<?page no="0"?> S C H W E I Z E R A N G L I S T I S C H E A R B E I T E N S W I S S S T U D I E S I N E N G L I S H Lukas Bleichenbacher Multilingualism in the Movies Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices <?page no="1"?> Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten Swiss Studies in English Begründet von Bernhard Fehr Herausgegeben von Andreas Fischer (Zürich), Martin Heusser (Zürich), Jürg R. Schwyter (Lausanne), Werner Senn (Bern) Band 135 <?page no="3"?> Lukas Bleichenbacher Multilingualism in the Movies Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices <?page no="4"?> Cover illustration: Lukas Bleichenbacher, Collage made from Pieter Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel and a photographic film Cover design: Martin Heusser, Zürich This thesis was accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zurich in the summer semester 2007 on the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer and Prof. Dr. Richard J. Watts. Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Bibliographical information of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; for detailed bibliographical data please contact http: / / dnb.d-nb.de © 2008 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen All rights, including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translate, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. Internet: http: / / www.francke.de E-Mail: info@francke.de Printed and bound by Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed in Germany ISSN 0080-7214 ISBN 978-3-7720-8270-2 <?page no="5"?> To my parents <?page no="7"?> Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people: First, the teachers who, over the years, made a few of the world’s languages less foreign to me, especially Georges Fausch, Ivo Stolz, and Viktor Yurovsky. My supervisor Andreas Fischer, for his helpful advice, and Richard J. Watts (University of Berne), for acting as a Second Reader of this work. Sarah Chevalier, for carefully reading earlier drafts of this book, and for many fascinating linguistic discussions. A number of expert speakers of specific languages, for their invaluable help with my transcriptions: Paris De Belder (Spanish), Lena Mader (Serbian), Dorota Smyk-Bhattacharjee (Polish), Julia Nasčiaková (Czech), and especially Anna Bernold (Russian). Many more colleagues and friends who offered critical advice during different stages of this work, including Małgorżata Haładewicz-Grzelak, Martin Heusser, Sebastian Hoffmann, Arlette Huguenin Dumittan, Marta Inigo, Anja Janoschka, Ursina Kellerhals, Hans Martin Lehmann, Georges Lüdi, Martin Mühlheim, Adrian Pablé, Thomas Schalow, and Gudrun Ziegler. The Swiss National Science Foundation for their generous financial support of this publication. My family, and especially my wife Amália, for her patience in explaining to me some of the movies. <?page no="9"?> Contents 1 Introduction 1 Plan of the book 3 2 Multilingualism in the real world 7 2.1 Introduction 7 2.2 Societal and individual multilingualism 7 Language variation and language contact 7 Individual multilingualism 9 2.3 Language choice 11 The communicative situation 11 Code-switching 13 Accommodation and language mode 14 Multilingual discourse as a political strategy 16 2.4 Linguicism versus linguistic courtesy 17 Linguicism 17 Mock Spanish and linguistic racism 18 Linguistic courtesy 19 3 Multilingualism in fiction 21 3.1 Introduction 21 3.2 Formal aspects 22 Contexts of literary production 22 From elimination to presence: Mareš’s taxonomy 23 3.3 Functional aspects 26 Realism 26 Social criticism 27 Humor 29 3.4 Characterization and stereotyping 30 Contrast 30 Stereotyping 31 3.5 Linguicism in the movies 33 The semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation 33 Iconization 35 Fractal recursivity 36 Erasure 37 <?page no="10"?> X Contents 4 The Language Contact Movie Corpus 39 4.1 Introduction 39 4.2 Linguistic criteria 40 Migration 44 Tourism 45 Crime and terrorism 46 International conflicts 47 4.3 Generic criteria 48 4.4 Economic criteria 49 4.5 Chronological criteria 51 4.6 The replacement and presence sub-corpora 52 5 Replacement strategies 55 5.1 Introduction 55 5.2 Elimination and signalization 57 5.3 Evocation 59 Accents and code-switching 60 Other forms of evocation 66 5.4 Partial presence 70 Orders and background utterances 70 Prayers and songs 72 Linguistic landscape 73 Unrealistic code-switching 78 5.5 Individual multilingualism 83 5.6 Conclusions 90 6 Characterization 93 6.1 Introduction 93 6.2 Coding procedure 94 Selecting the characters 94 Sex and age 96 Nationality/ ethnicity and L1 98 Linguistic repertoire 100 Occupation 103 Narrative importance 105 Narrative evaluation 106 6.3 Results 112 Sex, L1, and linguistic repertoire 113 Age, L1, and linguistic repertoire 115 Occupation, L1, and linguistic repertoire 116 <?page no="11"?> Contents XI Narrative importance, L1, and linguistic repertoire 118 Narrative evaluation, L1, and linguistic repertoire 119 Cross-genre differences 120 Cross-textual differences 121 6.4 Representation of L2 use 124 Interlanguage grammar and lexis 125 Interlanguage pragmatics 130 Impoliteness: beyond interlanguage 132 Who uses interlanguage? 135 6.5 Summary and conclusion 144 7 Language choice 147 7.1 Introduction 147 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 148 Linguistic profile of movie scenes 149 Intertextual differences 153 Setting and language choice 158 Activity and language choice 164 Mood and language choice 166 Minor categories of language choice 169 7.3 Comprehensibility 173 Subtitles 174 Cognates and well-known expressions 178 Incomprehensible dialogue 181 Interpreting 183 Conclusions 190 7.4 Code-switching 191 Situational code-switching 193 Metaphorical or marked code-switching 202 Indexical code-switching 208 Edited code-switching 211 7.5 Summary and conclusion 214 8 Conclusions 219 Works Cited 223 Bibliography 223 Filmography 234 <?page no="12"?> List of Tables Table 1: Matrix of four different communicative situations, based on Lüdi and Py (2002: 160 f ) Table 2: A taxonomy of multilingualism in fictional texts, based on Mareš (2000a, 2000b, 2003) Table 3: The language contact movie corpus Table 4: List of movies with replacement of other languages Table 5: James Bond’s second languages in six movies Table 6: List of movies with presence of other languages Table 7: Sex and age of movie characters Table 8: Nationality versus L1 of characters Table 9: L1 and linguistic repertoires of characters Table 10: Occupation of characters Table 11: Narrative importance and sex of characters Table 12: Narrative evaluation and importance of characters Table 13: Number of positive and negative OL1 characters in all 16 movies Table 14: L2 proficiency of multilingual movie characters Table 15: Comparison of L2 proficiency of mixed-language protagonist couples Table 16: Speaker turns by L1 of speakers and language(s) used Table 17: Linguistic repertoires and languages used in movie scenes Table 18: Average of turns in three categories of scenes Table 19: Settings of movie scenes per country Table 20: Local setting of movie scenes Table 21: Main activity of movie scenes Table 22: Mood of movie scenes Table 23: Average number of turns in endolingual EL scenes and exolingual OL scenes Table 24: Comprehensibility strategies in scenes with OL dialogue Table 25: A French dialogue and its English subtitles in comparison Table 26: Motivations for code-switching in scenes with multilingual dialogue Table 27: Compared ranking of movies by positive characterization and amount of OL turns <?page no="13"?> List of Charts Chart 1: Sex, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters Chart 2: Age, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters Chart 3: Occupation, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters Chart 4: Narrative importance, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters Chart 5: Narrative evaluation, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters Chart 6: Narrative evaluation of OL1 characters in comedies and noncomedies Chart 7: Scenes per movie and category of language choice Chart 8: Countries and categories of language choice Chart 9: Local settings and categories of language choice Chart 10: Main activities and categories of language choice Chart 11: Mood and categories of language choice List of Figures Figure 1: Screenshot from Amadeus (1984) Figure 2: Screenshot from GoldenEye (1995) Figure 3: Screenshot from The World Is Not Enough (1999) Figure 4: Screenshot from The Pianist (2002) Figures 5-7: Screenshots from Schindler’s List (1993) Figure 8: Screenshot from Licence to Kill (1989) Figure 9: Screenshot from The Peacemaker (1997) Figure 10: Screenshot from Just Married (2003) Figure 11: Screenshot from Sabrina (1995) Figure 12: Screenshot from Green Card (1990) Figure 13: Screenshot from French Kiss (1995) Figure 14: Screenshot from Braveheart (1995) Figure 15: Screenshot from Frantic (1988) Figure 16: Screenshot from Red Heat (1988) <?page no="14"?> Key to transcriptions of movie excerpts Bold face any dialogue in a language other than English Normal face any dialogue in English (italic face in brackets) any comments on the scene transcribed Small Caps subtitles (‘inverted commas in brackets’) my translation of dialogue where subtitles do not exist (…) excerpt is preceded or followed by more speaker turns within the scene [text in square brackets] overlapping parts of speaker turns ‘text in inverted commas’ characters quoting somebody in their turns xxx or xxx incomprehensible part of turn in English or other language Frequently used abbreviations EL English language EL1 English as a first language IMDb Internet Movie Database L1 First language L2 Second language OL Other language OL1 Other language as a first language <?page no="15"?> Chapter 1: Introduction Conversation is important, but it is not the only thing that people listen to. (Rampton 1998: 311) Switzerland often serves as the prototypical example of a country with a high degree of both societal and individual multilingualism. Four languages are declared as official by the Federal Constitution, and for generations, school language policy has ensured that everybody is taught at least basic comprehension skills in the two dominant languages, German and French. In recent years however, commentators have noticed a growing preference for many German speakers to learn English - a language deemed more useful and prestigious - rather than French, a phenomenon which is considered a threat to interethnic stability in the small multicultural country. The German speakers’ shifting allegiances are reflected, on the other side of the main language border, by negative attitudes towards German among many French speakers. A few years ago, an article in a Swiss newspaper reported that the reluctance of French-speaking pupils to learn German at school is partly rooted in cultural stereotypes transported by war movies: whenever teachers of German as a foreign language ask their beginner students which German words come to their mind spontaneously, Heil Hitler is always a sure bet (Büchi 2003). What this anecdote illustrates is that attitudes towards certain languages, or indeed towards multilingualism in general, can in part be informed by media representations even when the people who develop these attitudes have plenty of opportunities for real-life instances of language contact. Therefore, medial texts can be considered all the more relevant in cases where for the audience, they constitute the major or only form of contact with certain languages. Accordingly, they can influence the way in which we reflect on people’s multilingual practices - as migrants, tourists, or simply second language learners. Clearly, these texts are well worth having a closer look at. The aim of this book is to outline a framework for the description and interpretation of how multilingual practices are represented in contemporary mainstream Hollywood movies. My approach consists of both qualitative and quantitative analyses of movie dialogues, informed by different linguistic theories of language choice, with special attention given to the fictional nature of my data. More specifically, my goal is to test a charge often levelled at Hollywood filmmakers, namely that Hollywood movies perpetuate patterns of negative stereotyping with regard to the use and the speakers of other <?page no="16"?