Accent of evil
Two posts ago I discussed the rise of modern popular culture during the first part of the 20th century. I argued that it was phonetically influenced by three non-rhotic accent types: 1. Northeastern US, 2. Southern/African American, and to some extent 3. the British Empire’s ‘Received Pronunciation’. I described how the first of these became marginalized, as it was in the democratic nature of popular culture that the majority accent, General American, came to predominate in the USA.
In the following post, I went on to consider the special case of popular music, where Southern/African American pronunciation continues to exert influence throughout the English-speaking world.
Today I want to consider the status of the third accent, RP, in popular culture. In particular, the widespread and often discussed idea that British or English speech is associated with evil.
An article in the Independent from 2010 begins:
From middle earth to a galaxy far far away, there exists a truth universal since the dawn of Hollywood time: bad guys speak with British accents. But it is a truth that British actress Dame Helen Mirren has become fed up with.
Speaking at an event in Los Angeles to celebrate British success in Hollywood, Dame Helen said British actors were an “easy target”. “I think it’s rather unfortunate that the villain in every movie is always British,” she said.
When people make this claim, the sort of thing they mention is George Sanders as the villainous tiger Shere Khan in Disney’s Jungle Book:
Or Steven Berkoff’s smuggling art dealer in Beverly Hills Cop:
Or Jeremy Irons’ villainous lion Scar in Disney’s Lion King:
Or Benedict Cumberbatch’s super-villain Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness:
Many writers have tried to explain this phenomenon – I think wrongly – in terms of historical American resentment towards Britain. In a Daily Mail article Barry Norman, for decades the BBC’s main film critic, wrote: “Americans have a brooding resentment of the lordly way we used to rule our colonies there”. And an older online article on the BBC’s h2g2 site claims that “the concept of the British as the ‘old masters’ and British influence as an unjust yoke to be thrown off is deeply ingrained in American cultural history”.
It’s worth pointing out that these writers aren’t very accurate about the accents they’re describing. According to the BBC article, “Beginning with Errol Flynn’s classic portrayal… Hollywood Robin Hoods have had American accents”. But the Australian Errol did not have an American accent. Here he is exhibiting BATH-broadening, non-rhoticity and a generally British vowel system in I’ll get myself a staff… What else d’you call a man who takes advantage of the King’s misfortune to seize his power?
And both the Independent and Mail articles claim that Anthony Hopkins played the villainous Hannibal Lecter with an English accent. Again, false. Hopkins is clearly Southern USA in his famous first scene with Jodie Foster’s agent Starling (Closer… from the student body… That is the Duomo seen from the Belvedere):
Elsewhere he’s occasionally rhotic, generally lacks BATH-broadening, has unrounded LOT. Not an English accent.
More importantly, the writers are missing the main point by thinking in national terms – filmmakers from one nation, the USA, supposedly choosing actors on the basis of negative feelings about another nation, Britain. I think the primary factor is social rather than national: the most important thing about ‘British villains’ is not their country of origin but the fact that they sound upper class.
This was vividly demonstrated earlier this year when Jaguar, the Indian-owned British luxury car manufacturer, launched a lavish TV campaign to around 90 million viewers during the Super Bowl, America’s annual football championship game. Starring Tom Hiddleston, Sir Ben Kingsley and Mark Strong, and directed by Tom Hooper of The King’s Speech, the ad begins “Have you ever noticed how in Hollywood movies all the villains are played by Brits? Maybe we just sound right…” A helicopter races a Jaguar around famous London tourist spots while the British stars tells us, tongue in cheek, that “we’re more focused, more precise… we’re always one step ahead… we’re obsessed by power… and we all drive Jaguars. Oh yes, it’s good to be bad.”
Jaguar 2014 Big Game Commercial British Villains Rendezvous Jaguar USA
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The Jaguar campaign helps us to understand the perception of this type of accent in the English speaking world, though it’s worded in the same national terms (“Brits”) as before. We have to grasp two things. On the one hand, the accent at the heart of the matter is not any British accent but Received Pronunciation, the accent of the British empire’s ruling elite. RP, as I put it in another post, was from its very conception the accent of privilege. On the other hand, modern post-imperial culture places value on democracy and equality, which dovetail with traditional values like compassion for the poor and disadvantaged; a corollary of this has been the stigmatization of privilege. In storytelling, audiences sympathize and identify with the ordinary, the humble and the vulnerable more than with the privileged and the wealthy.
So RP-type speech is a good choice for evoking elitist associations in adverts, appealing to consumers who want to demonstrate their wealth and high class tastes. But it’s easier for a Jaguar to pass through the eye of a needle than for an audience to empathize with an unfairly advantaged character, especially one who flaunts their status. Materialistically, we may envy the trappings; but morally, these trappings (including the accent) are associated with being bad.
