Picking up where we left off, segueing from systemic industry failures to social pressures:
Some writers, like Barnett, say the financial incentives have gone haywire, with top studio executives “giving themselves ridiculous raises” even as we “see Hollywood tanking.”
Another problem with modern screenwriting, though harder to quantify, is that writers fall prey to the social edicts of modern culture, which demand constant evangelization for secular causes and tiptoeing around the English language. For audiences, it has become a familiar experience to be immersed in an on-screen story only to be hit with ham-fisted intrusions meant to “educate” them. Instead of character and plot, you’re served up a lecture in dialogue form or scolded for the sins of your father.
In one scene of Peaky Blinders, set in the postwar year of 1919, an unmarried female character learns she is pregnant. In consolation, her aunt remarks: “The longer you leave it, the worse it gets. Believe me, I know. I was 16. And I didn’t dare tell anyone. . . . He didn’t come back. They don’t. Why should they? You know the words. You’re a ‘whore,’ the baby’s a ‘bastard,’ but there’s no word for the man who doesn’t come back.”
Yes, there is. Period-appropriate words -- “cad,” “bounder,” “rake,” “scoundrel,” “cur,” “louse,” and “heel” -- work just fine.
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