One might logically hypothesize that degradation of language is one significant precursor to the decline of civilization. Everything is f-this and f-that, and words that once made sailors blush are now batted about cavalierly by tweens.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Hollywood where censorship has all but gone out the window.
Good Boys is funny, yes, but mostly because it's alarming.
Profanity has become the jump-scare of comedy: lazy, lazy, lazy.
It's true that Richard Pryor was hilarious, but his comedy wasn't particularly reliant upon profanity so much as seasoned (or peppered) by it.
All the more (as my ears wither, age, and thin), I feel increasingly sensitive to profanity and empathetic to its effects on others. Right or wrong, I like to think of this as maturity and progress. ('Evolution,' let's say, in an era replete with bellwethers and drowning in watersheds.)
What irony, then, when Hollywood employs such misogynistic language whilst they, universities, and political candidates alike champion equality, safe spaces, and trigger warnings. Hypocritical much? I don't understand how one reconciles the two. (Well, actually, I do. It's called money. If it sells, do it.)
Anyway, the Good Boys unleash >50 f-words, approximately 20 s-words, and a half-dozen exclamations each of a--hole and b--ch. In 90 minutes.
* * *
On February 27th of this year, as Lady Gaga sat on Jimmy Kimmel's couch clutching her golden A Star Is Born Oscar statuette, she proclaimed, "Social media, quite frankly, is the toilet of the internet."
She's right, of course, because for every step forward toward love, we find ever-creative means of unflinchingly destroying one another through rudeness, incivility, hate, even mass murder. What a quaint notion, 'politeness.'
We are to blame—and having weaponized technology so fully and efficiently, there's no turning back. Pandora has opened her box; we have crossed the Rubicon; the die is cast.
Slurs, hate speech, toxic language, and violent verbiage are the order of the day...and made all the easier when one is able to employ and perpetrate them anonymously, from afar, behind untraceable/unknowable screens (populated all the more by bots and deep fakes).
I would like to think the tide might one day turn for the better, but if Santayana was right, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and Lincoln would have to admit that "the better angels of our nature” appear to be getting their asses kicked.
Good Boys isn't evil, it's just a sign of the times, and I'm saddened by the times.
Let's each do our part, shall we, to be kind, to be gracious, to be generous, to be humble servants to others through souls generated by love.