Of course not all villains speak RP. We’ve already seen that Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter was not RP-speaking; besides, the real villain of The Silence of the Lambs is the serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’, an American played by an American. Many of the most iconic villains are American, especially when the villainy comes not from privilege but from mental disturbance or social marginalization: Psycho‘s Norman Bates (and various other slashers), Robert Mitchum’s psychopaths in Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter, assorted Dennis Hopper villains, Batman’s nemesis the Joker, Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Kathy Bates in Misery, and any number of manipulative femmes fatales and Italian-American gangsters.
And not all RP-speakers are villains. The accent’s eliteness is sometimes exploited for non-evil connotations, such as benign seniority. Think of Obi-Wan Kenobi as portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness in Star Wars or Sir Patrick Stewart’s captain on the generally American-speaking starship Enterprise. Another niche of potentially sympathetic RP speakers are higher-ranking servants from the old days, like Jeeves and Mary Poppins, or Batman’s butler Alfred.
Further, British characters who don’t speak RP are often sympathetic. James Bond conquered the world (including the US) in the Scottish-accented form of Sean Connery. A London accent is similarly free of villainous baggage, whether real, like Michael Caine’s, or preposterous, like Dick Van Dyke’s. Some years ago American car insurer GEICO decided that the animated gecko in their TV ads should switch from RP to Cockney, as discussed on Language Log. (Only the elite drive Jaguars, but everyone needs car insurance.)
So it’s not Britishness but classiness that causes the problems. Villains often like classical music, and RP is the phonetic equivalent.
The clinching evidence that it’s about class rather than nationality is this: the same associations of RP apply within Britain.
Every Christmas season, British theatres are given over to pantomime, panto for short. Pantos are musical comedy fantasies based on traditional children’s stories, including Snow White, Cinderella, Aladdin, Babes in the Wood, Dick Whittington, Peter Pan. Usually, these stories feature a young, humble and/or disadvantaged hero or heroine struggling against a grand, older, powerful and often titled villain, such as a wicked queen or wizard, King Rat, etc. In panto it’s normal for the performers to have regional accents – except for the villain, who of course speaks RP. In this brief and amusing ad for a production of Aladdin in Glasgow, three of the four performers (hero, genie, and cross-dressing ‘dame’) have Scottish accents, while the villain Abanazar speaks RP:
King’s Theatre Glasgow 2013 pantomime Aladdin
To buy tickets visit… http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/aladdin/kings-theatre/ We’re delighted to announce that we are reuniting the cast from last year’s cr…
In this panto from Basildon, Essex, an Estuary-ish dame interacts with a Captain Hook whose RP has a posh old æ vowel (starting 3:25):
It’s Smee…! Pantomime Dame-Peter Pan
Mrs Smee – opening routine – Peter Pan at the Towngate Theatre, Basildon – 2012/13. (Featuring Bryan Torfeh as Captain Hook)
So, just like Americans, Brits associate grand villainy with upmarket accents. The very British cast of the Harry Potter films includes quite a few upmarket speakers, but outclassing the rest as megalomaniac-snob-racist Lord [sic] Voldemort is Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, eighth cousin of the Prince of Wales:
Note for example Fiennes’ æ in Harry and the backish first element of proud, now posh and old-fashioned.
Poshness and old-fashionedness go hand in hand because of sociophonetic change in Britain/England over the last half century. Traditionally, as I explained in an earlier post, there was a fairly straightforward, linear relation between social class and prestige, but changes in social attitudes – which can’t simply be attributed to Hollywood – had the effect of stigmatizing privilege. Crudely:
With their growing stigmatization, posh accents became increasingly marginal in the British mass media which they formerly dominated. By 1982 John Wells had to invoke the concept of ‘U-RP’, i.e. RP posh enough to carry negative associations. The typical speakers he suggested were amusing stereotypes, such as the dowager duchess and the elderly Oxbridge don; at least one, the Terry-Thomas cad, counts as a villain. Increasingly it became the role of posher speakers to be laughed at and/or vanquished.
(The clip of King Rat and dame above nicely shows how villains are there not merely to be defeated but also to be deflated. This mockery can even be self-directed, as it often was by Noël Coward; in their different ways Stephen Fry, Hugh Grant and Boris Johnson gained popularity playing their poshness comedically.)
