Two young boys decide it is time to learn the ways of speaking like an adult.
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Review by Victoria Angelique:
The short film, LEARNING TO CUSS, explores the rite to passage every child goes through when it comes to growing up by challenging the rules of the household. The dynamic is simple, a big brother giving advice to his little brother to curse at the breakfast table after he says much harsher curse words because every child must learn how to cuss in order to become an adult. There is just one issue with the big brother’s plan that he forgot to explain to the naïve and trusting little brother, mom’s rules regarding cursing and the consequences if they break it.
The film starts off with a soundtrack to invoke nostalgia through drama, which indicates immediately that the plan isn’t going to go the way these brothers are planning. The camera focuses on a key prop that every child from the 1980s and 90s feared, the wooden spoon. The scene unfolds like the big brother planned as he utters the f-word without blinking. He’s challenging his mother, acting like he is the man in the house and no longer sees her as the authority figure. She quickly grabs her trusty wooden spoon and chases him to his room. The audience doesn’t see, but hears him being spanked as he cries.
This leaves the little brother a choice, does he stand with their mother and respect her authority or does he risk being spanked and still utter the curse word that he was instructed to by his brother?
This film uses a dynamic that plays out in many houses across the world as children grow up and want to challenge the authority of their parents. It feels natural as the brothers clearly wouldn’t do this if mom spanked them on a regular basis, but still that the time had come to challenge her authority as the adult in the home. LEARNING TO CUSS is the perfect film to show what every child feels is a rite of passage and how the consequences play out to remind them that they are still children in their parents home.
