A comfort of swearing between father and son

I really meant to see Brad's Status last year in time to rank it, but it just lost out in a numbers game. My enthusiasm for it was somewhat dampened when one of my film podcasters (now former film podcasters; R.I.P. Filmspotting SVU) revealed that he absolutely hates it. But when I saw it as a 99 cent rental on iTunes it was an easy pickup. Mike White as the director, Ben Stiller as the star, and social media as the possible central issue were all selling points for me.

I guess with Mike White as the director, I expected there to be something outre about it, something that provoked in overly cheeky ways, that had turned off that podcaster. In fact, Brad's Status is earnest almost to a fault, and it doesn't rely on cringe-worthiness or awkwardness nearly to the degree I had been led to believe. Neither is it as topically obsessed with Facebook as I would have guessed, though the envy of others' perceived great lives, as extrapolated from their social media posts, is indeed a running theme. In short, I liked it quite a bit.

But one of the things I, as a father of two sons, took away from it most was the central relationship between Stiller's Brad and his 17-year-old son, Austin Abrams' Troy.

Abrams was familiar to me, but I couldn't place him -- looking into it now, I realize he was on The Walking Dead. But the actor he reminded me of most was Miles Teller. Since I could imagine Teller playing this role as snarky and sneering, even though those aren't particularly trademarks of his acting style, I expected the same to inform Abrams' portrayal.

Yet father and son don't have that contentious relationship in this movie. If anything, Troy is overly forgiving of things Brad does, far less extreme versions of which would cause most movie teenagers (and probably real-world teenagers) to roll their eyes. There's nary an eye roll in this movie. Again, it surprised me that a director like White would lean toward a more idealized version of this relationship rather than a less idealized one, though it was nice to see in these cynical times.

Anyway, one of the casually introduced aspects of their relationship is that Troy periodically says "fuck" in conversation with his father and his father doesn't bat an eyelash. He doesn't pepper his speech with the word; after all, this is a kid applying for Harvard who might actually get in. But as an occasional punctuating adjective, some variation of the word escapes his lips about three or four times during the movie. His father doesn't even react. If he was dropping the f-bomb every other word, Brad'd be obliged to say something. But as just an occasional flourish in his linguistic palette, it's fine. (Incidentally, Brad is a good dad and does not reciprocate.)

Part of the reason this interested me is because it has an echo in my own relationship with my own older son ... who is a lot younger than Troy.

My son will turn eight in about a month's time, and though he has never said the word "fuck" in my presence -- good boy -- his general curiosity about the word has meant that his awareness of it has come up as a topic in conversation. Unfortunately, he's heard both my wife and me say it on occasion, though the only time I can remember doing that myself was when a car almost ran us down on our bikes after the driver, either drunkenly or otherwise, drove onto the bike path. The familiarity he has with it is more likely a result of the playground than anything he's getting in his home environment.

Anyway, we know he knows it and we have started making more and more mutual reference to the fact that he knows it. That moment might not have arrived with my own parents until four or more years later, if it ever did. But what can I say, these are different times.

One funny example came this past Wednesday, when I left work early to pick him up from school because my wife had an all-day conflict. We turned on the radio in the car to Triple-J, an Australia-wide station that doesn't blush about playing songs with bad language. They play the songs, but at least during the day, they oblige themselves to say "Language warning" right before the song begins. The tone of voice of the woman who records this message suggests that she find it a silly rule to have to obey, and she's adhering to it only cheekily.

Anyway, after his particular language warning, the song commenced and included the word "motherfucker" about 1.5 seconds in. The purpose of the language warning is to allow you to silence the radio or at least change the station if young ears are within earshot. In order to prevent this particular f-bomb from being heard, though, I would have already had to have been hovering my finger by the radio dial in anticipation of possible action.

My son and I laughed about it. It had been a moment that had occurred and there was nothing I could have done to stop it -- other than, I guess, not listening to this station in the first place. We've made several references to that moment in the days since, and laughed about it each time.

Then on the very night I watched Brad's Status, we had another episode involving the word, where I could have done more to stop it, and in fact drew extra attention to it. I guess the previous incident had emboldened me.

I was reading him a story on the couch, or rather, he read me a story as part of a reading challenge he's doing. Usually after this he would have me read him something, but on this particular occasion he didn't seem to care about that. Instead, we (I can't remember who initiated it) started pulling books out of the adjacent book shelf, joking that I should read to him from one of our boring adult books.

I pulled one in particular called How Late It Was, How Late because I knew it would be an extreme example. This book is inscrutable even to my wife and me. It's written by a Scot named James Kelman, and it's written with a thick Scottish dialect that recalls Trainspotting, or something James Joyce would have written with the equivalent Irish dialect. I know it's inscrutable from having perused a couple sentences previously; my wife actually tried to read it, and either suffered through to the end or let it defeat her, but in either case, was the worse for it.

My son, who is willing to ride a comedy bit to its logical conclusion (a man after my own heart), encouraged me to continue after reading the opening page. I declined, not only because it's physically difficult to read aloud with all the abbreviated and purposefully misspelled words, but because I knew it wouldn't be long before I stumbled across some profanity. My son must have known that was part of the reason I stopped because he asked if it had bad words in it.

Instead of just saying yes, I scanned forward in the text until I actually found one, and told him I'd found it. I was going to leave it at that, but he pressed further, wanting to know what word it was. And here was the moment when I took my bold step forward. I found the page with the word "fucking" on it and stuck my finger right up to it so he could see.

"You could have just said it was the f-word rather than showing me," he said, a bit of delighted incredulity in his eyes.

Why yes I could have. But I guess I feel like it's time to start developing that comfort that the father and son in Brad's Status share, where they can begin to meet on the level of equals rather than always a parent and a child.

But if he starts dropping f-bombs in my presence, I'm going to have to do something about that.

At least not until after his eighth birthday.