Earlier this week I sat (or, more accurately, suffered) through the new movie Horrible Bosses, a dark comedy about three guys who decide they’ve had enough of their despotic supervisors—so much so that they begin plotting to kill them.
One of those bosses is an insatiable nymphomaniac named Julia, played by Jennifer Aniston, whose every scene is an absurd exercise in sexual harassment taken to the outer limits. Specifically, she keeps trying to convince her dental assistant, Dale, to have sex with her. In pursuit of that goal, she frequently propositions him in unseemly ways. (She also sexually abuses her knocked-out patients.) But Dale steadfastly, repeatedly resists her immoral advances.
And then it happens. At one point when he starts talking about remaining faithful to his fiancée, Aniston’s character spits, “You’re starting to sound like a little f-ggot there, Dale.”
While there are haystacks of offensiveness in this film, this exclamation is being picked out as the needle. In a culture that’s increasingly sensitive to how certain demeaning words are used to bully gays—and especially in light of the suicides of several gay teenagers last year—some are asking whether the use of this slur is acceptable in any cinematic context, even in a boundary-pushing, hard-R comedy like this one.
The movie’s two screenwriters have talked about their decision to use the word as a means of conveying the utter despicability of Aniston’s character. John Francis Daley told The Daily Beast, “She is a horrible person, so I think when it is coming out of her mouth, it is understandably offensive.” Fellow writer Jonathan Goldstein adds, “It’s indefensible. I think part of the challenge is to, in a fairly short amount of time, get these guys to a place where an audience can empathize. …To shorthand that, we tried to think: What are the most offensive things they can say? Using a word like that I think is one of them. It says this woman is irredeemable.”
Not everyone is buying those justifications. Dan Bucatinsky, executive producer of Showtime’s Web Therapy (which stars another Friends alumna, Lisa Kudrow), said, “I just don’t know if everybody is thinking about the collateral damage they are creating. … What’s going to happen when millions of people watch an actress who is supposed to be America’s Sweetheart say a word like that?”
That question, in a more general sense, is one that some other high-profile entertainers have been mulling of late as well. In February, shock jock Howard Stern—no stranger to inflammatory language—announced that he would no longer be using the word. “I have tremendous compassion for people who are homosexual. I feel like they are bullied and abused in our society. I’ve put a lot of thought into this. … I’ve tried to change my thought about that word. I’ve tried to stop using it.”
This is a telling case study in how a culture’s mores shift over time. It’s an example of content that, not too long ago, wouldn’t have raised eyebrows or garnered public censure.
Another prime example: In 1985, nobody blinked when Dire Straits released “Money for Nothing,” a song that repeated the phrase, “That little f-ggot.” But early this year, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council banned it on Canadian airwaves.
Meanwhile, public sensitivity over the film’s other 250 or so vulgarities—it’s pornographically inclined dialogue about male and female anatomy, and its protagonists’ brainstorming about offing their bosses—doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the level it would have been 25 years ago.
And without taking anything away from the fact that pejorative slurs are hurtful and wrong, that’s pretty telling, too.
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