Mail Bag Bulges With Words on ‘Wanda,’ ‘Bull’

Unless you demean motherhood, urge the abolition of cats and dogs, warn that apple pie a la mode can be dangerous to your health or attack one of the better-known ethnic groups, you don’t get a lot of mail as a newspaper writer.

Those who disagree with you think you’re a hopeless case anyway, and those who agree with you figure you’re on their side already so why bother.

But my complaint last week about the abuse of language and some other excesses within two popular comedies, “A Fish Called Wanda” and “Bull Durham,” provoked what by my norm was a flood of mail (although it probably would not have dampened Paul Conrad’s shoes).

There are obviously large numbers of people who don’t like the language they are asked to listen to on the screen and who don’t mind saying so, often in funny and expletive ways not suitable for print.

“Who disliked ‘Moonstruck’--PG!” wrote an actor named Dean Norton. My memory is that the talk in “Moonstruck” was not unsoiled but that the cuss words rang so true you didn’t notice them, which is as good a test as there is of writing that works as against writing that doesn’t.

So far as I could tell, none of the letter writers wanted to repeal the modern world or even pretend that 1988 is 1938. It is just that they have come to feel that, linguistically, less can be more, and enough is too much in some areas. “This is the magic of the silver screen? Expletive deleted,” Winston Miller wrote.

On the other hand, friends whom I respect have been chiding me for taking sheer entertainments too seriously. Maybe so; there were good performances and very funny moments in both those films, as I thought I’d said.

Then again my friends did agree that, well yes, the fish-eating scene was not entirely wonderful and the killing of the small dogs was slightly on the gross side and there was rather a lot of the f-word, and Michael Palin’s stuttering did give them moments of discomfort.

“I’m a member of the National Stuttering Project,” Ralph T. Lamb wrote me, “and we have tried over the years to overcome the misconception that stuttering is funny.” The effort has sometimes seemed hopeless, he said. The group also works to help those with the affliction, and Lamb included a list of famous stutterers, from Demosthenes and Darwin to Thomas Jefferson, Somerset Maugham, Carly Simon and Bruce Willis.

At least nobody suggested censorship or anything like it, although there were some caustic requests that critics of both stage and screen could themselves be more caustic about the language when it is excessive rather than organic. Fair warning would itself be a help, the letter writers said.

Still it’s a far cry from complaints about bad taste or aesthetic misfires to angry warnings that the commonweal is in danger. The urge to censor springs eternal, as the present shrill fuss over “The Last Temptation of Christ” demonstrates. Yet the point appears to have been taken by the society as a whole that the box office and the dial, as reflecting the state of public taste, are in the long run the best censors we can hope for.

“Bull Durham” and “A Fish Called Wanda” have been box-office successes, a fact which overweighs if it doesn’t defeat my complaints. It’s just that there is no way to tell whether they would have done even better if the word of mouth had not turned some viewers off.

What seems clear is that even those who are not bothered by the language are not enchanted by it either. They simply tolerate it. It appears to be a downside risk with little upside potential, to put it in terms even a producer might hear.

Flawed is an f-word, too, and it fits both films to a fare-thee-well.