> 2 Chapter 1: Introduction languages, thereby bolstering monolingual and anglocentric language ideologies. Examples of these accusations include Schiffman’s (2001) statement that in the movies, “people speaking ‘foreign’ languages are up to no good”, and Kozloff ’s (1999: 82) assertion that she is “not convinced” that “contemporary filmmakers are more enlightened and held to higher standards of accuracy and sensitivity”. My approach is based on the insight that social practices in general, and language in particular, are co-constructed by the media as one of many other sources of influence. This is especially true with respect to the myriad forms in which the English language is used on a daily basis, above all by the majority of its speakers for whom it is a second or foreign language. Graddol (1997: 7) designates the audio-visual media as a defining characteristic of “Late Modern English”, the latest of seven stages in the history of the English language. Hollywood movies have been one of many factors that have contributed to the spectacular spread of English worldwide (Crystal 2004: 16 f ), and in turn, the language used in movie dialogues has had an influence on at least some registers of contemporary English (McArthur 2002: 186; Cotter 2001: 430 f ), and on other languages as well (Graddol 1997: 46 f ). A survey called “Europeans and Languages”, commissioned by the European Union to estimate in which contexts people use the second languages they know, showed that the interviewees’ second most frequent context of second language use was watching movies and television - after holidays, but even before language use at the workplace (European Commission 2001: 7). Linguistic studies of fictional conversations are relatively rare, and similarly, there has been a tendency for film scholars to devote little attention to dialogue analysis (see Kozloff 2002: 6 ff ) - the reason being that many prefer the characters to talk as little as possible: “[b]orn silent, the cinema continues to love silence” (Carrière 1994: 31). Still, discourse analysts and sociolinguists have become increasingly aware of the importance of fictional representations of language use - or rather, they have sought to reconsider the major focus of attention of their ‘mother discipline’, philology. Naturally, the aim cannot be to mistake texts such as movie dialogues for absolutely faithful representations of their real-life counterparts; they are “too carefully polished, too rhythmically balanced, too self-consciously artful” (Kozloff 2002: 25 f ). However, in Tannen’s (1994: 139) view, fictional conversations can indeed reveal “unconsciously-adhered-to assumptions” of how speakers conceive of verbal interaction in general. Likewise, Coupland (2004: 258) asserts that they “can sometimes reveal social processes more clearly than lived reality”, and Pablé (2004) understands them as prime sources for the study of language ideologies and linguistic stereotyping. In particular, Kozloff (2002: <?page no="17"?> Chapter 1: Introduction 3 26 f ) points out that much could be gained from dialogue analysis in the study of negative portrayals of minorities (linguistic or other). In her view, what commentators have often overlooked is how much the speech patterns of the stereotyped character contribute to the viewer’s conception of his or her worth; the ways in which dialect, mispronunciation, and inarticulateness have been used to ridicule and stigmatize characters have often been neglected. Who gets to speak about what? Who is silenced? Who is interrupted? Dialogue is often the first place we should go to understand how film reflects social prejudices. In this study, different languages lie at the focus of attention, rather than intralinguistic phenomena such as dialect or register variation. The increasing presence of multilingual discourse in medial texts can be seen from the ongoing scholarly interest reflected by publications such as Piller (2003), Busch (2004), or Kelly-Holmes (2005), and the findings of these studies are complemented by this book. Plan of the book Chapter 2 contains an introduction to the relevant scholarly findings on multilingualism in real life. There, I discuss the common distinction between societal and individual multilingualism, and offer an overview of sociolinguistic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic approaches to language choice. Special attention is paid to code-switching as a form of discourse used by multilingual individuals for a wide variety of reasons, including less directly obvious ones such as political agendas. In a final section, I situate my work within the recent tradition of critical sociolinguistics, where the denunciation of linguicism, defined as social practices that discriminate against specific language users, is a central aim. In chapter 3, the focus is on how multilingualism is represented in fictional texts, such as narrative prose, drama and the cinema. In my discussion of formal aspects, I introduce the distinction, based on a taxonomy proposed by Mareš (2000a; 2000b; 2003), between movies where languages other than English are present in the dialogues, and those where these languages are replaced with English, as if in a translation. Then, I review accounts of the different functional aspects of multilingualism in fiction, such as realistic representation, social criticism, humor, and characterization. I will argue that while linguicist representations are by no means the common denominator of these functions, it is the domain of characterization where these are most likely to surface. In a final section, I propose a catalogue of features that characterize stereotypically linguicist representations in the movies. There, <?page no="18"?> 4 Chapter 1: Introduction my approach is informed by the three semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation (iconization, fractal recursivity and erasure) outlined by Irvine and Gal (2000). Chapter 4 presents the corpus of 28 language contact movies (listed in table 3, chapter 4 below) chosen for the analysis and discusses the criteria of their selection. The movies are all commercially successful mainstream English-language movies released between 1983 and 2004 with European or American settings. The stories narrated are reasonably realistic and prominently depict situations of language contact with characters who speak languages other than English. Typical genres include action thrillers, war movies, historical drama and intercultural comedies. Among the movies selected for analysis, I distinguish between two sub-corpora: 16 movies are characterized by the presence of other languages, whereas in twelve, the strategy of replacement is used. Replacement is the focus of chapter 5, where I discuss and exemplify Mareš’s taxonomy in more detail. Replacement strategies differ in the extent to which the nature of the replaced languages are made obvious to the viewer - who, in some cases, may even fail to appreciate that the strategy is used at all, and draw the false conclusion that the characters would really be speaking English. Special attention is given to the representation of different degrees of individual multilingualism, and in what way these can be made obvious even if one or more languages are replaced. In chapter 6, the discussion of individual multilingualism is extended to the sub-corpus of 16 movies with the presence of other languages. The chapter contains a quantitative study of 518 movie characters, all coded for relevant information, including sex, age, occupation, narrative role and evaluation, and their linguistic repertoire. One major question is whether being a multilingual individual makes a movie character more or less powerful, important, or positive. A further point of interest is how characters differ in the way in which they are portrayed as users of second languages: is it true that all bad guys speak ‘broken English’, or is the overall picture more complex? Chapter 7 is based on the same data as the preceding chapter, but the focus is on the conversations as such. The issue of language choice is addressed from three different viewpoints. Firstly, there is the global choice of languages in the different movie scenes: what are the typical settings, social activities, and narrative moods that accompany scenes with dialogue in English, other languages, or a combination thereof? Secondly, when and how is the content expressed in other languages made comprehensible to the viewer who does not understand them? Thirdly, what is the nature of code-switching in movie dialogues: does it appear as reasonably realistic, or grossly stereotypical and <?page no="19"?> Chapter 1: Introduction 5 odd? The results are then compared to those of chapter 6, in an attempt to rank the 16 movies on a scale from little to much linguicism in representation. The concluding chapter 8 puts the results into context. <?page no="21"?> Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world 2.1 Introduction What is multilingualism? A useful starting point can be found in the introduction to the book Bilingualism and the Latin Language, a study of how multilingual practices are reflected in written sources from Roman Antiquity, where Adams (2003: 7 f ) argues that [t]he merchant who manages to communicate in a foreign market place with a mixture of gestures and words of the foreign language shorn of some inflectional morphemes and articulated in a foreign accent may in a sense be described as a practising ‘bilingual’, but his proficiency in the second language is at a far remove from that, say, of a foreign ambassador who delivers a speech in Latin at Rome on a political subject. Adams’s observation illustrates three main aspects of multilingualism: (1) societal multilingualism, or the social reasons for and manifestations of language contact; (2) individual multilingualism, or the extent to which persons know and use more than one language; and (3) multilingual discourse, defined as the use of more than one language within a given spoken or written text. This chapter contains a brief survey of the three aspects, with special emphasis on the third one, where different approaches to language choice are discussed. The aim of this discussion is not to offer a comprehensive introduction to the enormous field, but to describe those insights gained by scholars in studies of real-life multilingualism that are most relevant for a comparison with its cinematic representations. As a common denominator, many contemporary scholarly approaches share an increasingly favourable assessment of multilingualism - to the extent that monolingualism, the opposite phenomenon, has come to be known as a “cureable disease” among some sociolinguists (see Phillipson 2003: 63). This viewpoint explains why much recent sociolinguistic work is informed by a pronounced criticism of monolingual attitudes, ideologies and practices, which is discussed in the final section of this chapter. 2.2 Societal and individual multilingualism Language variation and language contact Multilingualism - I use the word as an umbrella term for the use of two (bilingualism) or more languages - has two necessary ingredients: language variation and language contact. The first phenomenon is the core area of <?page no="22"?> 8 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world interest for variationist sociolinguists, who have found increasingly sophisticated explanations for the interrelations between linguistic differences on the one hand, and social factors on the other. Linguistic varieties have been found to reflect their speakers’ individual biography and social background, while different registers (language varieties used in specific contexts) and styles (varieties characteristic of distinct levels of formality) index social contexts in a precise and fairly predictable way. Moreover, pragmatic approaches to language variation emphasize how speakers, rather than being strictly confined in their use of different varieties, take conscious choices and exploit the different linguistic means available to them, for instance to negotiate power relations or interpersonal relationships in any given communicative situation. The sociolinguistic study of language variation has also contributed to our appreciation of language change, or the question of how similar varieties may become more and more distinct, until in the long run, they cease to be mutually comprehensible, and are then considered different languages 1 altogether. If we understand language mainly or exclusively as a tool for communication, such a development may appear as essentially absurd. This is the conclusion offered by core myths of Western (and other) cultures, such as the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis (11, 1-9), where societal multilingualism is portrayed as a form of divine punishment. In contrast, linguists point out that communication would be harmed, rather than improved, if language were not a “flexible, adjustable system” (Aitchison 1996: 30); in Baker’s words, “diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival” (Baker 2001: 51; see also Crystal 2000). Language contact occurs when speakers of different languages interact. As the main reasons, large-scale processes such as territorial expansion (e. g. colonization), political unions, border contacts and migration have been identified (Edwards 1994: 33 ff; Wei 2000a: 3 ff; Thomason 2001: 15 ff ). None of these are completely new phenomena in history, but examples of their intensification in recent times are easy to find. The enormous economic disparities worldwide are bound to cause yet greater migration towards richer countries, while economic globalization results in more mobility among the more affluent, and both telecommunication and public or private means of transport become faster and cheaper. Also, the creation or solidification of 1 The absence of mutual intelligibility is only one of many factors that can influence speakers’ and policymakers’ decisions to conceive of linguistic varieties as either different languages, or dialects of the same language. Other arguments include social factors, such as the number of speakers and official status, and socio-psychological ones, such as dominant attitudes towards the different varieties and their speakers. See, for instance, Edwards (1994: 15 ff ) or Wei (2000a: 8 ff ). <?page no="23"?