The character of Sherlock Holmes is interesting in this regard. Though a crimefighter, Holmes has several of the characteristics of a villain, including withering haughtiness, a violin and a drug habit. He’s been notably portrayed by stars who often played villains, like Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing. Audiences empathize more with Holmes’s more human sidekick Dr Watson, and recent Watsons have been given less posh, more ‘contemporary’ personas and accents – Jude Law on the big screen, Martin Freeman on TV. Compared with Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch – who’s also made ads for Jaguar – has a closer FACE vowel and opener THOUGHT, and he occasionally likes to use a geunine iː in FLEECE (send your least irritating officers and an ambulance… to lead others to peace in a world at war):
It’s therefore unsurprising that in the epic Hobbit films Martin Freeman plays the hero while the posher Cumberbatch plays the villain.
Which brings us back to the national question. The Hobbit films are obviously set not in Britain, but in some supranational anglosphere. And the traditional status of RP, a product of the empire’s heyday was supranational. RP was often defined as being crucially unspecific as to the origins of its speaker, who might be from Surrey, Inverness, Vancouver or Rhodesia. The term ‘Received Pronunciation’ contained no reference to its nationality: it was simply the respectable way to pronounce the English language.
The semiotics of RP have continued to function throughout the ‘inner circle’ of the English-speaking world, mother country and ex-colonies alike. Those ex-colonies had flatter social structures and lacked distinct upper classes of their own, so the empire’s elite accent continued to symbolize a social pinnacle everywhere. Even in long-independent America, a sign of the lingering aura of RP was the old stage accent sometimes known as ‘American Theater Standard’ — an Americanized RP which implicitly deferred to the elite status of the old country’s ruling accent.
Hollywood bore no grudge against the British. On the contrary, Hollywood has been unstintingly hospitable to British talent from Charlie Chaplin to the present day. But Hollywood, like British panto, has always favoured stories which pit underdogs against overdogs. For those overdogs it has consistently acknowledged and exploited the most elite accent of the anglosphere: RP.
It has become an international stylistic trope, not unlike the international adoption of American accents for pop/rock singing. In popular culture, performers who approximate RP are tapping into a range of associations that include old-fashionedness, seniority, cultivation, traditional manners, expensive education and tastes, haughtiness, smugness, pomposity and, in many narrative contexts, evil.
The blog has been hacked recently. I will try to restore missing recent comments when I have the time.
So that is what happened! I was surprised to see no one commented. How awful.
Would you consider Zeinab Badawi to be another one of the people from the BBC with posh accents, as a person having similar accent to Frank Gardiner’s?
I’d call that Adoptive RP, as it sounds a bit too careful for a native speaker. This is one of the few terms coined by Wells 1982 that doesn’t seem to have caught on in discussions of accents.
That’s interesting.
She was born in Sudan, but she has been living in the UK since she was three.
There are quite a few others who seem to have an accent a bit posher than the rest of the people from the BBC. Perhaps David Willis? Or Tom Brook?
If this is who you mean by Tom Brooks, he sounds to have a slight lisp. Otherwise his pronunciation sounds like a typical BBC reader in Britain.
If this is David Willis, then I would say “near-RP” and I don’t think that he sounds especially posh. On occasions his vowel in START sounds more fronted than most BBC reporters. This could be the influence of living in the USA or (if Wikipedia is right) of having grown up in East Anglia.
Those are the two journalists.
Tom Brooks has a lisp? Where in the video did you hear it?
David Willis has a fronter START (START or PALM?)?
I think the nasality of their voices contributes a bit to my impression.
By ‘posh’ I don’t mean ‘as posh as Prince Charles or the Queen’, but ‘closer to the neutral, a bit older RP than most other colleagues’.
Listen to how Tom Brooks says “success” at 2:30. I think that there is a bit of a lisp there, but maybe I’m imagining things.
These speakers seem to be trying to speak clearly, which is all good in broadcast journalism. However, it’s usually people who are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths who feel that they need to make an effort. Those who were born into privilege often don’t feel the same pressures. Some recordings of the old RP can actually sound quite unclear to a modern listener. For example, John Maynard Keynes used to speak very quickly in old-fashioned RP, and a lot of BBC recordings from the era sound like this.
I’ve just listened to Tom Brook (not Brooks; I shouldn’t correct you when I too made a few mistakes in these comments), and what I think leads me to believe he is a bit posher than the rest in his pronunciation is the definitely lax HAPPY vowel and a noticeable presence of smoothing.
I will have to bump onto David Willis.
There are a few others who I think are closer to Traditional Received Pronunciation, but I wouldn’t want to be wrong so I won’t say.
Thank you for that John Maynard Keyes! I love it. I presume you detest it? The pronunciation is very clear; I undersood his every word, which is why I found your second paragraph contradictory.
I can’t say I like the pronunciation of Imogen Foulkes or Martin Patience the same way, though I do understand them completely.
