On Deadpool and the F-Bomb

The massively popular and profanity rich superhero film Deadpool has generated a little bit of attention on Christian blogs as a film that Christians perhaps, maybe, just-a-suggestion, might choose not to see. (Spoiler alert: This article will contribute nothing towards that particular debate.) I say maybe and perhaps because gone are the days when religious and social conservatives could muster the energy to emphatically pronounce on such things. On the question of morality and public decency the wind is very much not in the social conservative sails.

Our taboos have changed. Our sense of what is sacred and what is profane has shifted. This is a very different thing from saying that we have rid ourselves of taboos and the sacred altogether. We patently have not. We are as censorious as ever – indeed, by some measures, we more likely to censor profanity that ever. It is simply that what occupies those categories has profoundly changed.

We saw an instance of this last year in Australia when SBS journalist Scott McIntyre was sacked for tweeting negative comments about the Anzacs on Anzac Day. The question, of course, was not whether or not his claims were historically valid, but rather that he profaned a sacred story on a sacred day. As Susan Carland argued in an ABC Religion and Ethics article a few days later, one would have a hard time explaining to someone in say, Indonesia or Egypt, that Australia was a secular country with no place for blasphemy laws.

To describe a film or television show as full of profanity is in many cases anachronistic. To profane something is to desecrate something considered holy or sacred. I’ve not seen Deadpool, but if the reviews are anything to go by, most of the humour takes place in an area just north of the upper thighs and south of the belly button. And, if Philip Larkin’s chronology of the sexual revolution is right, then since 1963 we’ve moved on from the idea that sex is in any sense holy or sacred. And if something is not holy, the by definition it cannot be profaned.

Which brings me to the F-Bomb. I was recently watching a Netflix documentary called Best of Enemies on the 1968 US Presidential campaign debates between conservative lion William F. Buckley and liberal darling Gore Vidal. Toward the end of the debates, William F. Buckley lost his temper and threatened to punch Vidal, in a profanity-laced sentence live on national television. It was a moment that haunted Buckley for the rest of his life.

One of the commentators in the documentary, reflecting on this moment, said that the only “profanities” left today are three words: the C-word, the N-word and the F-word. Consider those words for a moment: Why are they still considered profane? I submit they are profane because they touch on the religious sensibility at heart of modern culture – our sexual, racial and gender identities. The C-word is profane because it is derogatory towards women, the N-word because it is derogatory towards people of colour and the F-word because it degrades a sexual minority. (In case you’ve not already guessed, the F-word in question is of course not the four-letter one – how could that be profane anymore? – but the genuinely profane three-letter version.)

Behind each of those words stands a history of actual mistreatment, oppression and cruelty to which no Christian should be insensitive. The fact that they are taboo words reflects in part the fact that in all three of the communities they degrade, there is still work to be done and injustice to be addressed.

However, I do think we can safely set aside the idea that we are a secular society with no room for the sacred. We have not managed to fulfil the Enlightenment’s promise of a world of free enquiry without taboos or the possibility of offence. We are, on the contrary, rather easily offended. Chris Uhlmann’s recent piece in The Australian calls out the “tolerance” which is in fact unwilling to tolerate anything other than the Correct Opinions on (for example) reforms to the marriage law. “Stripped of their fashionable clothes,” says Uhlmann, “what’s striking about the tolerance police is how similar these new moralists are to the old.”

And let’s stop pretending that we are secular. We are deeply religious. We have a Holiness Code to rival anything found in Leviticus, complete with a priesthood zealous to enforce it. We are profoundly observant of the sacred, and profoundly sensitive to profanity. We still have an F-Bomb. We Westerners may have abandoned our ancestral religion. But the desire to hunt heretics and enforce blasphemy laws is firmly in place.