> 2.2 Societal and individual multilingualism 9 political and economic unions are now widely accepted as necessary answers to globalization, with the European Union as a prime example. Edwards (1994: 34) is right in pointing out that “few people become or remain multilingual on a whim”; rather, it is often a matter of necessity. It is precisely the close connection between language contact and the struggle for resources that has resulted in the view that language contact is necessarily accompanied by social conflict (see Darquennes 2004). However, sociolinguists have taken care to avoid “generalizations about the relationship between language diversity and sociopolitical conflict” (Tollefson 2002a: 230), or, in the words of Dicker (1996: 237): Diversity in itself is not a problem. However, it becomes a problem when those with power use it to set less powerful groups against each other. The result benefits those in power and helps maintain the social status quo. It is not societal multilingualism itself which creates conflicts, nor does the simplification or homogenization of a sociolinguistic setting caused by language death necessarily result in less conflict and more stability. However, conflicts can become more pronounced if different languages are symbolically associated with opposing viewpoints - and it is these symbolic associations which can be fuelled by media representations of multilingualism among others. Individual multilingualism Individual multilingualism can be defined as an individual speaker’s ability to use more than one language. While scholars disagree on how well individuals should know the languages to qualify as multilingual individuals (see, for instance, Grosjean 1982: 228 ff ), and also about who is to judge in the first place, many scholars have drawn attention to the limitations of the folk view of individual multilingualism, namely that people have “similar levels of proficiency in two or more languages, typically learned from birth” (Pavlenko 2005: 6). In contrast, Pavlenko advocates a “use-based definition” rather than an emphasis on proficiency, and understands multilinguals as “speakers who use two or more languages or dialects in their everyday lives - be it simultaneously (in language contact situations) or consecutively (in the context of immigration)” (ibid.). This approach has the advantage of explaining different levels of proficiency - which undoubtedly exist - with the different domains in which speakers use their languages, rather than with a general inability of human beings to acquire high levels of proficiency in more than one language. In contrast with early negative views of individual multilingualism (which <?page no="24"?> 10 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world chimed with the dismissal of societal multilingualism), the current state of knowledge is that from early childhood, human beings are “eminently capable of acquiring two languages simultaneously” (Genesee 2003: 223). Some scholars have pointed to evidence for specific cognitive advantages of multilinguals over monolingual persons, such as “a superior ability to ignore misleading information and attend to relevant cues and structures” (Bialystok 2004: 595 ff ). Still, the more obvious benefits are economic, cultural, and communicative in nature (Wei 2000a: 22 ff ): rather unspectacularly, being multilingual is an advantage for any person to interact with other people who speak another language. For an increasing number of people around the world, the English language is an important part of their multilingual lives, and multilingualism often really means another language plus English (see Spolsky 2004: 220). This is also the case for the cinematic texts that form the data of this study. While scholars are becoming increasingly aware of this “Special Case of English” (Kelly-Holmes 2005: 67), the spread of English need not necessarily take place at the expense of other languages, as Graddol (1997: 63) argues: Yesterday it was the world’s poor who were multilingual; tomorrow it will also be the global elite. So we must not be hypnotised by the fact that this elite will speak English: the more significant fact may be that, unlike the majority of present-day native English speakers, they will also speak at least one other language - perhaps more fluently and with greater cultural loyalty. Graddol’s statement leads me to some terminological remarks on the description of multilingual individuals. The first concept is that of the linguistic repertoire, defined as the totality of languages available to or used by any given person. Here, I distinguish between monolingual individuals, and multilingual persons who use two or more languages. Then, I employ the term first language or L1 (rather than native language 2 ) for the language that any person uses with higher fluency than any other language 3 . If a person displays 2 The terms native language and its near-synonym mother tongue have been found highly unsatisfactory by a number of critical sociolinguists, mainly because they blur distinctions that are central to the study of multilingualism. For instance, there is a latent risk of confusing language proficiency with genetic provenance or even citizenship (Rampton 1990; Piller 2001), and the notions seem especially ill suited to account for the linguistic repertoires and biographies of persons who grow up with different languages simultaneously. More seriously, they can contribute to unfair processes of social stereotyping and exclusion (Ammon 2000; Shohamy 2006: 41). See also Davies (2003) for a book-length treatment of the issue. 3 This definition is not an unproblematic one: the term first language is more commonly used for any language learnt very early in a person’s life, and not necessarily the one they use most fluently at any later stage. Moreover, as mentioned above, multilingual individuals <?page no="25"?> 2.3 Language choice 11 an equally high fluency in more than one language, the L1 is defined as the language to which they appear most closely affiliated in terms of ethnic and cultural identity. Any other language that is part of a person’s repertoire is considered a second language (L2). If a person’s use of a second language is marked by obvious deviations from the societal norms of first language use, such as phonological interference (an L2 accent), morphosyntactic reduction and simplification, or similar phenomena in lexis or pragmatics, I use the term interlanguage 4 to account for these features. While these terms enable me to account for the performance of movie characters as fictional monolingual or multilingual individuals, I lay equal emphasis on how the movies depict language contact as communicative situations in context. In the next section, my discussion moves to the contextual factors that influence speakers’ language choices. 2.3 Language choice The communicative situation Language choice is a key concept in the study of multilingualism: which factors inform, in a situation of language contact, the speakers’ conscious or unconscious decision to use one language rather than another? To classify these situations, it is useful to make a distinction between speakers’ linguistic repertoires on the one hand, and the languages they actually use on the other. Lüdi and Py (2002: 160 f ) distinguish between endolingual situations, where the speakers’ repertoires are largely identical, and exolingual situations, which are characterized by different and asymmetric repertoires. In either situation, the speakers may choose to use just one language, which results in a monolingual situation, or two or more languages, which makes the situation multilingual. Thus, four possible situations arise, as illustrated and exemplified in the following table: often use one language more fluently in one situation, but another in a different one. My reason to use this term in a somewhat simplistic manner is that the individuals at the focus of my study are fictional characters, typically of adult age, and whose linguistic biography can almost only be inferred from their linguistic performance in the movie scenes. 4 While the term interlanguage has mainly been used in the sense of an intermediate stage in a language learner’s dynamic process towards more fluency, I understand it as a strictly synchronic snapshot of a fictional character’s language use at a specific instance in the fictional text, which corresponds to Ellis’s notion of interlanguage as “the system that is observed at a single stage of development” (1994: 710). <?page no="26"?> 12 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world Table 1: Matrix of four different communicative situations, based on Lüdi and Py (2002: 160 f ) Endolingual and monolingual communicative situation A dinner table conversation of French L1 speakers in the Provence, which takes place in French only. Exolingual and monolingual communicative situation An American tourist talking to a French policeman, who knows English, in Paris. The American does not speak French, and the conversation is entirely in English. Endolingual and multilingual communicative situation A conversation at a party among Mexican Americans in California, who all speak Spanish and English fluently, and who switch between the two languages as they speak. Exolingual and multilingual communicative situation A Russian diplomat in Moscow talking on the phone to an American counterpart in Washington, DC. They know each other’s L1 passively, and both English and Russian are spoken. The reasons for speakers to choose one language or another, or to use two or more within the same interaction, include different aspects of the communicative situations. Usually, a distinction is made between three major aspects: “(a) the participants (i. e., speakers, addressees, and audiences); (b) the ecological surroundings; and (c) the topic or range of topics” (Blom and Gumperz 1986: 421; see also Hymes 1986 and Fishman 1965). First and foremost, the nature of the speakers’ repertoires, and especially their shared languages, influences their language choice. To avert misunderstandings, speakers may avoid using a language that is not understood by all interlocutors, a phenomenon which underlies many exolingual and monolingual conversations. Secondly, the notion of ecological surroundings is best illustrated by the findings from early sociolinguistic studies of multilingual speech communities, where the social context of the interaction was found to govern language choice in a fairly strict way. Certain settings require the use of certain languages or dialects, just as specific topics are often discussed in one variety rather than in another. The paradigmatic case is Ferguson’s (1959) notion of diglossia, which accounts for the strict association of standard or so-called H (‘high’) varieties in prestigious contexts (such as university lectures or religious sermons), and of regional dialects (‘L’ varieties) in more informal settings, most typically in everyday conversations. The notion of diglossia was later extended by Fishman (1967) to include communities where different languages, rather than only dialects, are used. The theory of diglossia illustrates two fundamental insights about multilingualism. On the one hand, the fact that two varieties <?page no="27"?> 2.3 Language choice 13 or languages are in strict complementary distribution can contribute to the relative stability of societal multilingualism: if both languages are assigned clear societal roles, there is no necessary reason for the speech community to stop using one of them. On the other hand, the concept that the varieties are clearly associated with high as opposed to low prestige carries notions of social conflict, especially in societies where everybody’s access to H (typically through formal education) is not guaranteed. Thirdly and finally, the nature of the topic discussed can influence language choice. For instance, siblings in second generation immigrant families may be expected to discuss school matters in the language used at school even if the home language is normally their language of origin. Code-switching An understanding of the different varieties’ roles can explain when and why speakers change from one language to another within the same conversation or even turn (utterance), a behaviour that is referred to as code-switching. Blom and Gumperz (1986: 424 ff ) use the term situational code-switching to account for switches that reflect a change in the communicative situation, such as a new speaker arriving, a new surrounding, or a change in topic. Situational code-switching is contrasted with metaphorical code-switching, where speakers switch into another language to “add a special social meaning” (425), which depends on typical qualities that are symbolically associated with the language switched into. For instance, a speaker might switch into the H variety, or into a more prestigious language, to make his or her statement sound more authoritative (see also Brown and Levinson 1987: 110 f ). Gal (1979: 112) offers an example from a bilingual Hungarian-German community in Oberwart (Austria), where a grandfather intensifies an order addressed to his grandchildren by switching from Hungarian, his usual language of interaction, to German, which carries connotations of authority in the speech community. A related concept is Myers-Scotton’s (1988; 1998a; 1998b) notion of marked code-switching, where speakers rationally choose a variety other than the unmarked one, that which would usually be used in a given situation, to achieve a specific interactional goal, such as “to establish a new rights and obligations set” (Myers-Scotton 1998a: 80). In subsequent research on code-switching, scholars have emphasized the fact that the exact symbolic associations of different languages are not always stable and clearly agreed upon. Therefore, the categories of situational and metaphorical code-switching were considered insufficient for the interpretation, let alone prediction, of the individual switches in very intensive <?page no="28"?