With FUBAR, Arnold Schwarzenegger makes his TV leading man debut. On the Netflix show, which quickly jumped to the top of the charts, the former governor and Top Gun: Maverick’s Monica Barbaro) play a father and daughter who discover they’re each secret CIA operatives. There’s shoot-outs and chases and faintly True Lies-y humor. But what does the all-caps title mean?
If you don’t know, obviously you’ve never been in the military, or you’ve watched too few military movies. As an acronym, FUBAR has a few meanings, but the most commonly used one is “F*cked Up Beyond All Repair.” Sometimes the R stands for “Recognition.” The etymology for the term is fuzzy, but it’s believed to have originated in World War II. Some stories swap out “F*cked” for the more family-friendly “Fouled.”
Some people change it to the even more frank “F*cked Up By Assholes in the Rear.”
Like most slang, FUBAR has come and gone. It resurfaced in the 1970s when it found its way into management-speak, used by corporate executives, not by soldiers describing the danger they’re in and/or the leaders who have put their lives at risk. It came back again thanks to movies like Tango & Cash in the late ‘80s and Saving Private Ryan in the late ‘90s.
And now it’s back again, all thanks to Ah-nuld.
FUBAR now streams on Netflix.