When I finally got around to watching Oppenheimer (I know, I’m far behind the times, but that’s normal for me), I didn’t quite understand what all of the fuss was about, because it really wasn’t that good. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it was longer than it needed to be, and I was almost ready to turn it off after the first hour. While it improved in the latter two thirds, it never rose above being just okay, despite all of the hype it received. It also received an R rating for a couple, entirely unnecessary, scenes of nudity, which added nothing to the movie but…shock value? I’m not sure. However, this is not intended to be a review of Oppenheimer. Rather, this is a post about vulgarity.
Those nude scenes in Oppenheimer are an example with which many of you are likely to be familiar, but be it such casual exposure or foul language, our present society is startlingly accepting of the vulgar. It is difficult to tell how much this was always the case, and it has simply become more overt and noticeable, and how much it is a change over time, but from books, to news articles, to movies and television shows, to everyday interactions, I see more curse words (and not the magic kind), more explicit content, and more references, discussions, and displays of what I would consider to be poor taste.
From here, we could discuss morality, social norms, and the intersection of various philosophies from Aristotle, Mill, Locke, Kant, and others with this trend. We could talk about how it reflects an increasingly unmoored system of values, an increasingly indulgent society, another symptom of those hedonistic silk slippers of history…but instead, we’re going to talk about this trend specifically in the context of storytelling.
As with many storytelling considerations, this can be reduced in large part to a matter of intended audience and expectations. If your intended audience is going to be put off by a lot of cursing, violence, et cetera, then you may want to consider if including it is accomplishing a real story purpose. Yes, there are plenty of people who actually use curse words the way some people use “um” or “uh,” but you don’t need to characterize that in the text all the time, just as you only include those filler words in dialogue if they are serving a particular purpose in that instance. In-world curse words can be a way around this (like all of the dragon-related expressions in the Dragonriders of Pern series), although these can still be off-putting if used excessively.
There is more to these decisions than audience expectation, though, and this discussion of vulgarity should be considered separate from the discussion we had a few weeks ago on grittiness in storytelling. How vulgar you choose to make your writing is also a worldbuilding decision. It says something about the culture you create for your characters, about the context in which they live, if they are constantly foul-mouthed, either with anachronistic curse words or with in-world curse words (or behaviors, which are equally applicable – think of the Ancient Greeks’ views on showing the human body in statues and athletic competition).
Thus, we end up in much the same place that many of these posts go: it is a matter of making a conscious decision more than it is of a right or wrong answer. Vulgarity can have its place in storytelling, but it should serve a purpose, it should be tied to your worldbuilding, and it should account for audience expectations. Think about what it says about your characters and their contexts before you give them the foul mouths we hear around us too often these days.
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