> 14 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world and rapid forms of code-switching, sometimes referred to as language mixing (Auer 1999) or code-mixing. In these cases, what matters most is neither the direction of the switches, nor exactly which content is expressed in which variety, but really the speakers’ overall choice of code-switching as a linguistic practice (Jørgensen 1998: 242). Rather than marking situational changes or exploiting symbolic associations, individual code-switches can fulfill the function of discourse marking strategies, much like prosodic features such as “intonation, loudness or pitch level” (Auer 1988: 210), for instance to mark the beginning of a quotation within a speaker’s utterance (Auer 1995: 119). Crucially, code-mixing in highly endolingual settings can serve as a reliable touchstone for multilingual vitality. On the one hand, scholars have demonstrated a relationship between high language proficiency and intensive code-switching, countering the popular misconception that speakers switch mainly to compensate for their lack of fluency in either language (see Poplack 1980) - although this cannot be ruled out as an explanation of code-switching altogether. On the other hand, frequent code-switching in a community can be linked to a certain pride, on the part of the speakers, in their multilingual identities, and also to an absence of serious language conflict (Myers-Scotton 1998: 100 ff ). Nevertheless, attitudes towards code-switching are still often unfavourable, even among multilinguals who practice it themselves (Gumperz 1982: 62 f; Ritchie and Bhatia 2004: 349 f ) - a phenomenon which can partly be accounted for by the widespread acceptance of dominant purist and monolingual ideologies 5 at least in the Western world. Accommodation and language mode In further approaches to language choice, the focus is widened to more asymmetrical, exolingual communicative situations, such as interactions between majority language users and members of immigrant minorities, but also contexts of colonialism or tourism. The socio-psychological approach known as communication and accommodation theory (Sachdev and Giles 2004) posits that speakers with different linguistic backgrounds have two main options, namely one of convergence, to accommodate by using the interlocutor’s L1, and one of divergence, to stick to one’s own. Convergence is a typical strategy 5 Another example of an elitist misrecognition, stemming from ideologies of monolingual purism, of language users’ needs lies in the rejection of loanwords from other languages. For instance, the anti-English purism which has long informed language policy in France is judged to be of little help to the “average French citizen, torn between the rhetoric of the intelligentsia and his/ her own perceptions of the role of English as a world language” (Flaitz 1988: 101). <?page no="29"?> 2.3 Language choice 15 for minority speakers when addressing a member of the linguistic majority, especially when the addressee cannot be expected to know the minority language. In contrast, instances of convergence by a majority speaker can be perceived as sympathetic gestures to a member of the minority, but just as well as a “strategy of condescension” (Bourdieu 1991: 68 ff ). Mutual divergence is an unproblematic option when all speakers know the other languages at least passively, and while mutual convergence can result in pragmatic dilemmas (see Burt 1992), it may also offer the speakers an opportunity to practice their weaker languages, and can even lead to an improvement of ethnic harmony (Sachdev and Giles 2004: 354 f ). In short, there is no inherent relationship between any of the strategies chosen and the efficiency of the interaction. Rather, the meaning of convergence or divergence is negotiated by the speakers on the spot, as they index, with their language choices, their position on the continuum between “social inclusiveness”, the desire to be or become like one’s interlocutor, or the opposite, “differentiation” (ibid., 370). The concept of a multilingual speaker’s convergence to monolingual interlocutors ties in neatly with the psycholinguistic notion of language mode, defined as “the state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms at any given point of time” (Grosjean 2001: 3). According to Grosjean, a multilingual person’s language mode can be anywhere on a continuum between monolingual, where only one language is ‘activated’ and therefore used, and bior multilingual, when the speaker has an option of different languages. Grosjean contends that while any speaker’s stronger or strongest language is never completely deactivated, in interactions with monolinguals they are likely to “adopt the language of their monolingual interlocutor(s) and deactivate, as best as they can, the other languages” (Grosjean 1995: 262; see also Gumperz 1982: 69). What the concepts of accommodation and language mode have in common is the notion that in the presence of monolinguals, the unmarked linguistic behaviour of multilingual individuals is not characterized by frequent code-switching into one’s own L1, but rather to converge to the interlocutor’s only, and therefore preferred language. The importance of this insight for my approach lies in the fact that in the domain of fictional representations, many commentators have observed a tendency for multilingual individuals to perform precisely the opposite, and to display instances of interference and code-switching irregardless of the nature of the communicative situation (see chapter 3, section 3.4 below). <?page no="30"?> 16 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world Multilingual discourse as a political strategy Some scholars have emphasized the extent to which many instances of language contact are characterized by the absence of harmonious collaboration, and described the complex ways in which speakers use different forms of multilingual discourse in reaction. A first concept is Eastman and Stein’s (1993) notion of language display, when speakers use expressions from other languages “to impress socially within one’s own linguistic territory” (188) and to claim certain (typically desirable) aspects of other cultures. Instances of language display include the jocular and ostentatious use of borrowings such as latte and siesta instead of coffee or nap (189), but they may just as well “be used to express opposition to a dominant group and its standards of acceptable language use” (200). A related phenomenon is Rampton’s (1995; 1998) notion of language crossing, a form of multilingual discourse defined as “the use of a language which isn’t generally thought to ‘belong’ to the speaker” (Rampton 1998: 291). In the case of language crossing, the speakers’ language choices are potentially “illegitimate”, either because the speakers do not actually know the languages they code-switch into, or because the choice of languages appears particularly ill suited to the context. Rampton explains language crossing among adolescents in multi-ethnic British communities as a “rather complex set of engagements with established ideologies, images and valuations”, which “engaged with dominant stereotypes in a mixture of radical and reactionary ways, and sometimes it operated independently of these” (1995: 317). In a similar vein, Heller describes code-switching patterns in bilingual Canadian communities as a reaction to “ideologies which legitimate the unequal distribution of resources”, and as “ways in which power is maintained or may be successfully resisted or overturned” (Heller 1995: 171; see also Gal 1988). By broadening the notion of metaphorical code-switching, these approaches testify to the meaningfulness of multilingual discourse. At the same time, they are informed by a recognition of code-switching by speakers with very low, or even almost absent, L2 proficiency - which paves the way for a more inclusive view of societal multilingualism on the one hand, and second language acquisition and use on the other. To sum up: while the explanation or prediction of language choices has come to be understood as an increasingly complex, if not ultimately impossible task, to consider language choice as purely arbitrary surely misses the point. A myriad of factors are involved in the analysis of language choice in different communicative situations, from the strict association between varieties in diglossic situations to the situational or discourse-oriented reasons that underlie code-switching and code-mixing. Scholars have offered concise <?page no="31"?> 2.4 Linguicism versus linguistic courtesy 17 accounts of code-mixing as a multilingual form of discourse in highly endolingual settings, and of exolingual contexts characterized both by a convergence to monolingual norms, and by the more defiant patterns of language crossing. What distinguishes the more recent approaches from the earlier ones is the insight that code-switching can fulfill highly localized pragmatic goals on the one hand, but also function as a response to large-scale social phenomena on the other. More importantly still, research has convincingly demonstrated the extent to which language users code-switch to achieve goals and co-construct the communicative situation, rather than just choose their codes in reaction to predetermined realities. 2.4 Linguicism versus linguistic courtesy Linguicism The scholarly recognition of multilingualism as something normal, as well as potentially beneficial and enriching, has resulted in pronounced criticism of monolingual language ideologies, policies and practices, especially in cases where these “subordinate or exclude people with multiple linguistic or cultural identifications” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 266). In this connection, the term linguicism was coined by Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas to stand for “ideologies, structures, and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language” (Phillipson 1992: 47). Phillipson’s work is mainly concerned with the role of English as a global second language, in particular in the former colonies (Phillipson 1992) and in Europe (Phillipson 2003). While his criticism is mainly directed at British and American language policymakers, whose power he overestimates in the view of some commentators (see, for instance, Spolsky 2004: 86 ff ), the strength of his approach lies particularly in his analyses of metalinguistic discourse. Discourses of pro-English linguicism, Phillipson argues, construct languages other than English as “[l]ocalized”, “([i]ntra-) national”, “of narrower communication”, “[u]nhelpful”, “[i]ncomplete”, “[c]onfining”, “[c]losed”, and “[b]iased” (1992: 282). These discourses map closely onto the language subordination process described by Lippi-Green (1997: 67 ff ), where the use of non-standard accents is trivialized, vilified or marginalized by use of mystification and misinformation about language use in the media and elsewhere. As a result, the value of other languages or varieties on the linguistic market (Bourdieu 1991) is weakened to the benefit of English (Pennycook 1994: 13). While this happens to the clear disadvantage <?page no="32"?