Crying Foul with the Tongue (Essay by Bob Racine)

Most of us growing up were taught or at least encouraged not to “cuss”, a more raw form of the word “curse”.  Our parents did not like it when we used what has been referred to as foul language, unless one or the other or both parents were in the habit of doing the same.  Great pains have been taken during the course of civilization (at least western civilization) to shield the kiddies’ ears from exposure to such language as the barons of society deemed harmful in the shaping of their character. 

Not until the 1960s did we start hearing “God damn” on the soundtracks of American movies.  It was some years later during the following decade that the F word and “shit” began popping up and joining the movie vernacular.  We had something called the Hays Office and the various state boards of censors that listened to those soundtracks with a scrupulous ear.  Whether any of them ever took into consideration the fact that even the most well brought up kids were daily exposed to cussing on the school grounds or on the playing fields is difficult to determine.  By the time the kids started on a regular diet of motion pictures the exposure had already taken place.  (Currently certain words are still being bleeped out of news broadcasts and even some dramatic shows so that those delicate little ears miss out on them.)

Are those restraints really missed?  Well, let us consider the query.

I know that I often find myself using “damn” or “hell” when I am at home and for the most part alone, mostly in reference to some inanimate object that is not obeying my instructions properly and causing me delay or frustration.   I even sometimes cuss out people who have “gotten my goat”, but not so that they can hear me.  It is more a conversation I have with myself.  “Four letter words” we have come to call them, which in a way is misleading, because “love” is itself a four letter term as are “kind” and “meek”.     

We of course as a society have done tricks with foul expressions to make them seem less foul.  Goddamn-it has been disguised as dog-gone-it.  You see, dog is God spelled backward, and gone-it is another way of wishing for somebody or something to be banished.  We want God to “gone it”, that is, send it to – well, maybe not literally hell.  Few of us have any clear idea what a literal hell would look like anyhow.  But at the very least we want something that is annoying or confounding us to be cleared out of our space, to be removed from our path.  Send it away from me, not to be seen or encountered anymore. 

Or sometimes we settle simply for the lone word “damn” as a substitute, a shortened, abbreviated form of the whole mouthful.  We just assume that when we “damn” something we are counting on powers beyond our own control to do the dispatching.  God is the silent participant, maybe the elephant in the room.  We have even softened the edge of this word by itself; we have traded it in for “dern”. 

Oaths, as they were called in the ancient world, were always thought to involve wishing harm to come to someone or something else.  If you cursed you were releasing the fury of heaven upon human mortals.  An individual had it in her or his power to literally place a curse, in some cases carelessly, upon their worst enemies.  And in so doing they were supposed to place it upon themselves as well.  A kind of black magic!  In the movie “Gone with the Wind” Scarlett O’Hara is seeing Ashley Wilkes back to the battlefront, when he begins talking in pessimistic terms about the outcome of the war, and she upbraids him about talking that way and tells him anxiously “Say a prayer quick!”  Erase the spell quickly before God (or the Devil) has time to act on your wish, as if the man has really wished for it! 

Traditionally held to be the worst form of profanity is the utterance of words that defame deity.  The Decalogue is explicit in its condemnation of language that takes “the name of the Lord thy God in vain”. We are enjoined not to speak of anything or anyone deserving of respect in a loose or defamatory manner.  And especially is this supposed to apply to the name of deity or to anything deemed sacred.  To profane that name or things that are considered holy is to speak of them with contempt, or with disregard for their holiness. 

Another term for this is blasphemy.  Jesus among other things was accused of it when he seemed to be rewriting the Judaic Law.  “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.”  He was considered a blasphemer just by the fact that he healed on the Sabbath.  He offended the Sanhedrin’s sense of propriety and seemed to be claiming for himself the power and privilege that belonged only to the Almighty.  Once I heard a very misguided fellow minister report that he had been spending time listening to words uttered on TV commercials and serving as a one-man censor board.  He wrote to the network complaining about the “blasphemous” use of the term “holy cow” on one occasion.  His action was frowned upon and ridiculed by his fellow clergy (including me), but the fact remains that at one time in our Christian history the understanding of blasphemy was carried to just such a ridiculous length.  I have never been quite sure what in this man’s view was being blasphemed, the cow or the God who created the animals of the field.  It can get quite confusing.  Was deity being ascribed to the animal?    

