Mindless Ones

Bullshit ain’t about lying, not according to philosopher Harry Frankfurt from Princeton University. It is, however, still concerned with falsehood.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Great, an’ all, and all very right sounding, but it’s not the definition you’ll likely get from the man on the street. So if we don’t fully grasp bullshit, then God help foreign readers when it comes to its close cousin “bollocks”, that most British of swearwords.

Like bullshit, bollocks is subtle. It is used as a declaration of falsehood, but it’s also, more commonly, used as to denote poor quality, or, like bullshit, highlight truth rejecting nonsense, or to punctuate a fuck-up.

In American pop-culture, not so much. In American pop-culture bollocks is thrown around with gay abandon, because, I think, most people have no idea what it means. In contrast, British people, who do know what it means, don’t use the word indiscriminately because, as Rich Johnson was so keen to point out, bollocks is the 8th most offensive swearword in the uk… according to some bullshit poll or another.

My Mum doesn’t like bollocks, I kinda love it, but our reactions are predicated on it being part of our vernacular. For everyone else it seems to signpost either a vapid British stereotype, pop-culture via the Sex Pistols, or operates as a way of winking and nudging at the anglophilic reader, “you’re one of us”, it says, “you get this whole British obscure swear word thing”. Which might be all well and good if you’re not a British reader, or a British reader who isn’t still under the spell of Britpop, 90s Britain’s very own brand of self-aggrandising anglophilia*. For me, however, bollocks in US fiction most often comes across as a password to bullshit, and bullshit, in line with the definition above, is less important to understanding this guy than bollocks.

Utter bollocks

Which is to say that Constantine should perhaps talk more bollocks, and use the word less, not simply because it’s offensive, but because bollocks is getting perilously close to being one of those empty comic book signifiers of fun that aren’t actually fun, like in the panel above: a powerful effort to capture Constantine at his most dead on the page iconic, just in time for his grand return to the DCU. You know what I mean.

John. Fag. Mackintosh. Magic. Blood. Bollocks.

No vigour, no life, no character truth, just momentism.

And the bollocks sits very awkwardly indeed. Mileage may vary, but on the whole bollocks is reserved for mid range fuck-ups. Drop your keys in some dogshit? Bollocks. A minor prang in the car? Bollocks. Forgot your wife’s birthday? Got caught having a wank by your nan? Bollocks.

Bollocks often but not always – and this is going to end up being *key* to this essay, so pay attention – brings with it a humorous, ironic gloss in that it’s frequently intended as a light(-ish) counterpoint to whatever mishap may have befallen us. A way of bringing levity and/or (through) an admission of our own complicity, or the futility of fighting Sod’s law.

So it’s hard to see how bollocks is an appropriate response to a room smothered in blood, unless the intention is to say some rather edgy things about John’s character and the world in which he operates by way of the very blackest humour. Which, I think it’s safe to assume, it isn’t.

But it perhaps it should be. More on the appropriateness of bollocks in part 2.

Something to consider in the interim: As far as his professional life goes, John Constantine is very concerned with the truth. It’s his personal life which is riddled with bullshit. Here lieth the tension in the character.