> 18 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world of the speakers of other languages, Bourdieu’s concept of the “institutional circle of collective misrecognition” (1991: 153) suggests that these accept and support their own discrimination at least in part. Mock Spanish and linguistic racism An American example of public linguicist discourse is Mock Spanish, defined by Hill (1995) as “incorporating Spanish loan words into English in order to produce a jocular or pejorative key” (204). This is achieved through “semantic pejoration of Spanish expressions”, the use of Spanish morphology “to make English words humorous or pejorating”, as in expressions like “mistake-o numero uno”, or through “ludicrous and exaggerated mispronunciations of Spanish loan material” (ibid.). As a further instance of semantic pejoration, Hill (ibid., 205) cites the famous line “Hasta la vista, baby” from the 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which appears as a jocular threat in the action movie and was then used in numerous US election campaigns. What this use of “hasta la vista” obfuscates, however, is that in Spanish, it is “a rather formal mode of leave-taking, that expresses sincere hope to meet again” (ibid.). Hill argues that Mock Spanish cannot be understood as a novel acceptance of languages other than English in mainstream US discourse, nor even an exception to the purist dismissal of Spanish loanwords - rather, it makes it “increasingly difficult for any public uses of Spanish to be heard as ‘serious’”, limiting the use of Spanish in the public sphere to “no more than a poetic function” (208). The racist ideologies that inform the public use of Mock Spanish operate in very subtle ways, Hill argues, because the discourse is of a humorous kind. More generally, numerous commentators have described how linguistic stereotyping often serves as a convenient alternative to more gross, but less admissible forms of racist discourse. An example is Edwards (2004: 216): While it is no longer acceptable to express deep-seated fear and mistrust of minorities in direct terms, the same restrictions do not apply to opinions about language. It has become increasingly clear, however, that debates which on the surface focus on language are actually about culture, identity, power and control. In this view, derogatory accounts of, or statements about other languages and their speakers assume the status of “racism […] dressed in the clothes of liberal, educated, articulate, common-sense discourse” (Blackledge 2005: 44; see also Milroy 2001: 244 ff ). As possible reasons, commentators name a sense of unease, among the majority speakers of English, caused by the “loss of world prestige and economic domination” (Dicker 1996: 29; see also <?page no="33"?> 2.4 Linguicism versus linguistic courtesy 19 Fishman 1988), but also due to a more tangible fear of economic and social disadvantage (Schmidt 2000: 238 f ): Remove the stigma of lower-class status and racial features, for example, and most of us see bilingualism not only as possible but as a personal enhancement. […] From this angle of vision, one of the central challenges in building a successful language policy of pluralistic integration is to “de-racialize” and to “de-class” minority American languages such as Spanish. Schmidt’s observation points to the “double standard” (Dicker 1996: 135 ff ) whereby multilingualism that involves prestigious second languages (such as French in the US) is viewed much more favourably than if minority languages are concerned (see also Cummins 1995: 175 f and Fishman 2004: 417 f ). However, it is not hard to see how discourses aimed against the use of minority languages can also fuel skepticism towards societal and individual multilingualism in general, and strengthen views of “second language learning as a challenging and perhaps impossible task” (Pavlenko 2005: 35). Linguistic courtesy Linguists’ advice to language policymakers is typically characterized by a rejection of “the stubborn persistence of the Herderian conception of the axiomatically monoglot nation” (Stevenson and Mar-Molinero 2006: 2), and a call for the recognition and valorization of individual, societal and discursive multilingualism. This advice is not limited to more informal or traditionally more multilingual settings, but includes more monolingual societies such as Great Britain (Blackledge 2005: 229) or Slovakia (Bleichenbacher 2006), and rather formal settings such as language classrooms (Relaño Pastor 2005: 160). Its aim is, quite clearly, the empowerment of individual language users (see Pavlenko and Piller 2001: 38 f ), a society that is marked by “justice and a more common good” (Schmidt 2000: 250), but also clear economic benefits (Grin 2003: 201 ff ). As a concrete example, the outcome could be a scenario like the one proposed by Dicker (1996: 246) for the US, where an established American could “make great strides by spending time in his city’s Chinatown, speaking to vendors, ordering food in restaurants, going to Chinese-language movies” (see also Schmidt 2000: 232). In a seminal book section entitled “Who’s Afraid of Bilingualism? ”, Baetens Beardmore proposes the notion of linguistic courtesy as a viable antidote to linguicism - a form of social behaviour that refrains from actively “discouraging bilingualism” (2003: 24). While Baetens Beardmore specifically points towards the acceptance, on the part of linguistic majorities, of immigrant and minority multilingualism, it is equally useful with respect to second <?page no="34"?> 20 Chapter 2: Multilingualism in the real world language users in general. Conversely, explicit linguicist discourses, which deny certain people “the right to be understood ” (Husband 2000: 208 f ), as well as the more subtle and indirect patterns of linguistic stereotyping and misinformation about language use, are the social practices that are least likely to qualify as instances of linguistic courtesy. In the next chapter, I will discuss how this distinction maps onto multilingual discourse in fictional texts. <?page no="35"?> Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction With repetition, therefore, narration becomes representation. (Berg 2002: 19) 3.1 Introduction How is multilingualism represented in fiction? How much linguistic material from different languages can fictional texts incorporate, and for which aims? The paucity of comprehensive studies on cinematic multilingualism is contrasted with a wealth of scholarly accounts of multilingualism in literary texts. Some commentators foreground how monolingual mindsets have dominated literary and cinematic production in most periods of the history of Western literature, with a particular focus on instances of negative stereotyping. In contrast, other scholars highlight, with reference to the theoretical concepts of heteroglossia and polyglossia (Bakhtin 1981), to what extent language-internal variation as well as textual multilingualism have been a defining feature of Western literature for at least the last two centuries. Similarly, movies appear as the most apt medium to represent the richness and complexity of real-life multilingual realities for a number of reasons. In fact, multilingualism is a distinctive feature of many contemporary movies produced outside the Hollywood mainstream, such as independent movies by directors like John Sayles or Jim Jarmusch, the works by “exilic and diasporic” filmmakers (Naficy 2001), or European co-productions like Cédric Klapisch’s Euro Pudding (2002) and Jan Svěrák’s Dark Blue World (2001). In this chapter, I review some of the main findings on multilingualism in fiction, distinguishing between formal and functional aspects. My discussion of form underlies the categorization, in the following chapter 4, of the corpus of language contact movies into movies where other languages are replaced, as opposed to those where they are present. In turn, the survey of functions enables me to sketch a theory of linguicist representations in mainstream movies, which I then test against the evidence of my corpus in the remaining part of the book. <?page no="36"?> 22 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction 3.2 Formal aspects Contexts of literary production How multilingual can a text be? A simple calculation shows that in theory, the degree of multilingualism in a given text can range from zero, or completely monolingual, to an equal amount of text in each language, where two languages are used for one half of the text each, three for one third, and so on. The latter case is typical for official documents, where the same content appears in two or more different language versions within the same text - as a very early example, the Rosetta stone can be named. While such texts are intended for audiences with different or even mutually exclusive linguistic repertoires, this has not traditionally been the case for most literary texts. There, authors show an overall tendency to converge to a perceived monolingual norm of their audience, and reduce the quantity of other languages to a minimum - with the result that the appearance of languages other than the dominant or base language is specially marked. In doing so, these authors can be seen as adhering to the monolingual ideologies mentioned in chapter 2, thereby avoiding charges of betraying their own speech community (see Kremnitz 2004: 62). Nowadays, these ideologies are mainly associated with 19 th century European Romanticism and nationalism, but they can be traced to much earlier periods in history. Knauth (2004: 269) describes how the stylistic rules of kathara lexis ‘pure speech’ and puritas were central to key texts of both Ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, and the idea that even borrowings from regional dialects were ‘barbarisms’ to be avoided has informed many authors’ stylistic choices for at least two millennia since. Moreover, purist ideologies of linguistic correctness and standardization may have prevented many multilingual authors from writing in more than one language in the first place (see Kremnitz 2004: 7), while those who have chosen to do so (three arbitrarily chosen examples are Dante Alighieri, Vladimir Nabokov, or Milan Kundera) have used different languages mainly across different texts, rather than within them. A further and obvious practical reason for monolingual literature is that even if widespread individual multilingualism is neither a recent, nor a class-exclusive phenomenon in history (see, for example, Furrer 2002), this is certainly not the case for multiliteracy, let alone literacy in a single language. Grutman (2002: 338) quotes the example of the Russian writer Lev Tolstoj’s War and Peace, where the impressive number of French passages had to be reduced and, in part, replaced with Russian in subsequent editions of the novel: Tolstoj had overestimated to what extent his audience was able to read French, then a highly prestigious second language among the upper-class Russian population. <?page no="37"?> 3.2 Formal aspects 23 Clearly, there are exceptions to the predominance of fictional monolingualism. In some cases, multilingual authors may write with an equally multilingual audience in mind, which results in an endolingual and multilingual context of literary production and reception. Contemporary examples include literary texts written by and for members of multilingual immigrant communities (see, for instance, Grosjean 1982: 146 f and Lüdi 2001: 20 ff ), but similar phenomena can also be found in much earlier periods. In some forms of Medieval European literature, there were patterns where poets chose different languages according to different genres; Forster (1970: 16) mentions the example of Northern Italian troubadours who wrote prose in French, lyrics in Provençal, and law in Italian. These strictly diglossic patterns were contrasted with the genre of macaronic poetry, based on the creative combination and mixture of different languages and without any specific and predictable language choices, much like the real-life practices of code-mixing. A prime example is the Carmina Burana, a compilation of Medieval poetry in Latin and Middle High German, where the mixture of language is seen as stemming from the “pure and spontaneous desire to ‘play’ with two different languages, without being constrained by communicative or pragmatic demands” (De Fontis 2000: 245; my translation from Italian). However, in the case of music and lyrical poetry, the need for the audience to fully understand the content is arguably smaller, which is why the following discussion is limited to prose and drama. From elimination to presence: Mareš’s taxonomy A useful taxonomy 6 for the treatment of multilingual discourse in fictional texts by Mareš (2000a; 2000b; 2003) is based on the notion of a continuum from the complete elimination (Czech “eliminace”) of languages other than the base language (in my case, English) to their complete presence (“prezence”). The taxonomy focuses on characters’ direct speech, since that is the preferred site for other languages to appear. Mareš’s central notion is that whenever another language would be used by a character within the reality of the story (“ve (fiktivním) světě”; ‘in the (fictional) world’; 2000a: 51), the narrator chooses whether to represent the other language faithfully or to replace it, either through complete elimination or one of two intermediate strategies, signalization (“signalizace”) and evocation (“evokace”). The following table gives an overview of Mareš’s taxonomy: 6 Some of the information in this section, as well as in chapter 5, has already been described in Bleichenbacher (2007) and Bleichenbacher (in press). <?page no="38"?