You would be hard pressed today to find devout souls who are rabid about offending the ear of the unseen God.  Many who are sensitive to the use of verbal profanity oppose its use more on the grounds of what is inappropriate or disrespectful, not strict religious taboo.  It should be apparent to all moderns by now that four letter utterances that are meant in a crude or unkind or flagrant way are really a means of releasing frustration or to holler about the frustration.  They express anger; they do not amount to condemnation.  “Damn” is a manner of saying “I can do without this” or “I can’t believe this happened or that I heard that or that such an occurrence is possible”.  But it gets really risky when it is directed at individuals.  In such a case you might not be cursing another person’s soul, but after enough of it you might be cursing the space between you and the intended other.  You may be sewing the seeds of acrimony or creating an abiding hatred.  You can poison the air between you and the other person or persons.  The language becomes divisive, lays the groundwork for alienation or scorn or outright enmity.

We have all probably met persons whose lives have been so oppressive, due to deplorable circumstances in which they grew up or by choices or failures or the plague of associations with evil company that their entire outlook on life is poisoned, and it shows up with an almost endless flurry of expletives that fill the air they sit or stand or walk in.  The words fall like confetti all around them, except they are not let loose to celebrate anything.  For them it has become a blighting habit.  So pitiful!  So sad and heartbreaking!  The only one they have cursed it seems is themselves.

Have you ever noticed that in movies that have their setting in ancient times, there is no attempt made to simulate profane speech?  How could there be?  The fact is that we do not know exactly what a cuss word in ancient Latin or Greek sounded like.  To hear English words like “damn” or “shit” or “hell” or the F word spewing out of the mouth of Julius Caesar or Mark Anthony or even one of Jesus’ disciples would seem quite bizarre and anachronistic.  To say the least, it would be laughable!  There was a motion picture version of Lloyd C. Douglas’ book “The Big Fisherman” that put in a very brief appearance back in the late 1950s, a tale about Simon Peter and his struggle to come to terms with the advent of the man Jesus Christ.  Peter was portrayed as a rough cut individual who was acquainted with lowlife ways and did not know what to make of this strange man who taught forgiveness and kindness and humility.  It was not a very well written work, and it is not surprising that it never really caught on with the public.  But there was one exceptional scene in it I shall never forget. 

Peter comes up against two ruffians who make fun of his new attachment to the carpenter’s son and decide to test his new faith.  First of all they slap him in the face.  Peter feeling the urge to fight back mutters “Deliver me from temptation”.   A second time one of them slaps him he repeats the prayer a little more earnestly, “Deliver me from temptation”, and yet a third time he is struck and repeats the words obviously very riled up and gritting his teeth to keep from yielding.  Suddenly one of them socks him on the jaw and he goes sprawling to the ground.  That pushes him over the edge and as he rises to his feet he changes his prayer to “Forgive us our trespasses” and knocks both of his enemies down in one swing.  They scamper away and do not bother him anymore.  At once he is seized with self-disgust and cries out “You’d better give up on me, God.  I’m not your type.”  But in a few moments he is begging God not to give up on him.  He falls into a sobbing heap on the floor of his fishing boat where he remains until he hears Jesus calling him to follow.  A very touching moment!  No ugly words necessary!  What a shame that the rest of the splashy spectacle was so asinine and nauseously contrived.  It has predictably disappeared from the repertoire.    

If a scene like that were set in modern times, a new convert butting heads with hoodlums on the street perhaps, we can be pretty certain that we would hear some cussing in our own language, the man cussing first at his attackers and then at himself for having such a tough time putting his new faith into practice.  How would we depict that profanity in a Biblical setting?  Interesting question!   

