There is No F-Word Controversy in "Horrible Bosses"

There's a wiff of a controversy brewing about the new movie Horrible Bosses, which opens Friday, and includes a character played by Jennifer Aniston, who openly berates an employee, calling him a "faggot" (among many other things).

Part of me doesn't want to give this meme any credence at all, because it was started by noted idiot (and out Newsweek writer) Ramin Satoodeh, who, you'll recall, previously argued that most gay actors can't convincingly play straight, and has also argued that Kurt on Glee hurts gay tolerance because he's too queeny.

He and The Daily Beast are probably just trolling for traffic.

In his latest article, Setoodeh plays the whole "When did you stop beating your wife?" writerly bit, asking the screenwriters to defend their characters' use of the word "faggot," and asking other Hollywood observers to weigh in (negatively). But Setoodeh himself never explicitly condemns the movie. I think he's learned that whenever he expresses one of his opinions, he runs into serious trouble. So this time, it seems like he's having his interviewees make the point he wants to make. Otherwise why even raise the question?

Charlie Day, Jennifer Aniston

As for me, in the context of the movie, I didn't think the use of the word was offensive at all. Indeed, it seems to me like it reinforced the idea that only a truly reprehensible character like the one Aniston is playing (who literally has no redeeming qualities whatsoever) would use a word like this as a slur. That seems to me to be night-and-day different than having a "cool" and sympathetic point of view character like Vince Vaughn in The Dilemma use "gay" as a slur.

The Dilemma normalizes the slur while Horrible Bosses stigmatizes it.

Setoodeh writes that the use of the f-word in Horrible Bosses represents some kind of cultural shift, but I don't see that at all. Most of the GLBT people I know never had a problem with the word's use in a context like this, not any more than we do with Kathy Griffin using it on stage, affectionately and ironically — which is totally different than the way Tracy Morgan seemed to be using it in his recently on-stage tirade.

It's obviously all about context.

But I do think another aspect of the movie represents a kind of cultural shift on gay humor. In fact, when Setoodeh's article broke, I had just finished writing my review praising the movie for its (more or less) progressive gay humor.

The film has a number of gay-related jokes (apart from having Aniston's character be an anti-gay bigot), including one sequence where the three male leads encounter a male prostitute. But it seemed to me that the movie bends over backward to not have the scene be about obvious gay stereotypes and, more importantly, it's not about the discomfort the straight male characters feel for being mistaken as gay.

No, it's about the discomfort they feel about being pissed on.

Hey, it's a fine line! But again, it makes sense in the context of the movie. And it clearly struck me that the writers were consciously steering away from the obvious (and very, very tired) "gay panic" humor that has long been a part of so many American comedies.

Halle-frickin'-lujah.

True the scene in question isn't very funny, but then the whole movie isn't very funny — and that's a separate issue anyway. (And for what it's worth, there's a series of jokes in the movie about how a man can't ever really be raped by a woman that I thought really were tasteless. Really? We're still making that stupid argument in 2011?)

But there's no serious f-word controversy in Horrible Bosses, not for anyone who's paying attention.