> 24 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction Table 2: A taxonomy of multilingualism in fictional texts, based on Mareš (2000a, 2000b, 2003) Most distant from depicted reality Closest to depicted reality Strategy Elimination Signalization Evocation Presence Treatment of other languages Neither used nor mentioned Named by the narrator or by characters Evoked by means of L2 interference phenomena Used Audience awareness of other language(s) Depends on ability to process extralinguistic hints Through metalinguistic comments Depends on correct interpretation of interference phenomena Full Audience comprehension of content Full Full Full, unless the audience is unwilling to listen to nonstandard speech None, unless the other language is somehow translated In the first strategy, elimination, any speech that would have been in another language is completely replaced with an unmarked standard variety 7 of the base language. There, the audience is offered no linguistic means of realizing that the other language is replaced at all, unless they correctly interpret contextual evidence which shows that in reality, it is unlikely or impossible that the characters would really have used the base language. Their task is alleviated in the case of signalization, where the replaced language is explicitly named in a metalinguistic comment. Mareš posits the strategy of signalization for narrative fiction only, but not for cinematic texts. However, as I argue in chapter 5 (section 5.2) below, signalization can also include metalinguistic comments 8 by the characters themselves. The third strategy, evocation, is used when characters speak a variety of the base language that is characterized by interference (transfer) from the language they would really be speaking. For instance, a Spanish accent or a 7 See footnote 14. 8 Prime examples for signalization in drama occur in Brian Friel’s play Translations (1981). <?page no="39"?> 3.2 Formal aspects 25 number of short code-switches from English into Spanish can evoke an utterance that would have been in monolingual Spanish in reality. An especially sophisticated use of evocation in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is described by Page (1970: 81 f ). In the novel, the use of spoken Spanish is evoked by use the use of marked lexical items, such as English clearly for Spanish claro (in utterances where of course would be more idiomatic), and also by the marked use of the intimate pronoun of address thee, to evoke the pragmatic distinction between the intimate Spanish pronoun tu and its more formal equivalent usted. In contrast, the use of L2 accents for evocation is obviously much easier in movies than in written texts, since there is no risk of alienating the readership by violations of orthography 9 . An important side aspect is that evocation is often only used for the speech of certain characters, rather than all who would logically speak the other language (see Lippi-Green 1997: 84 and Grutman 2002: 333). Furthermore, evocation can also be accompanied and made more explicit by signalization. Blake (1981: 19) notes that in drama, as opposed to narrative fiction, the overall absence of a narrator who can provide vital metalinguistic background information has resulted in more reluctance to deviate from the standard of the base language. Finally, the other language is no longer replaced at all when the strategy of presence is used. Unless the audience is highly multilingual, comprehension becomes an issue in these cases. In written texts, adding translations potentially results in an interruption of the flow of reading, whereas in movies, comprehension is enhanced by the “multiple, overlapping signifiers” (Kozloff 2001: 223 f; see also Busch 2004: 281 f ) of the images that underlie the dialogue, and of course by the option of a written translation in subtitles. Their acceptance and use have certainly increased a great deal since 1970, when Forster (1970: 13) stated that “[l]ess use has been made of this medium than one might think; the convention of live theatre has been too strong.” Still, many would agree with what Kellman considers a piece of “conventional wisdom in Hollywood”: that, with very few exceptions, “Americans do not go to movie theatres in order to read” (2000: 110). In sum, this discussion of Mareš’s categories confirms the initial observation about the very limited quantity of other languages in fictional texts. In the following section, I turn to the different functions they have been used to fulfill. 9 See Sebba (2000) for an interesting discussion of this problem in the context of the representation of code-switching between Standard British English and Jamaican Creole in Anglo-Caribbean writing. <?page no="40"?> 26 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction 3.3 Functional aspects An exhaustive account of the functions of multilingualism in fiction is an impossible task, since the contexts of production and reception vary at least to some extent for every individual text. The issue is comparable to the discussion of metaphorical code-switching in chapter 2: unless there is a close agreement between author and audience about the specific meanings of different languages, authors incur a high risk of having their stylistic choices misinterpreted, especially the more remote their audience is (see Page 1970: 56 f; Blake 1999: 327). In this section, my focus is on three major functional categories: realism, social criticism, and humor. Realism In a straightforward manner, the notion of realism in representation means that multilingualism in the text is motivated by the desire to represent a situation of language contact in the story as faithfully as possible. Grutman argues that even if the audience is fully aware of the fictional nature of the text, they can still expect it to be meaningful with respect to real-life standards, or in his words to narrate “what could have happened according to the laws of probability” (Grutman 2002: 333; my translation from French). Similarly, the film theorist Bordwell (1985: 37) assumes that movie viewers have “a more or less stable set of assumptions”: that objects and human beings persist in space even when they are not on screen; that a character possesses the same individual identity on successive appearances; that a film in English will not suddenly lapse into Urdu. Therefore, the use of certain languages is intrinsically meaningful, for instance as an indicator of geographical setting: French or Spanish are spoken because the story is set in France or Mexico. Yet, most commentators are very clear about the limits of realistic representation. In his manual Writing Dialogue, Chiarella states that “the writer must never feel compelled to duplicate dialects simply for the sake of “authenticity”” (1998: 45), and in a guidebook for screenwriters, McKee (1997: 388) offers an account of real-life speech which might strike many conversation analysts as rather too unfavourable: Dialogue is not conversation. Eavesdrop on any coffee shop conversation and you’ll realize in a heartbeat you’d never put that slush onscreen. Real conversation is full of awkward phrases, poor word choices and phrasing, non sequiturs, pointless repetitions; it seldom makes a point or achieves closure. But that’s okay because conversation isn’t about making points or achieving closure. It’s what psychologists call “keeping the channel open.” Talk is how we develop and change relationships. <?page no="41"?> 3.3 Functional aspects 27 Interestingly, McKee’s folklinguistic and highly inaccurate formal observations are teeming with an acute awareness of the social and communicative functions of real-life language use. With respect to fictional representations, scholars agree with the points raised in these manuals. Glessgen (2000: 253) points out that literary language ought not to be mistaken for either standard language or language use in general, and the same observation is made by Pfister (2000: 149 ff ) with respect to language in drama. Therefore, it is dangerous to base any sociolinguistic argumentation on the evidence of language in fictional texts only, as Mareš (2000a: 47) argues. Writing on the representation of speech in the English novel in general, Page (1988: 7) states that “there is an inevitable gap - wider or narrower at different times, but never disappearing entirely - between speech, especially in informal situations, and even the most ‘realistic’ dialogue in a work of literature.” In contrast, Mitry (1997: 237) points out that of all fictional representations of spoken language, movie dialogues most closely reproduce the spontaneity of real-life conversations. Social criticism The rejection of realism in too narrow a sense does not mean, however, that any comparison between representation and real-life is in vain, as Shohat and Stam (1994: 180) clarify with reference to the work of Bakhtin: Rather than directly reflecting the real, or even refracting the real, artistic discourse constitutes a refraction of a refraction; that is, a mediated version of an already textualized and “discursived” socioideological world. This formulation transcends a naive referential verism without falling into a “hermeneutic nihilism” whereby all texts become nothing more than a meaningless play of signification. Precisely because the depiction of language use in fiction is invested with these ideological implications, Gauvin (1999a: 11 f ) suggests that literary texts should refrain from representing multilingualism in an ethnographic sense of strictly faithful mimesis, in order to avoid a simple perpretation of diglossic or polyglossic hierarchies in society. Rather, it is the use of other languages for carnivalesque purposes (the term is again Bakthin’s) which heightens their literariness. Deviations from the standard language can be motivated by a multitude of narrative and ideological reasons, and many commentators agree with Blake’s observation that “the more modern a literary work is, the more likely it is that there will also be a serious purpose behind the mixture of languages” (1999: 331; see also Fields 1999: 63). Crucially, these purposes are not restricted to the perpetuation of pro-standard, monolingual mindsets. <?page no="42"?> 28 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction In 19 th century British fiction for instance, the depiction of regional dialects is not only connoted with provincialism and backwardness, but also with concepts such as intimacy, tradition, and skepticism towards industrialization and middle-class Victorian ideologies of education (Mace 1987: 289 ff ). Likewise, linguistic hierarchies can be challenged by literary multilingualism as a “project of an esthetic insurrection against cultural and social imperialism” (Schmeling 2004: 234; my translation from German). Narrative strategies employed to this aim include the foregrounding of code-switching practices, but also instances where the use of a dominant language appears as a marked, rather than self-evident phenomenon, as Goetsch (1987a: 46) notes with respect to Chinua Achebe’s novel A Man of the People. Likewise, Birch (1991) discusses instances of “opposition to a singular, elitist privileging of one minority culture, for example, standard spoken British English” (1991: 86) in 20 th century English-language drama. In his reading of Wole Soyinka’s play The Road, Birch (1991: 145) argues that the depiction of multilingual discourse can contribute to the overturning of linguistic hierarchies: Codes shift and mix here in an important demonstration of varieties of English which would be considered non-standard by colonial oppressors, but which are increasingly being recognised as acceptable, standard, varieties of post-colonial world Englishes, not least in their ability to alienate, by code mixing in particular, the colonial domination by language. Accordingly, Jonsson (2005: 255) argues that the use of Spanish-English code-switching in Chicano theatre “can create awareness while legitimizing these phenomena through this public use”, which in turn “has the possibility of leading to empowerment in the daily lives of people.” What these observations illustrate quite clearly is that in contemporary literature, representations of code-switching frequently undermine linguicist ideologies, rather than support them. Apart from these clearly political motivations, further narrative functions of the contrast between the dominant and the other languages of the text can be to “evoke some feeling within the reader” (Green 2002: 164): to invite them to empathize with some characters, but also to create atmospheres of foreignness. Such atmospheres can have strongly positive connotations, such as Kozloff ’s “special enjoyment of fresh sounds and rhythms” (2000: 83), and also the notion of exoticism (Kramer 2002: 414 ff ). Conversely, foreignness can also be associated with alienation, estrangement and hostility (Mareš 2003: 31; 42). <?page no="43"?