Recently I saw and reviewed that short series “One Day at a Time” and I was impressed by how much strong emotion, even near volcanic emotion, was put across, especially by the mother, without weakening the fiber of that continuing tale by any profusion of cussing.  Yes, a word or two sneaks in but never did the writers perform as if the gutsiness of it depended upon a full outlay of gross terminology. 

Where are we now regarding the use of what is sometimes called “colorful” language in dramatizations, especially in motion pictures?  Has someone torn open a Pandora’s Box?  Is it “anything goes” now in contrast to where we were a century ago?  I suppose so!  But have we made so much of it tiresome on the ear?  How much does the impact of human personalities portrayed on the screen depend upon dropping or scattering these ugly terms of human conversation into the script?

It all depends upon the kind of people you are setting out to portray.  If one is dealing in something lurid or violent, explicit or not, it seems more authentic not to impose any kind of strict ban on salty language that people watching would expect to hear.  But I have seen movies in recent years in which the F word was heard far more than seems believable.  Go into any dive or men’s locker room or even into any prison ward and how much in the space of an hour would you hear it?  It is heard, yes, and frequently, but not with every other breath that is taken.  If it cannot add force where it is needed, if it becomes a kind of tic or verbal spasm, a kind of show and blow, a pointless monotony, does it really serve the purpose of good dramatic art any more so than those taboos of yore?  I would say not. 

                                       

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Silence (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hrs & 41 min, color, 2016

Sometimes we encounter motion pictures in which it is considerably difficult to know who to root for or what to root for, and yet we find the content compelling enough that we have to stay with it.  I long ago lost all interest in missionary enterprises designed to carry the Christian Gospel to the “heathen” and convert them.  I have the greatest admiration for those who travel abroad to heal or to feed or to educate or to rebuild what has been laid waste, but counting converts is really for me a distortion of what Jesus meant by the Great Commission.  So I approached “Silence”, Martin Scorcese’s epic about the sufferings of Catholic priests in seventeenth century Japan, with a bit of caution.  What vested interest had I in the success or failure of their efforts?  Why would I root for them, and what would there be in the hostile acts of Japanese rulers that would enlist my sympathy?  I need not have worried.  More is at stake in the conflict portrayed than I could have imagined.    

“Silence”, it must be said, is not a general audience movie, not something to be watched when you are fatigued at the end of the day and desirous of relaxation, not something to be screened on a passenger airliner during a long cross country trek and you need a break from the stress of the trip you are taking.  Those who screen it should choose the time carefully, setting close to three unhurried hours aside to do some hard thinking, for that is what it demands of you; it is a thinking person’s movie. 

In its early sequences it does not appear to be so.  A struggle for survival gets underway.  The Emperor has decided that everything western must be abolished from the land, which includes a deeply entrenched Catholic Church of Portuguese origin.  Priests (referred to all through this story as padres) are being tortured in a manner most brutal in the opening scene. We are told in narration that they have requested this test of their faith, but none of those we see seems the least bit stoic in his attempt to endure.  We have reason at this point to ask where Scorcese is taking us. 

Scorcese was raised Catholic but has over the years referred to himself as a lapsed one.  What he actually is in relation to the Church of Rome remains something of a puzzle, I think even to himself.  He has all but admitted as much.  He may be lapsed, which is to say that he may not be a regular practicing adherent to the disciplines of that faith, but he has not quite been able during his lifetime to shake its influence.  We have seen strange elements of religious obsession in characters he has created in his many dramatic screenplays.  He even adapted Nicholas Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” and in his 1974 work “Mean Streets” (which I still consider one of his best) he creates a troubled youth torn between his involvement with fellow hoods and his strange enthrallment by priest and ritual and Confessional. 

