Frank, freeing, and fabulously to the point, the f-word is hugely pleasurable when done well. Some movies swear blind by it…

Saying it may be wrong on occasion, but sometimes it just feels so right. The jaw retracts, the bottom lip curls in, the teeth spring forward, and the fricative consonant gives way to a guttural vowel sound finishing with a firm, resounding ‘ck’. With it can come all manner of emotions, from joy to rage, pleasure to pain, passion to desperation, plus a lacerating blast of good old-fashioned offence.

The F-word blossomed in cinema in the early 1970s. Since then it’s been deployed with gratuity and ingenuity by filmmakers searching for shock, realism, comedy and irony. Coarse it may be, but this four-letter intensifier (and its myriad derivatives) is a wonderfully versatile linguistic tool: a noun, verb, adjective and compound that paints a rich palette of colourful meanings and, if used skilfully, never fails to deliver dramatic bite.

The fog of adolescence

The Exorcist was one of the first films to make hay from the F-word. Four decades on, William Friedkin’s horror show feels like a shallow, preposterous construction as soulless as the evil spirit lurking within Regan. But it’s also one of the great sound films: the taut musical score, grinding sound effects and increasing profanities building a cold, excruciating atmosphere of nastiness.

The devil certainly has the best tunes in The Exorcist, which delights in dropping F-bombs on its audience through the cherubic lips of a sweet and innocent 12-year-old. Because although it’s ostensibly about demonic possession, much of the film’s power derives from the way it taps into parental anxiety about losing children to the fog of adolescence, where they’ll soon discover the pleasures of the F-word in all its forms.

Fast forward ten years to 1983 and by then, the F-word was rattling across the movie landscape like machine-gun fire, short-hand for strutting machismo in an era when action cinema was blooming. That was the year of Scarface, in which swaggering Cuban upstart Tony Montana (Al Pacino) swills the word around his mouth with the boundless confidence of a Reaganite capitalist, before spitting it out so you almost feel the hot saliva spraying your face.

The F-word reached blistering new heights in 1990, when Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas broke the record for the number of times it was used in one movie (300 in total)

Movies became ever more creative in their use of the expletive as the decade continued. The Terminator systematically selects it from his programmed drop-down menu to threaten a nosey janitor, mild-mannered executive Steve Martin unleashes it with great comic gusto on an incompetent car hire clerk in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Die Hard’s Bruce Willis bastardises the famous lyric of singing cowboy Roy Rogers to taunt his adversaries.

Naturalism and menace

The F-word reached blistering new heights in 1990, when Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas broke the record for the number of times it was used in one movie (300 in total). Here, it didn’t so much add spice to the sauce, but become a base ingredient for the meal. For Goodfellas is a feast of a film: the incessant use of the F-word – delivered most memorably and with lip-smacking relish by pint-sized potty mouth Joe Pesci – serving up a sumptuous combo of naturalism and menace.

The gangster genre turned postmodern four years later in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where scripture-reciting assassin Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson) strolls through the LA underworld wielding the F-word as poetically as his 9mm handgun.

Preferring to use the prefix ‘mother’ wherever possible (he even has it branded on his wallet), Jackson and partner-in-crime John Travolta curse with an easy gravitas that made the F-word seem profound and effortlessly cool. You’d cross the street to avoid Joe Pesci’s character, whereas you’d probably ask Jackson to join you for a beer.

The word comes out of nowhere, yet feels like a flash of authenticity in a film where the truth feels forever guarded and elusive

More recently (and on the smaller screen), the equally-lovable double act of Bunk and McNulty in HBO’s The Wire decipher a complex crime scene by only ever saying the F-word. It’s a brilliant setpiece, every profanity bringing a fresh nuance as the booze-loving cops methodically uncover the truth. And in many ways, the truth is what really lies behind the F-word’s enduring appeal.

A flash of authenticity

Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which sees cult leader and awe-inspiring bullshitter Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) crack under the tenacious grilling of a journalist, exploding the F-word (sublimely prefaced with the word ‘pig’) into the laps of his quaint middle-class companions. The word comes out of nowhere, yet feels like a flash of authenticity in a film where the truth feels forever guarded and elusive.

Like a coiled spring, The Master creaks with inner tension as its pent-up protagonists struggle to cope with trauma, emptiness and, above all, carnal desire. In a way, the F-word is omnipresent throughout the story, so much so that when sex-obsessed World War II veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) enjoys a playful tumble with a young lady in the final scenes, it feels like sorely-needed catharsis.

Much like the act it so bluntly describes, the F-word is hugely pleasurable when done well: delivering an explosion of energy, a satisfying emotional release and a mutually beneficial way for human beings to communicate with each other and say what’s in their hearts. Like a good friend (with benefits), the F-word is frank, freeing, and fabulously to the point. So thanks very much F-word – and fuck you too.

The Links

The ‘Funny Guy’ scene, Goodfellas, 1990

‘F*** the Diaz Brothers’, Scarface, 1983 

‘The middle of f***ing nowhere’, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987

The ‘pig’ scene, The Master, 2012