> 3.3 Functional aspects 29 Humor Another prime area where different languages are contrasted is the function of humor. Here, it is useful to ask what exactly is supposed to be “naturally funny” (Blake 1981: 78) about multilingual discourse phenomena such as L2 use and code-switching. To begin with, the notion of multilingual discourse being comical as such can easily be traced to monolingual mindsets fuelled by the “desire for ‘pure’ languages and traditions” (Sollors 1998a: 9). More specifically, there is the situational comedy of misunderstandings or interlingual puns (often obscene or scatological in nature) in scenes of exolingual communication. Blake (1981: 61) quotes the example of Thomas Deloney’s 1597 novel Jack of Newbury, where the L2 accent of an Italian character is reflected in his pronunciation of “turd” for ‘third’. For a more concise understanding of the comicality of multilingualism, it is useful to consider Eitzen’s (1999: 95) notion of superiority theory, which accounts for the fact that most humor involves some breach of social norms or accepted behavior […] [and] holds that humor can be explained as a relatively nonviolent and therefore socially acceptable form of aggression toward others or correction of social deviancy. The pleasure of humor, in this theory, stems from ego affirmation: humor makes us feel part of a privileged in-group or otherwise superior to those at whom our laughter is directed. The notion of breaking social norms can be meaningfully linked to the linguistic concepts of accommodation theory and language mode discussed in chapter 2, in that multilingual persons normally converge to monolingual interlocutors in exolingual speech situations. The consistent use of a language which is not understood by one’s interlocutor is a problem source in interactions, while its limited use (for instance in code-switched speech tags) is at least odd, and hence potentially funny. Furthermore, it is precisely the pragmatic oddity of these linguistic choices that invite the audience to interpret them as instances of interlanguage and compensatory strategies for a lack of L2 fluency. Likewise, a character’s use of non-standard language can come across as their inability to use the more prestigious standard. In King’s (2002: 144) words, the characters are “seen as laughably foolish or incompetent, and so not capable of taking on greater power or responsibility”- a form of comedy which can easily stabilize “relationships of inequality” and “contribute to the legitimization of the dominance of those in power” (see also Page 1988: 58 f and Blake 1981: 13). Conversely, the use of languages that are traditionally associated with more prestige, such as Latin, can also become a subject of derision, as in the grotesque doctoral examination scene in Molière’s comedy Le Malade Imaginaire (see Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans 2002a: 18). In <?page no="44"?> 30 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction either case, an underlying reason can be the “lack of confidence” on the part of the majority culture, as well as an “acknowledgement of the significance” of the other varieties, as Blake (1999: 334) argues with respect to comical uses of Latin by Protestant writers in Tudor England (see also Pustianaz 1999 and Goetsch 1987: 56). Crucially, the notion of hidden fears and anxieties 10 that underlie derisive representations of multilingualism mirrors the motivations for real-life linguicism discussed in chapter 2. In the following section, the focus is on how these practices contribute to stereotyping in characterization. 3.4 Characterization and stereotyping Contrast The way characters speak is a fundamental aspect of their characterization, both in narrative fiction, and especially in the mimetic genres of drama and movies (see Pfister 2000: 171). The main reason for language variation among characters is to create narrative contrasts: specific linguistic varieties mark certain characters as special and different from the other ones (Blake 1981: 12; Page 1988: 55; Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans 2002: 16; Kozloff 2000: 82 f ). This pattern has two important consequences, both of which challenge the intentions of realistic representation. The first consequence is an elimination of sociolinguistic realism, in that distinct varieties or different languages are not spoken by all characters who would logically use them, but merely by those who can meaningfully be contrasted against others in the process of narration. Blake (1981: 87) exemplifies this pattern with the French characters in Shakespeare’s Henry V, where the King and Queen of France’s use of standard English is contrasted with the “broken English” spoken by their daughter Katharine. The distinction is not used with the aim “to create an illusion of verisimilitude”, Blake argues, but “to reveal her defencelessness, her youth and her charm” (ibid.). In other words, the important narrative contrast between Katharine, her parents, and her future husband, King Henry V, is projected onto her linguistic performance as an L2 speaker of English. Taavitsainen and Melchers (1999: 14) use 10 As a further literary example of this sense of anxiety, Kramer (2002: 326 ff ) describes the replacement of a dominant language by an author writing in an endangered minority language. In the work of Theo Candinas, a Swiss author writing in Romansh, direct speech that would logically take place in the majority language (Swiss German) is consistently replaced in favour of a monolingual Romansh text. In Kramer’s (328) words: “The bilingual society which considers itself weak opposes multilingual texts, because it sees them as a weakening factor” (my translation from Italian). <?page no="45"?> 3.4 Characterization and stereotyping 31 the term metonymical in their book section “Writing in Nonstandard English”, in that characters’ speech is marked by “a few extreme features that are easy to recognize as conventional stereotypes”. Thus, the process of stereotyping reduces the contribution of non-standard varieties and other languages to a bare minimum, but then exaggerates the few marked linguistic features that are left. Conversely, a higher proportion of non-standard language can be interpreted as a smaller “degree of hostility and stereotyping” and a “more inward and complex […] understanding of cultural difference”, as Porter (1999: 370) observes in his book section “Scots in English Broadsides”. The second pattern, the elimination of pragmatic realism, is that even when the different varieties or other languages are fully present, they appear as strictly homogeneous and indexical of the individual characters, with little or no attention paid to stylistic variation, or any other sense in which speakers alter their performance in relation to the context of the communicative situation (see Blake 1981: 14). Durrer (1999: 16 ff ) points to an interesting paradox in French prose fiction: whereas in novels predating the French Revolution, the direct speech of all characters was largely uniform (despite the fact that only a small part of the population actually spoke Standard French), the work of writers such as Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant, which postdate the implementation of dialect eradication and standardization policies, display a fair number of carefully selected dialect representations - as a first step towards a more realistic literary rendering of oral language. However, in Barthes’s (1972: 59) words, the characters remain “people who are enclosed in the language of their class, their region, their occupation, their heredity or their history” - an observation which contradicts Barthes’s simultaneous assessment of these representations as “a lucid act of information” (my translation from French). Stereotyping Both patterns share the notion of stereotyping as a common denominator. As a socio-psychological process, stereotyping consists of collective and largely context-blind categorization of individuals on the basis of “easily identifiable characteristics” (Hewstone and Giles 1997: 271). While their usefulness lies in their serving the purpose of “pragmatics and efficiency in thought” (Cowen 1991: 354), they are often viewed with a large amount of suspicion by social scientists, because they can result in people’s confusing of cause-and-effect relationships in social processes (see Branston 2000: 160). Writing about intercultural communication, Scollon and Wong Scollon (2001: 169) argue that <?page no="46"?> 32 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction [s]tereotypes limit our understanding of human behavior and of intercultural discourse because they limit our view of human activity to just one or two salient dimensions and consider those to be the whole picture. Furthermore, they go on ideologically to use that limited view of individuals and of groups to justify preferential or discriminatory treatment by others who hold greater political power. This skepticism is shared by many commentators in media and film studies. Specifically, movies are seen as powerful perpetuators of stereotypes “because they most closely approximate the array of directly accessible visual and verbal information found in face-to-face interaction” (Cowen 1991: 353). Although moving images always only represent individuals, not categories (see Burger 1990: 300), stereotypical depictions become normalized through constant repetition within and across texts, which can result in a vicious circle of negative representation (Snead 1994: 131 ff; Berg 2002: 18 f ). Bidaud states that stereotypes function like shortcuts in people’s reasoning (1994: 208), and Berg, while acknowledging that they can have a “basis in fact” (2002: 16), names them “gross generalizations, […] conveniently ahistorical, selectively omitting the out-group’s social, political, and economic group history” (17). At the same time, commentators admit that factors such as “the pressure of time and budget” (Nelmes 1996a: 228) or “their valued narrative economy” (Berg 2002: 42) form strong arguments for filmmakers not to avoid stereotypes altogether; or, in Schlesinger’s (1979: xii) words: “The film is both an industry that lives by stereotype and an art that often undermines stereotype.” Condemnations of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of foreigners and members of ethnic minorities date back to the beginning of the 20 th century (Shohat and Stam 1994: 181; Miller 2000: 147 f ), which led to the inclusion, in the Production Code of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), of a rule which stated that “‘[t]he history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations had to be respected fairly” (Kochberg 1996: 43). Likewise, the US Office of Censorship prohibited the “derogatory picturization or presentation of nationals of United Nations and of the neutral countries” during World War II, which led to a temporary disappearance of foreigners as “funny folk with ridiculous accents and incongruous customs” from the screen (Doherty 1993: 50). Later, the political atmosphere of the Cold War was reflected in the movies’ “exaggerated, dehumanized depictions of their Russian characters”, who lack “the depth and genuineness necessary to empathize with them” (Strada and Troper 1997: 201). However, the accusations of negative representation were challenged by an empirical study of “Social and Political Themes” in 394 top- <?page no="47"?> 3.5 Linguicism in the movies 33 grossing American movies from 1946-1985 (Powers et al. 1996), where the authors found that “Hollywood is more likely to present minorities as positive characters than to present whites in a positive light” (173). The reason why minority characters are nevertheless confined to “rather narrow dimensions” is because they frequently appear in settings of crime or “authoritative institutions” such as the “military and law enforcement”, of which Hollywood has a “rather alienated view” (ibid.). What are the alternatives? Hewstone and Giles argue that in the light of peoples’ “insatiable need for categorization and simplification, it would seem a more realistic aim to replace negative with positive stereotypes, rather than to eradicate group images together” (1997: 280). However, this view is seriously challenged by many commentators, partly because a suitable definition of positive and negative stereotypes may be hard to come by (Berg 2002: 4 f ), and because positive stereotypes may be equally confining as negative ones - a pattern referred to as “pseudo-polyphonic discourse” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 215; see also Scollon and Wong Scollon 2001: 172 ff ), or even “modern” and “enlightened racism” (Cottle 2000a: 11 f ). A more sensible approach to stereotyping, it is argued, lies in “knowledge, both about the Other and about the stereotyping process” (Berg 2002: 23), and in the critics’ “attention to the cultural voices at play, not only those heard in aural ‘close-up’ but also those distorted or drowned out by the text” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 214). In the final section of this chapter, my focus is on this very notion of distortion and drowning, in other words: on the linguistic correlates of misinformation and negative representation of multilingualism in movie dialogues. 3.5 Linguicism in the movies The semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation For a categorization of linguistic stereotyping in movie dialogues, a useful starting point lies in Irvine and Gal’s three semiotic processes “by which people construct ideological representations of linguistic differences” (2000: 37), namely iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. Here is how the three processes are defined (2000: 37 ff ): Iconization involves a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked. Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence. This process entails the attribution of cause and immediate necessity to a connection (between linguistic features and social groups) that may be only historical, contingent, or conventional. <?page no="48"?