For close to a quarter of a century he labored to bring to the screen the 1966 novel “Silence” by a man named Shusaku Endu.  He enlisted the skillful services of screenwriter Jay Cocks, who in my estimation deserves as much credit as Scorcese for the brilliance of the end result.  It follows the lives of two young priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) living in Europe who volunteer to travel to Japan and try to locate a beloved mentor of theirs named Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who lived there for many years but has disappeared and according to rumor has abandoned the faith and is either still living there somewhere or has died a martyr’s death.  Their bishop is not inclined to let them go; Christians are being murdered all over Japan, and he supposes that the young men could be put to better use somewhere else.  But their importunate, impassioned plea finally persuades the bishop to release them, the bishop supposing it to be a divine calling.  They fear for Ferreira’s life and feel greatly indebted to him, though it has been years since they were his pupils. 

So they go and are smuggled into the country by an ex-believer now living a derelict’s life, a man they are not sure they can trust.  In fact, just about everyone they meet in their stealthy travels is possibly a betrayer.  I was soon more fearful for their safety than for their mentor’s.  Their dark passage through terrain with which they are not the least familiar draws us in and makes us deeply apprehensive.

Soon they make contact with the remnant of faithful Catholics in Japan who are starved for priestly leadership, craving the Mass and the Confessional and the rite of Baptism for their offspring.  The young priests press their search for Ferreira, until the Emperor’s legions get wind of what is happening and close in upon them and their following.

For the first hour or so of the picture the two padres are the epitome of courage and confidence, armed with intelligence and priestly training.  They administer the sacraments to droves of natives who have been living in secret and remain devout, even in the most dangerous of circumstances.  But a change begins to take place inside the two men as they witness the ordeal the people they are serving have to endure.  The solidarity of their own faith begins to erode.   They gradually become aware of the fact that what they are doing is putting so many innocent worshippers’ lives in danger and they soon lose their innocence, to say the least.  What is ultimately lost or gained is the subject of this lengthy odyssey.         

Garupe’s death from drowning launches Rodrigues into a most painful and tormenting ordeal and makes him quite vulnerable, once captured by the authorities, in facing the Emperor’s Inquisitor, the man most to be feared.  As portrayed by Issei Ogata, this aging Japanese functionary proves to be something other than a bloodthirsty beast.  There is very much a thought-out method in the madness he perpetrates.  What he requires of Rodrigues is far more than the endurance of physical torture.  The Inquisitor turns out to be a master manipulator of the mind and heart; he seems to know the man behind the collar already when he falls into his lair.  Along with his powerful intrusion comes another Japanese personality and presence known as the Interpreter, played most engagingly by Tadanobu Asano.  These two cunning, shrewd men shake Rodrigues to the very depth of his soul and just may do the same for the audience. 

                                      

The cast is huge; Scorcese must have had to spend months putting it together.  Just imagining this staggers my mind.  And a tremendous amount of ground is covered in this masterwork.  The chasm between human strength and human weakness!  The universality of truth!  The arrogance of the will!  Forgiveness – human and divine!  Despair! Anguish!  The gift of mercy!   Love and fidelity!  The seeming silence of God!  They all play their mysterious part in the course of events.  And there comes the moment when Rodrigues has to perform the most painful of all acts of love.  What would that be?  I will leave those who choose to view the film to find out how that estimate is made.  It is at that point that I believe the wisdom behind the writing of Cocks and Scorcese becomes most apparent.

You may be wondering whether or not the young priest finds his long lost mentor.  The answer is yes, and Ferreira’s appearance opens up a whole new sphere of torment for him.  Liam Neeson gives a very wonderfully modulated, magnetic performance as a man who has undergone a strange transformation, one that has rewarded him in one respect and bound him in yet another.   It would be unthinking of me to neglect sounding some strong praise as well for Andrew Garfield’s performance.  He is in just about every scene and is consistently effective in filling the shoes of this bedeviled young priest.   

