck, of course.
Fornication Under Consent of the King, the fact that I have to use coy innuendos to describe the word because I’m genuinely unsure if it can be written in an article for this site uncensored means that it sits pretty high on the swear severity scale. This is strange, it’s not a slur, it’s not a word that sits on a foundation of prejudiced violence and subjugation. It’s effectively just a slang word, either for having sex or messing up, depending on the context. It’s a word with many uses and applications, and certainly not considered the most offensive pejorative; that one I definitely can’t write. Dropping an appropriately timed F-Bomb is undeniably satisfying, it’s a good word to use as a vent, and it’s a word with no target. Nevertheless, it’s the word that took the longest to reach our ears on the big screen. Sex has always been a very taboo subject in polite society, so such a harsh word for it is quite shocking, and the long history of film censorship would place heavy restrictions on what could and couldn’t be said. But eventually, a film dropped the F-Bomb, and we’re going to look at the first films that did.
If we’re talking about mainstream Hollywood cinema, which is a decent enough place to start, the answer is the 1970 Robert Altman film M*A*S*H. The story follows a group of military surgeons during the Korean War, in a mobile army surgical hospital, who use humor and outrageously dated hijinks to cope with the horrors of war. It’s based on the novel by Richard Hooker, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, and if this all reminds you of one of the defining television shows of the 20th century, this is the film that inspired it, much to Altman’s dismay. This film broke a lot of rules from the recently-scrapped Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly known as the Hays Code, being a gory, nihilistic, atheistic piece, it is considered to be the first mainstream Hollywood production to say that big four-letter word.
It’s used so casually too, during a football game one character says to another “All right bud, your fucking head is coming right off.” You think for such a historic milestone in profanity, you’d want to use it for a big moment. But was this as big a moment as previously described? A mainstream Hollywood F-Bomb is a big deal, but was it truly the first in cinema history?
Britain Dropped The F-Bomb Long Before Hollywood
The short answer is no, it wasn’t. Even before the lifting of the Hays Code in 1968, there was a smattering of underground and independent productions that used the word and then some, including two by Andy Warhol in 1965. However, the longer answer includes the two feature films that pre-date M*A*S*H, and a very important movement in cinema history. The British New Wave is where you’ll find two 1967 films that were both considered extremely raunchy for the time, being heavily banned and censored by the British Board of Film Certification. Three months apart in having the earliest cinematic F-Bombs, Ulysses and I’ll Never Forget Ol’ What’s’is’name.
British new wave cinema has some similarities to its French cousin, shot in a cinéma vérité style, in black and white, and on location. This crossed over with writers classified as the “angry young men”, Barstow and Osborne, Waterhouse and Sillitoe, as The Kinks listed, working-class writers and poets who were disillusioned by traditional British society. It was another attempt of cinema to capture the “real”, the gritty, grimy facts of life, and it’s a fact of life that people swear. Disillusioned working-class people swear, the people watching these movies swear, it would be inauthentic to sugarcoat the language real people speak to satisfy censors if real people are what they want to portray.
1, 2, 3, 4, We Don’t Want Your F*cking War!
While that Cultural Revolution was going on, there was a political one raging as people vehemently protested the war in Vietnam, the subtext of M*A*S*H. These demonstrations were widespread across the United States, and with television becoming more and more accessible, they became visible to the American public. Protesters did not mince their words, either, with a slogan that was put on posters and pins being “1, 2, 3, 4, We Don’t Want Your Fucking War!” People would hear this swear loud and clear from Brisbane to Boston, and it was decided in the Supreme Court case of Cohen vs California, that people were well within their constitutional rights to do so. With the Hays Code, which explicitly banned any kind of profanity, out the window by 1968 and replaced with a proper rating system, there was no reason for M*A*S*H to mind its language.
After M*A*S*H dropped that F-Bomb, the use of swears exploded. Ralph Bakshi was the first to put it in animation with 1972’s Fritz The Cat, William Friedkin took it a step further in The Boys In The Band, being the first film to use the c-word, and then did it again with a possessed 11-year-old in The Exorcist, if you watch the director’s cut that is. PG-13 films are allowed a single F-Bomb, and there has been many a contender for most profanity-ridden films, with Swearnet: The Movie being the current champion. At this point, is swearing even shocking anymore? Naturally, there are always going to be those who have a real problem with profanity, but especially now with the advent of an uncensored internet, where you can go on any live chat and hear extremely colorful language by very young voices, as long as you do so responsibly, a little cussing now and then really isn’t a big fucking deal.
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