PicoBlog

Everyone knows that fuck is the most versatile and useful word in the English language, which is why it’s been repressed all these years. It can be used as just about any part of speech, from a noun to a verb to a modifier, in just about every tense or construction. And it’s adaptable, so we’re constantly getting new innovations like fuckery or Fucko or fuckling, which I just made up and will part of the vocabulary in ... wait, there it goes, already in, my little fucklings.

I’m fond of profanity, and I’ve received a fair amount of criticism from folks who have read my work and complained about my (over)use of the word fuck (and a few others). To each their own, but I love language in all its quirky, weird, dark and slippery bits, and the creative use of profanities is simply a joy to play with, analyze, and innovate around. It’s neither envelope-pushing or terribly creative to simply dump a bunch of f-bombs into your prose, of course. You have to be creative. If you’re going to populate a scene or an entire story with fucks, you better have a plan.

Which brings us to The Greatest Scene in Television History.

If you’ve never watched The Wire, I feel sorry for you. Go, watch all five seasons, then come back. If you’re not willing to do that, at least watch The Greatest Scene in Television History.

This is from episode four of season one. At this point in the story, Detectives William “Bunk” Moreland and Jimmy McNulty are reviewing old homicides in an attempt to link them to the mysterious drug lord they’re chasing, Avon Barksdale, and they reluctantly travel to the apartment of a woman who was murdered, a killing that seems to have little to do with their larger investigation. They quickly realize the detective who originally investigated the murder did a terrible, incompetent job—and then they realize their time was perhaps not wasted at all.

The scene is so good I don’t need to set it up at all. Even if you’ve never even heard of The Wire, the scene itself gives you all the information you need, and you have the one word of vocabulary necessary: Fuck in all its glory. There is an entire conversation in this scene using one word—a complex conversation. It’s an amazing demonstration of the flexibility of the word and the power of solid writing.

But that’s not the point of this essay. The Fuck Scene in The Wire has been discussed elsewhere in great depth, but these discussions always focus on the expletive and its creative use. But the reason this scene is great is only 50 percent fuck. The other 50 percent is writing.

Go back and watch that scene again, but this time with the sound off. While the creative use of the word fuck and the incredible performances are both genius and obviously a huge part of what makes this scene something we’re still talking about after twenty years, the scene works as a silent film because everything about it is writing perfection. Even without sound—even if you’re unfamiliar with the show—you know who these characters are. You know what they do and how they regard each other. You know why they’re at this apartment, and you completely understand what they’re doing, the work that’s being accomplished. Conveyed through body language, facial expression, costuming, setting, and action, the entire story is told visually.

McNulty and Bunk are dressed differently, have different physicality, different skin color, but they both slip into a no-nonsense, professional mode upon entering the apartment. The building manager hovers, curious and maybe a little concerned about what they’re going to do. They physically mark and act out the crime—so many crime stories celebrate the cerebral nature of crime-solving, the inner Sherlocks who can glance at a photo and instantly understand what happened and why, but here we have a celebration of the nuts-and-bolts, hands-on nature of solving a puzzle. McNulty estimates trajectories on his own body, Bunk maps out the events on the floor, using photos and a marker.

They measure, they explore the three dimensions of the space. This sort of physical groundedness is unusual in film and television—but also in written stories. Physical spaces are often sketched out, vaguely gestured at, or rendered in a sort of dream logic where everything is precisely the size it needs to be when it’s described. But here we see the two detectives meticulously inhabit the space, because every inch they directly observe adds to their understanding of what happened. The way the details come together to paint a sub-story that sits underneath the main narrative is glorious: We may not necessarily know why this woman was killed, but by the end of the scene we know exactly how she was killed—and so do the police.

The fucks serve as garnish in this scene, and that’s the true genius. A million writers have attempted to replicate something like this, filling up their crappy scenes with expletives in lieu of dialogue, and they’ve failed spectacularly because all they’re doing is dumping profanities on the page. The Fuck Scene puts in deep work underneath the profanity. If they’d written straightforward dialog for this scene it might not be quite so memorable, but it would still stand out as a terrific scene depicting two jaded, bored detectives who suddenly find themselves thrilling to the actual work of detecting.

That’s good writing. Because the way Bunk and McNulty come alive in this scene is incredible to watch, fucks or no fucks. Their use of that word to convey their mounting disbelief at the shoddiness of the prior investigation and the certainty of their own superior skills is masterful, but all those f-bombs wouldn’t mean much if there wasn’t a solid underlying story. And if you think the only reason this scene is memorable is the creative profanity, or the sense of naughty transgression that comes from saying the word fuck a few dozen times in five minutes, you’re entirely missing the point.

Believe me, if simply repeating expletives in increasingly creative ways automatically equated linguistic genius, I’d have won the Noble Prize a long time ago, probably that time I was trying to install a radio in my old 1978 Chevy Nova and shorted out the whole electrical system.

Next: Bridgerton and celebrating classism.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6exprHPnaCvnaNjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXZy%2Fpq3TnqqtZaOYsq%2BxjKKlZqyVobK3tdKipqc%3D