There is much suspense in “Silence”.  Nothing one might expect to happen seems to happen at all.  Almost every twist and turn of circumstances brings with it a new shock or a new challenge to the unsuspecting viewer’s assumptions.  Nothing is neat, either visual or audial or plot-wise. There are many encounters with danger and more than enough times when we must watch somebody’s execution or torturing, some of which is bizarre.  There is one very explicit beheading.  This is a film for thinkers, but the collision of minds is not portrayed in ivory tower surroundings.  It finally raises the unspoken question of how much power a captor can exert over someone else’s destiny.  It is a deep dark journey of spirit and conscience.  Though I cannot recommend it for a general audience, I am so very pleased that I discovered it.  All who approach the imperatives of religious faith with an open mind should be able to connect with it. 

                   

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

One Day at a Time (Sitcom Review by Bob Racine)

13 episodes, 30 minutes each (give or take), 2017

Ethnic-based humor scores again, quite high in fact, as we are taken into thelives of three generations of Cuban Americans in one very active and adorable family.  Heading the fatherless household is a lively thirty-eight-year-old mother, Penelope Alvarez (Justine Machado), a plump, feisty, but tenderhearted woman who provides most of the energy and spark.  The continuing tale, spread out over thirteen episodes, embraces roughly the length of a school semester and revolves around the preparations for a supreme event in the life of Penelope’s fifteen-year-old daughter Elena (Isabelle Gomez).  More about that coming up!  A twelve-year-old son Alex (Marcel Ruiz), not in the least defiant, proves himself smart and rather resourceful when trouble is on the scene.  And there is Lydia Rivera (Rita Moreno), Penelope’s mother, the kids’ grandmother, who is something very special.  More about her coming up!

One word of clarification: These thirteen episodes have never been shown on network, cable or PBS television.  They are the property of Netflix itself, released only for streaming.  But they are based upon an earlier series of the same name, which I have never seen, that ran on one of the networks from 1975 to 1984.  That one, created by wife/husband team Whitney Blake and Allan Manings, was about a single mother and two teenage daughters, but did not involve Latinos.  Norman Lear, chief producer on that series, by now a ninety-four-year-old TV icon with an excellent track record in situation comedy, calls the 2017 version, which he is also involved in producing, a “reboot” and claims that the idea for it came from Brent Miller, a partner of his in the business.  Aside from Lear, the production heads on this current one are Mike Royce and Gloria Calderon Kellett. 

Penelope, with a record of army service in Afghanistan, is the one shouldering the big burden – as mother, breadwinner and caretaker and all without the assistance of her husband Victor (James Martinez), whom she met many years ago. Victor, never seen until the last two episodes, is presumed to be still under treatment for PTSD and alcoholism after all the intervening time since domestic tension and violence precipitated the marital separation.  Machado in this fiery role is tremendous, especially in the occasional scenes when she talks tearfully about the trials of being a single parent and the emotional burden of sleeping by herself without anyone to look her “in the eye and say ‘I got you.’ ” She genuinely loves her children and her sometimes burdensome, irritating mother, but she can stand her ground quite forcefully when she feels put upon and deprived of her womanly or motherly dignity. Ten firecrackers exploding simultaneously could not create more excitement than she does. 
Though she is somewhat hyperactive and at times overwrought, she is nevertheless a prime mover in all situations. A great piece of casting that makes me hope that we have not seen the last of this series!

A high point for her is a dispute with her doctor employer over wage discrimination between her and a male fellow worker.  She walks off her job in protest and has her employer chasing after her to beg her back and willing to make adjustments.  We should all glory in the victory she wins and even the way in which she wins it. 

Giving lively support is Todd Grimmell as a single unsure-of-himself neighbor named Schneider who is almost like a member of the family.  He does his best at learning the mores and the language (Spanish) of the Cubans and serves their needs in various respects while angling for some of the love he never got being an orphan.  Also adding contrast to the antics of the primary players is Stephen Toblowsky as the aforementioned aging primary care doctor by whom Penelope is employed, with personal family troubles of his own that the tightknit Cuban family helps him forget – a quite funny/sad man-child.