I’m being perfectly honest when I say that I find John Maynard Keynes quite hard to understand. Actually, I’m quite sympathetic to his economic views, but I’m just not used to that mode of speaking. My paragraph was not contradictory. Just because you understand it clearly doesn’t mean everyone will do.
Anyway, I hope that you can see that Tom Brooks and David Willis sound nothing like Keynes, so that’s why I’d say that they are not traditional RP.
Funny – no women. I wonder what would Eleanor Audley, the American actress, classify as.
The one accent I wanted to hear from Benedict Cumberbatch was when he played the aristocrat David Scott-Fowler in Thea Sharrock’s version of Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance. The dialect coach for that play was Jeannette Nelson. The Telegraph journalist Harry Mount said: “Several of the actors really go overboard on the Celia Johnson/Noel Coward school of English, stretching their vowels into outlandishly grand contortions.”.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/harrymount/100045192/the-national-theatre-now-treats-terence-rattigans-english-as-a-dialect/
The villains in question tend to be rich and powerful, so in a male-dominated world there tend to be fewer females of the type. The main Bond villains, for example, are never women; even Rosa Klebb was only “Number Three”. (The power of the femme fatale is very different, and British femmes fatales are relatively rare.)
In the more magical worlds of panto and Disney there are a good few villainesses, including Eleanor Audley’s roles in the animated Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. I think there was a grey area between old upmarket New York City (Audley was a New Yorker, b. 1905), ‘American Theater Standard’ and the older kind of attempt at a British accent, eg Betty Lou Gerson’s Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians. ‘Mid-Atlantic’ accents are rarer now: assuming Audley’s Sleeping Beauty role in the new Maleficent, Angelina Jolie is decidedly British.
Thanks for the Telegraph link. I didn’t see that production, but it’s fairly rare for period productions to make a real attempt at the accents, so not surprising that some would find it obtrusive. I see that the Telegraph reviewer raved (as did the Guardian), with no complaints about accents.
I’m glad that you brought that up; it is staggering to see how many actors cannot do a period accent correctly. One of your entries, with a sample from Lady Mary’s monologue from Downton Abbey, is a perfect example. None of the vowels were right.
Even Maggie Smith restrains herself. I hope that that is the case, and that she knows how to do it.
Even people who say they know 17 British accents cannot do it right, not even Mainstream Received Pronunciation:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20140619-one-woman-17-british-accents
I presume it would be too intrusive and that that is why the producers and directors don’t insist on it. When Harriet Scott popped up on Downton Abbey, her attempt was a bit too visible, or should I say audible.
Thank you for the reply about Eleanor Audley. I presume it was so. I needed confirmation and to know how British her ‘Mid-Atlantic accent’ was. I’m surprised that you say that it still exists.
I meant Harriet Walker, of course.
Why are you so obsessed with traditional RP? It’s not obligatory for an actor or actress to speak it. Most people in the audience don’t judge a show on whether the vowels are perfect.
I’m not.
It’s you who are stitching such an etiquette onto my comments.
No one mentioned obligation.
Inadvertently, you’ve even called Geoff Lyndsay of being obsessed, since this blog talks about Traditional RP ever since the beginning.
Geoff Lindsay says that traditional RP is dead and that we should all move on from it.
Excellent post, Geoff. I love the idea that the true hallmarks of a villain include playing the violin. Pure evil!
Thanks, Martin. I suppose the fiddle’s evil associations go back at least to Paganini. Choirs in movies seem to be relatively heavenly 😉
By the way, Geoff, did that clip with “extra vitality and good looks” go away too with the comments after the hacking? I can’t find it.
Hey Aleph, I’ve got to ask (and sorry everyone for going off-topic) — are you by any chance the same Aleph who used to post on a certain Serbian forum on language?
No, I’m afraid not. Why do you ask?
Well, it seemed like too much of a coincidence to have two people broadly interested in phonetics whose Internet handle is Aleph. : )
In the revived Doctor Who, there are few female villians who sound – to my ears at least – quite posh. They include the Slitheen from Raxacoricofallapatorious (played by Annette Badland) in “Boomtown” who tries to blow up the Earth to get a wave to surf on, and the nanny Miss Foster (played by Sarah Lancashire) in “Partners in Crime”.
Speaking about difficulties in understanding people, do any of you understand what Brian Sewell says around 00:40:
http://vimeo.com/8518085
“My memory *tis not …”
His memory is not what?
Or around 22:07 and 23:09
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/dida91/dida91_19940619-1115a.mp3
– fortunate in that the … what and comparative what?
I think that the association of RP with evil began with Lord Haw Haw.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/hawhaw/8904.shtml
oh wow, I havent noticed till your article.
Thanks for providing all the video and audio recordings.
You’re welcome. Thanks for commenting!