I had a movie binge over the recent holiday period. I was staying by my sister’s house for a couple of weeks, as the whole family was there preparing for my Grandma’s wedding (You’re never too old for love!). My brother-in-law has an awesome home theatre set up, so I took full advantage of his collection and the free time on hand.
Suffice it to say, two dozen movies were consumed in a two week window. Some good ones, some average ones, but all provided opportunities for learning something.
I watched a couple of movies with my dad, and it is amazing how your filters change depending on who you watch a movie with. Things that wouldn’t bother me at all if I was watching something by myself were suddenly very noticable.
One of those things to which I was much more sensitive was bad language. I grew up in a family that doesn’t swear. Post high-school saw some forays into bad language, but nowadays I’m back to the clean roots of my origins. I don’t have the need or inclination (most of the time) to swear.
It doesn’t bother me if people swear – it is a choice people have to make for themselves. But I believe it does have implications for screenwriting.
You might know people, or be one, where every third or fourth word seems to be the F-bomb. I remember overhearing some people talking in the gym a while back, and every single adjective was the ‘F’ word. I mean, six or seven a sentence sometimes.
Not only is it monotonous, but it limits the vocabulary. In a sense, it stupifies. Instead of finding the right adjective, people can use the one expletive to mean anything. It takes less thought to spit out an expletive than to find the right words to say.
As screenwriters, we need to be able to express subtleties of meaning, to use words, and words alone, to create a mood or colour a character. We need to be in control of language. We need a full arsenal in our vocabulary. We need highly nuanced words to help capture the right feeling for a scene.
If we lack the adjectives to describe things properly, our writing suffers. I believe that our vocabulary ‘muscles’ need to be kept in shape. If we fall into bad habits with sloppy language, we can lose some of the skills necessary to sharp writing.
Now, this is not to say that scripts should be devoid of swearing. Depending on the tone and characters inhabiting the world of a story, swearing is appropriate, even necessary. People swear, characters in movies will swear.
But expletives should never be a crutch. Used too often, they not only lose their impact, they can limit a character’s emotional colouring.