The kids Elena and Alex face typical but crucial factors in the business of growing up – drug temptation, sex instruction, sexual identity, a taste of romance, developing talents, taste in clothes, the limits and boundaries of freedom.  One very special issue is Elena deciding whether or not she is gay, a matter that eventually becomes a hot potato that sends the adults into a whirl of confusion, consternation and ultimately division, but one that allows the grownups to do some soul searching of their own before the struggle is completed.  Elena is quite the earnest feminist for her age; she recoils against anything that seems to put the woman in the position of being controlled or consigned to a demeaning role or image.   She is also a vegetarian, which compels her to revolt against the idea of the Catholic Mass in which she must feast on the body of Christ; her strict Catholic grandmother especially has trouble with this.        

Let me make it clear that in this series we do not have one of those domestic oddities in which supercool kids, mature before their time, exert control over uptight and unsuspecting parents.  The kids remain kids, vulnerable as well as questioning, but kids just the same.  And Penelope remains the mother in all the tight straits.  She takes discipline seriously but without demeaning the dignity or the intelligence of her children.

But the queen of the show is the incomparable Rita Moreno as the multi-faceted, devout, conservative-minded Grandmother Lydia Rivera, who is at times slithery, at others wise, at yet others a clever spinner of backhanded influence, and at almost every turn quite droll and funny.  The series would have been like a jewel with a missing diamond without her on the scene.  Somehow she knows just what inflection of speech is called for and just the right expression of facial and body language to keep her character on the right comic track.  She can say and do the most outrageous things and make them seem clever if not completely funny and make herself endearing to us the audience.  When the subject of Penelope’s impending divorce comes up she invokes the strict Catholic position on putting an end to a marriage.  “We Cubans don’t get divorced.  We die!” 

Lydia is not averse to causing a bit of worry.  When Penelope herself tries to put together an outing for Sunday morning, her only day off, and doing the unthinkable of not attending church, Lydia considers it an outrage.  In the debate that ensues when Penelope further admits that she has some doubt about the existence of God, Lydia disappears, sulking, but proves amenable to repair work when Penelope finds her.  As far as further involvement with a man is concerned, she declares “My body belongs [strictly] to God and my husband’s ghost”.  But she does not mind being escorted around by Penelope’s doctor boss.  We are persuaded to care about this rigid Grandmother and her feelings, as long as her behavior stays within loving bounds.  I love the way she yields so easily to an embrace; she is not a cold fish; she is touchy/feely on all the right occasions.   

And Lydia can work on our sympathies most ingeniously in her moments of sad reflection about all she and her family had to go through escaping from Cuba upon the insurgence of the Castro regime.  Her monologue describing her painful separation from her older sister is quite moving and a bit heartbreaking (they never saw each other again), as is her recall of the emotional stress she went through over her daughter at risk during the Afghanistan deployment. 

Another touch of real drama comes in the form of a girlfriend of Elena’s named Carmen (Ariela Barer), who is faced with the sudden deportation of her parents.  I do hope we will be seeing more of her as well in future episodes, if or when there are any.  

Of course, husband Victor pays a visit to observe his daughter Elena’s quinces,
(pronounced something like keen-sis).  That is a Spanish word that some are probably unfamiliar with, but what it amounts to is a sizeable party celebration of Elena’s becoming a young woman, a Cuban tradition.  Actually Victor is interested in more than his daughter’s big night.  He claims that he has overcome his mental lapses and his enslavement to alcohol and is ready to pursue the renewal of affection with Penelope.  That is a story within itself that occupies the last two episodes.  I will leave that for all who view the series to find out about.  No spoilers from me!

“One Day at a Time” is domestic entertainment of the highest order.  The music, the editing and the photography are a blast, and the scripts are consistently sharp-witted, thematically fine pointed, transparent at every turn and mature – and at least for me educational!  All who treasure family love and solidarity will find inspiration and plentiful food for thought.  A prize package to be sure!  Give yourself a treat and set six and a half hours aside to enjoy it.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.