In Praise of Profanity by Adams Michael;

Author:Adams, Michael; [Adams, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Profanity and the End of Language

HBO’s series The Wire aired from June 2, 2002, until March 9, 2008—just sixty episodes, which, regardless of universal admiration for the show, might have been all its viewers could take, because in spite of its art and the humor that occasionally relieves the show’s depressing tension, The Wire is hard to watch. Drake Bennet, in Slate (March 24, 2010), recalls the series’ “grim subject matter” and its “fatalistic worldview,” how “the show was meant to be a Greek tragedy but with institutions like the police department or the school system taking the place of the gods: the immortal forces that toy with and blithely destroy the mortals below.” Unlike The Sopranos, for instance, in which profanity marks moral agency and there is no tragedy, because the characters more or less get what they deserve, The Wire is metaphysical and proposes that the world is beyond human influence. Its use of profanity corresponds to that dramatic purpose.

A scene in “Old Cases” (Season 1, episode 4) is particularly memorable for its profanity because, throughout its three minutes and thirty-two seconds, fuck or words based on fuck—fucking, fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck, motherfuck, motherfucker, fuckin’-A—are essentially the only words spoken. There are thirty-eight of them, and that’s a lot of fucking. In the scene, detectives Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland re-investigate a murder that might be connected to characters central to the current story. On entering the crime scene, they look at gruesome postmortem pictures, and there’s little else to say but fuck. On the surface, other fucks and fuck-derived words do their usual business. When McNulty gets snapped by a retracting tape measure, he says fuck, as many of us would—nothing could be more ordinary. When they succeed where the previous investigation had failed, fuckin’-A seems a normal expletive way of registering that success. There are wry fucks and surprised fucks, but they all sound normal within the apartment where they’re uttered.

Our experience of these fucks is ironic, however—we’re outside the apartment listening in, aware of the relationship between the scene inside the apartment and the world of The Wire, as well as the relationship of the Wire world to our own. That ironic distance gives significance to profanity in the scene different from what it means to the characters and also unavailable to them—they are not Cassandra, the Trojan princess who was doomed to know the future and tell about it in prophecy that no one else would believe, and who figures profoundly in Aeschylus’s tragedy, Agamemnon. Instead, McNulty and Bunk are among those with whom the immortal forces toy, and so often in The Wire, we sense impending destruction. The fucks in “Old Cases” are part of that story, but they are part of a larger story, as well, one that includes us, one perhaps just as grim.

Reliance not only on profanity but only on profanity in “Old Cases” is interesting partly because, in police procedurals, detectives always seem to have something to say. They look at disfigured

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