The Naughty History of a Naughty Word

The fall has yielded a bumper crop of films that rattle taboos about what can be represented or suggested onscreen. Unsimulated sex (“Shortbus”), simulated assassination (“Death of a President”), bestialitybased family drama (“Sleeping Dogs Lie”) — there’s been something for everyone out there, and if the equally suggestive “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” was to be believed, we don’t even see the half of it.All these films posed marketing challenges, but at least their titles could appear above the review. Filmmaker Steve Anderson’s four-letter-documentary broaches another forbidden frontier, even before you enter the theater: the realm of the unprintable (and, very often, the unspeakable). Triggering prim circumlocution in family newspapers like this is a neat stunt, but it’s also about as transgressive and clever as Mr. Anderson gets.“F—” is a pocket history of the word, a greatest hits of public utterances and movie clips, and a visually monotonous parade of talking heads, celebrity and otherwise, who testify to the epithet’s power and versatility. It’s the sort of obligatory trifle that’s all too common: the documentary entertainment that one could replicate with a couple of hours on Google and YouTube and an Ali G volley of vanity-stoking interview requests.No offense intended to the offending word, which the film introduces promisingly enough. Glimpsed early in print in some trash-talking between monasteries, it spiked in popularity and visibility in the 20th century with soldiers returning from the world wars. With a few exceptions, the rest of the illustrious history you might have heard before: “M*A*S*H” and that far-out counterculture, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and, on the political front, presidents Nixon and Johnson on tape, and Vice President Cheney in Congress.There are the glimmers of a piquant social history here in the chain of profane inspirations: from death on the battlefield, to 1960s liberation between the sheets, to … culture-war football? But the heads take over, often the usual suspects. Janeane Garofalo and Dennis Prager give a course in comparative self-righteousness; Kevin Smith (ludicrously still peddling Gen-X credit) recounts fond memories of “Scarface” and sex with his wife; Billy Connolly wraps his brogue around outrageous propositions. Plus, porn star Tera Patrick because, well, why not?Generally, the topic only ensnares these authorities in flights of circularity. Avenues of argument double back: “The curse is powerful because it’s unique, and hey, it’s just a word, so what do you care.” (Alan Keyes, of all people, almost initiates a more interesting theory, involving biblical writ and the purity of the word.)No one’s expecting an academic treatise on the subject, but Mr. Anderson could have tried a bit harder with the humor than identifying etymologists as “cunning linguists.” The same sophomoric reflex sometimes derails the film from its focus: Yes, footage of a couple copulating on stage at a Norwegian music festival is diverting, but it muddies the distinction between filthy language and good old dirty pictures.Leave it to Pat Boone to rescue the documentary, for a brief moment at least, and probably not in the way the 1950s crooner intended. Immortal and bronzed, he lays on the charm with a line he’s probably delivered to wayward children at church functions: Instead of cursing, he uses his own last name as an exclamation (“Oh, Boone!”). Cut to Mr. Boone demolishing this folksy likability by sunnily referring to Mr. Carlin as being “covered in slime.”Maybe the film needs more people like Mr. Carlin, who’ve been through a few decades of pop culture, to show the rifts. But Mr. Anderson’s celebration of street talk has curiously little to say about America’s perennially inventive churn of subculture into mainstream culture, and that’s despite the appearance of hip-hop godfathers Ice-T and Chuck D.Coincidentally or not, the documentary shares the same distributor as “The Aristocrats,” to which it has been compared. The repeated dirty joke in that film had its ups and downs, but there was always something to learn from the craft of improvisation displayed in the iterations. Not so with this latest blue-room gag, which has only one word to repeat. Hundreds of times later, it just leaves you numb.

The Naughty History of a Naughty Word

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