Posted by Jay Livingston
A comment on my post about language anachronisms in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (here) has me rethinking my position. Maybe it’s not just a matter of right and wrong, of historical accuracy or inaccuracy. It’s also about cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. Much as I dislike the anachronisms, maybe I wouldn’t like the show so much if it were linguistically faithful to the period.
With the props, there’s no problem. We’re all cultural relativists. We think about those objects in the context of the times. We don’t mind a Studebaker parked in the street. And we’d howl if it were a Camry. But when it comes to language, we’re ethnocentrists, judging yesterday’s language by today’s norms.
To get a sense of this, I tried a thought experiment: What if the characters in the show spoke the way people in 1958 really spoke? Most of the dialogue would be the same, of course, especially for her parents and the other more conventional people in the show. But the people in a hip Greenwich Village club would be using words and phrases that were cool then but have long since disappeared.
Imagine Midge and Susie in conversation.
SUSIE: Nice necklaceI exaggerate. My point is that we can accept the period decor – the clothes and cars and furniture. Those are externals. If I were to walk around on the sound stage of Mrs. Maisel, I’d still be me. But language is internal. We think it tells us about the person, not the historical period. The outdated language makes the character a different person, and we don’t feel as close to her as we would if she spoke like us. Dig and cat and bread make her less (to use the current and very recent term) “relatable.” (Of course, given the show’s penchant for anachronism, I wouldn’t be surprised if in Season Two Susie tells Midge, “If you’re gonna do stand up, you gotta be relatable.” )
MIDGE: Yeah, some cat that was here last week laid it on me for twenty bucks.
SUSIE: Solid! You could hock it for more bread than that.
MIDGE: But I think it’s hot, you dig?
SUSIE: Nah, he’s probably just like that with chicks.
It’s easy to be a cultural relativist when it comes to the physical world. OK, we think, this is what a living room was like in 1958. We don’t think, “What kind of person would watch an old TV like that?” But with language, we’re more ethnocentric. Using those obsolete words today would seem forced and phony, so we make the same inferences about the characters that use themeven in a show set in 1958. “What kind of person would speak like that?” we ask. And the answer is, “Someone trying too hard to get us to think they’re hip.”
By contrast, unless our anachronism sensors are tuned in, when we hear them talk about “kicking ass” or being “out of the loop,” we think that they’re speaking “naturally” — using standard language to convey information, not to create an impression. They’re not phony, they’re relatable.
5 comments:
Jay:
Interesting. To stay on the pop-culture TV theme, your story reminds me of when my sister and I were watching an I Dream of Jeannie rerun when we were kids. We watched reruns all the time. Anyway, in this particular episode, Larry Hagman and his friend (ummm, lemme look this up, that's Major Nelson and Major Healey) get body-switched, so that Nelson is in Healey's body and vice-versa. Maybe Jeannie's mischievous sister did it to them, I don't remember. Anyway, the deal is that you can tell that it's really Nelson in Healey's body because Healey's body is speaking with Nelson's voice, and vice-versa. My sister was very amused by this, the idea that one's true essence was reflected in the voice. The funny thing is, decades later, she did psychology research on this!
The past is another country. If one is serious about portraying people in past historical periods authentically one has to challenge the audience to see them not as we are but as they actually were. This necessitates discomfiting the audience, and it requires them to do some work. The farther back you go the more radically different or "other" our own culture's former folkways, mores, and social practices are from the ones we currently practice. In fact we don't have to go back that far to experience a very noticeable cultural and ideological distance from the characters. If TMMM had been done a little more fearlessly we'd notice this distance much more intensely, and it would have made the show better. The beauty of historical fiction when it's done with acute attention to the details and an honesty about how "politically incorrect" the past was by today's standards is that while your characters shouldn't be "relatable" - they weren't "just like us" - they should be understood as fully human, just differently so.
Yes, you're right. To the audience, they should be speaking in "unmarked" (normal, unremarkable) language. If they really spoke as they did in the 1950's, they would seem odd and foreign and it would distract from their characters' personalities. It would be as if they had Arabic accents.
At the same time, do they really have to leave in hyper-modern slang from 2018 that could be gone in 2 years ("That's not a thing"). I can't believe that kind of language would get past so many people. Nothing in Mad Men was quite this jarring to me.
I can't believe the writers didn't notice "onesie" in S2 E2.
I guess that was especially jarring since as far as I recall that's only been in common usage here in Britain in the mid to late 2010s - apparently it originates in the '80s.
Maybe with this level of anachronism they should give up and say the show
uses Translation Convention?
What about the pantyhose gag in season 1? Pantyhose were not worn by everybody until about ten years later. Is that relatable language, or a fashion anachronism?
Post a Comment