Bring Back The Dramatic Movie 'Damn'
A couple of weeks ago I rewatched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I unabashedly love this movie. It is somehow both a great Star Trek movie and a Star Trek movie that non-Star Trek fans like. Over the years a lot of Trek fans have dismissed The Voyage Home ... because it's so accessible. But being good and also accessible can both be true. And I feel like over the last few years a lot of people have stopped pretending this one is lesser in some way because too many people like it.
When I woke up this morning I saw Jordan Hoffman complaining about how many times the F-bomb is dropped during Lanterns. This didn't really bother me upon my initial watch of the first seven episodes, and my initial reaction to Jordan's posts (Hoffman, not Hal) was, "He's always up to something." But the more I thought about it, yeah, he has a point. This has been a problem for awhile. One I first noticed and wrote about a few years ago.
When I rewatched The Voyage Home, I laughed really hard when Kirk uses the insult, "Well, double dumb ass on you!" Shatner is very good at this kind of thing, and using the word "damn," as I'll explain more in a bit. But, in general, we need to bring "damn" back as a dramatic expletive.
There's an elegance to "damn." A long, dramatic "damn" has a gravitas that other expletives just do not have. When an elongated "fuuuuuuuuck" is used, it just sounds too much like Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We need a "damn" resurgence.
I first wrote about this in 2020, when I was stuck at home watching a lot of older movies. I started to realize that the dramatic "damn" would hit me harder than any f -bombs did. Which told me f-bombs were being way overused. (This was especially annoying in the first Deadpool movie. They weren't even clever, they were just there to be there. This seems to happen a lot.)
Even in Star Wars, when Han Solo calls Ben Kenobi a "damn fool," it really stands out. In both a "this guy cusses, but also he really means it," kind of way. And one of the most powerful moments in television history is on Good Times when Esther Rolle's Floridia Evans is trying to come to grips with the death of her husband¹ and just used the word "damn" over and over.
¹When I was a little kid and would see this episode in reruns, I just assumed the actor who played her husband died. This is why I was quite shocked when John Amos showed up in Coming to America. Amos would live for 48 more years after this episode aired.
Speaking of Shatner as Kirk, there are some truly terrific cinematic “damn”s…
(This is a free post for "free tier" subscribers. But, The Hard Pass can't exist without paying subscribers. If you become a paying subscriber you can read the story a famous actor told me about Tom Cruise, which is now my favorite Tom Cruise story of all time. Or my life's work of asking anyone involved in Ocean's Twelve if, since Tess knows she looks like Julia Roberts, does their character also know they look like a famous actor?)
