Anybody watch the 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, a little feature called “The Departed” which I among many others found rather entertaining? Anyone hear or read even one critical attack on “the language” of that film, language which, in just the first five minutes, contained mucho many uses of cunt, fucking cunt, mother fucking cunt, what r u anyway a cunt, etc. etc., all of which words were used “literally,” as insults, insults spoken towards characters by other characters, all of whom the film encourages the audience to identify with as “real” people who “really” talk that way, and perhaps, therefore, “such language” is “understandable” thus “okay”? The words of the film go by, and the audience laughs or whatever, but does anyone think about being insulted by this so-called artistic use of the way so-called “real” people talk to each other, this supposedly real use of the supposedly beyond-the-pale “c-word” now used as the so-called new (yawn!) banal-insult-supreme of these “real” blue-collar “types”? As in, if the Scorsese cops say it, it’s okay, it’s PG-something-or-other, but if an/other writer lifts this word, or any word, up, out of it’s place, out of it’s context, and plops it into sudden, vast relief, then, THEN it’s obscene? Because we suddenly hear it? Because suddenly The Word is not iterated by a canonized “authority” but instead by One who might be questioning said authority, that very authority which may have assigned some of us the moniker cunt in the first place, allowing some Others of us to be/come the users-of-the-word-cunt-as-”literal”-insult, which “means” it’s only “obscene” when we DON’T know exactly who we are, who we’re NOT, and what it’s all supposed to MEAN? If you’re following me, Dear Reader, I think you’ll agree, (and thank you, by the way), that I’ve made a “pretty” “good” sort-of-an-oil-free-point, for now! To Be Continued…