Well what do you know, I actually do have something ideologically in common with Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street other than the insane amounts of coke and having had sex with Margot Robbie on a bed of money. When told that critics of Wolf of Wall Street were counting the "F-words," Terence Winter, writer of the Wolf of Wall Street script said, "I can't believe anybody has that time, and if they did that they'd use it to do that." Amen, Terrence Winters, amen.
This ridiculous and time-consuming focus on arbitrarily chosen "inappropriate content" neatly sums up what is so fundamentally flawed within the entertainment industry, although perhaps not in the way Terrence Winter was intending. In a movie filled with gratuitous drug use, the objectification and use of women, and unquestionably immoral (as well as illegal) business practices, the fact that anyone even noticed the abundance of "f-words" speaks to the absurdity of what angry viewing audiences view as crossing a line, versus what they don't.
I find it mystifying that a movie about drugs and thievery makes headlines for the use of a fairly common expletive, yet we shrug our shoulders and say nothing about the hundreds of incredibly graphic video games and action movies that pass through our movie theaters and gaming consoles, simply because they feature explosives, not expletives.
Where are the angry housewives of Middle America when it comes to counting say, the amount of scenes in which women are relegated to secondary characters, or worse yet, plot devices? I want someone to count the amount of times that gratuitous violence is utilized to make a heroic character look cooler, or to be calculate how many civilian casualties would result from all the pointless shooting in movies like X-Men: Days of Future Past or RoboCop, both of which aim to depict their main characters as saviors of the human race. Who is going through all the movies made in the last few years, counting the amount of times sex scenes do not explicitly feature consenting females? Oh, that isn't happening with nearly the same frequency as curse-word monitoring? Ah... I see.
Let's be real with ourselves, we have nothing to fear from naughty words, it's the naughty ideas that are touted as glamorous in popular culture that we should really be concerned about. Wolf of Wall Street might curse like a sailor, but it was rated R and blatantly shows that its protagonist's life choices lead to messy consequences. The rating alone limits the scope of the audience watching, which is more than is done for action movies.
RoboCop is rated PG-13 and that means someone who is barely a teenager can be inundated with images of violence in the name of justice, but that same child cannot, apparently, be expected to handle the word "fuck" in movies they aren't technically supposed to be seeing, anyhow.
If you're going to leave a theater pissed off, let it be for the gross violence and misogyny on the screen, not for the number of times someone cursed. Let me be the first to say, I don't give a single fuck about how many times Leo DiCaprio says "fuck" in Wolf of Wall Street, and I hope you don't, either.
Image: Paramount