> 34 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction […] Fractal recursivity involves the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level. For example, intra-group oppositions might be projected outward into intergroup relations, or vice versa. […] Erasure is the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away. Irvine and Gal illustrate and underline these processes with examples from diverse sociolinguistic settings, and also different forms of textual evidence, such as metalinguistic comments gathered in ethnographic fieldwork, but also scholarly accounts of multilingual societies. For example, they describe how commentators simplified the complex and multilingual sociolinguistic landscape of Macedonia by omitting - erasing - aspects which did not fit into their picture. As different linguistic groups lay claim to the Macedonian territory, they highlighted the contribution of their languages (such as Serbian or Bulgarian) to the Macedonian language, thereby iconically labeling the Macedonians as belonging to their nation (68 f ). In turn, the Macedonians’ reluctance to conform to these strict and mutually exclusive ethnic boundaries resulted in their designation as wavering and not trustworthy persons (65), who reenact, as individuals and within their families, the “ethnic profusion and confusion” (64) that Western commentators associate with the Balkan region at large. This last phenomenon is considered an instance of fractal recursivity, although this process is somewhat less clear than the other two. In my framework, I understand the term fractal recursivity as a simple subcategory of iconization (see also Irvine 2001: 33), with the sole difference that the sign relationship links two oppositions, rather than just two single phenomena. In an interesting and convincing adaptation of Irvine and Gal’s theory to public discourse about immigrant multilingualism in Great Britain, Blackledge (2004: 87) demonstrates and criticizes how “a lack of English, and a failure to encourage others to speak English, are iconically associated with the presupposed oppressive, regressive values and practices of Asian men”, and how the possibility of being a British citizen without speaking English is a priori erased in favour of “the future of Britain as a homogeneous, multilingual state” (89). Clearly, the three processes are also pertinent for more obviously fictional representations such as movie dialogues, because they share fundamental aspects of linguistic stereotyping processes. These are the mapping of social differences onto linguistic ones, the blindness to important contextual factors, and the focus on salient features only. In the following, I will discuss how these three processes map onto findings of linguicism in the movies. <?page no="49"?> 3.5 Linguicism in the movies 35 Iconization To begin with, the concept of iconization means that the cinematic depiction of languages other than English and of L2 varieties of English in movies point, in a strict and iconic manner, to the negative evaluation of the characters who use them, or to an overall lack of prestige, significance, or even just normality of the situations in which they are used. The latter tendency is described in Kelly-Holmes’s (2005) account of multilingualism in the related genre of advertisement discourse, where she argues that languages other than English are used as instances of “fake multilingualism” (184 ff ), with “monolingual ethnocentrism” (186) as the underlying ideology. Moreover, Kelly-Holmes (2005: 175) argues that [t]he idea of portraying someone on a street in London or in a house in Leeds speaking German, French, Urdu or some other language with no explanation, just as one randomly picked member of the greater public seems a long way off in advertising in the UK at least. Even though these are everyday occurrences in that sociolinguistic context. Thus, it is easier perhaps for advertising to continue to promote the notion of a monolingual society - something that is far from the truth in most of today’s European cities - than to try to portray something that does not fit neatly into a compartmentalized view of the world in which foreign languages belong in the category of holidays, tourists, imported foods, but not in the everyday. Similarly, an analysis of language choice in British TV holiday programmes shows how languages other than English are used “to enhance the entertainment level for the television viewer rather than to serve any other communicative need”, and “reduced to the status of rubber-stamp phrases from guidebook glossaries, co-opted for the staging and authenticating of unproblematised, exoticised linguascapes” (Jaworski et al. 2003: 21). Thus, languages other than English are portrayed as irrelevant or, at best, funny - whereas anything relevant is always uttered in English. The second aspect of iconization, the relationship between negative characterization and the use of a foreign or non-standard accent, is accounted for by the findings of a quantitative study by Lippi-Green (1997). Lippi- Green analyzed a corpus of 371 characters from “all released versions of fulllength animated Disney films” (1997: 86), who were coded for a number of linguistic, social and narrative characteristics, such as the variety of English 11 11 Since Disney movies are typically produced with child audiences in mind, they cannot rely on the use of subtitles for dialogue in other languages, and use replacement strategies instead. Therefore, the L2 accents discussed by Lippi-Green (1997) contain many instances of Mareš’s evocation strategy. <?page no="50"?> 36 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction they spoke (e. g. Mainstream US English or foreign-accented English), their sex, occupation, and the “evaluation of character’s actions and motivations” (90). A central finding of Lippi-Green’s is that while speakers of mainstream accents are predominantly characters with a positive evaluation, the negative characters are the largest group among those who speak English with an L2 accent (91 f ). Moreover, Lippi-Green notes how in African settings, varieties of African American English are mainly used for non-humanoid characters or those who “want those things they don’t have and can’t be” (94), but never by positive and powerful characters such as the Lion King in the 1994 movie of the same name. Likewise, characters with French accents are prototypically “persons associated with food preparation or presentation, or those with a special talent for lighthearted sexual bantering”, a depiction she terms “as narrow, if not as overtly negative, as that for AAVE speakers” (100). Lippi-Green summarizes her findings as follows (1997: 101): Characters with strongly positive actions and motivations are overwhelmingly speakers of socially mainstream varieties of English. Conversely, characters with strongly negative actions and motivations often speak varieties of English linked to specific geographical regions and marginalized social groups. Perhaps even more importantly, those characters who have the widest variety of life choices and possibilities available to them are male, and they are speakers of MUSE [Mainstream Standard US English] or a non-stigmatized variety of British English […]. Even when stereotyping is not overtly negative, it is confining and misleading. Fractal recursivity The notion of fractal recursivity goes one step further than iconization, insofar as the contrast between positive and negative characterization, or between prestigious and insignificant social settings, is reproduced as a contrast between two linguistic forms on the level of language use. For individual multilingualism, this means that the superiority of English L1 speakers over the other characters is reproduced in their superior language proficiency, while the other characters are incompetent users of English as a second language (Denzin 2002: 23), or even their L1 (Spurr 1993: 102 ff ). On the level of multilingual discourse, the process of fractal recursivity can imply that the content of whatever is said in other languages need not be made obvious to the viewer. Evidence for these phenomena is easy to come across in work on movie representations. Even from before the advent of sound cinema, Keller (1994: 8) names the example of the 1898 short movie How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed, where an Irish maid “takes off her clothes before serving the salad to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) family” - as an L1 user of the <?page no="51"?> 3.5 Linguicism in the movies 37 Irish language, she seems ridiculously unaware of the polysemy of the adjective. From the period of early sound movies, Shohat (1991: 227) describes how the actress “Carmen Miranda, the synecdoche of Latin America in many films, reportedly spoke English fluently and had only a slight accent but was forced by producers into her caricatural speech patterns”. Writing about Hollywood representations of Hispanics, Berg (2002: 66 ff ) mentions a number of Latino stereotypes of characters who are often pitted against a “WASP male hero” (67). For instance, the prototypical bandido’s “inability to speak English or his speaking English with a heavy Spanish accent is Hollywood’s way of signaling his feeble intellect, a lack of brainpower that makes it impossible for him to plan or strategize successfully” (66). Likewise, the male buffoon “cannot master standard English” and “childishly regresses into emotionality” through “explosions into Spanish” (72). Moreover, the use of Spanish in exolingual interactions with English L1 characters means that “the rules of “civilization” no longer apply” because the narrative has moved “beyond the pale of rational discourse” (49), as Berg argues in his analysis of a scene from the 1993 movie Falling Down. A further example comes from Kozloff (2000: 150), who notes that in Westerns, Native American characters “were given unintelligible grunts or wild screams to utter”, and if they did speak English, “they often spoke either a halting baby talk, or, contrarily, pontificated with wise aphorisms” (see also Parish 2003: xii-xiii). Erasure Thirdly and finally, linguicist stereotyping in movies is characterized by erasure, both of the depiction of contextual factors which underlie the use of different linguistic varieties (the notion of pragmatic elimination mentioned above), and also of these varieties themselves (sociolinguistic elimination or replacement). For instance, this can mean that characters using English as an L2 switch into their non-English L1 irrespectively of the speech situation they are in. Moreover, Shohat and Stam (1994: 191 f ) consider Hollywood’s use of replacement strategies as a “linguistic vehicle for the projection of Anglo-American power, technology and finance”, by “ventriloquizing the world” and thus “contributing indirectly to the subtle erosion of the linguistic autonomy of other cultures”. Languages other than English are “often reduced to an incomprehensible jumble of background murmurs”, and their speakers converge to their English L1 interlocutor to make their utterances comprehensible (Stam and Spence 1983: 240). In contrast, commentators describe a number of features that characterize movies which challenge linguicist patterns of representation. These <?page no="52"?> 38 Chapter 3: Multilingualism in fiction include the more extensive use of other languages, monolingually or in forms of multilingual discourse (Fuentes 1992: 211; Cortés 1993: 70; Keller 1994: 208 ff; Kellman 2000: 102 ff; Denzin 2002: 32; Berg 2004: 224), as well as “the orchestration of languages for emancipatory purposes”, where the viewer’s attention is drawn to problematic language hierarchies (Shohat and Stam 1994: 194). At the same time, dialogue in other languages is subtitled, and not left incomprehensible, because it contains important information. Numerous commentators argue for a recent shift towards less linguicism at least with respect to Hispanic characters, for instance in the 2000 movie Traffic (Berg 2002: 262; see also Woll 1993 and Reyes and Rubie 1994: 26). This chapter has shown that multilingualism in fiction can be achieved with diverse formal strategies and functional motivations. Form does not easily map onto function, but there is a general agreement that the presence of other languages in texts, as opposed to their replacement, is a better way to avoid linguicist representations. Likewise, commentators have criticized diverse instances of linguistic stereotyping, such as the portrayal of speakers of specific varieties as negative characters, or as incompetent language users altogether. In contrast, more progressive patterns of depiction are defined by a high amount of pragmatic and sociolinguistic realism, an awareness and problematization of linguistic hierarchies, and in general a normalization (Grin 2003: 202 f ) of multilingual realities. While these notions are further discussed in chapters 5-7, the next chapter is concerned with the choice of language contact movies. <?page no="53"?> Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus 4.1 Introduction This chapter discusses the compilation of a corpus of 28 language contact movies, which were chosen on the basis of a set of well-defined linguistic, generic, economic, and chronological criteria. The list of movies analyzed is accompanied by their basic plot details, with a clear focus on what kinds of language contact situations are dominant. In a second step, the division of the corpus into two sub-corpora is presented and explained: twelve of the 28 movies, where the strategy of replacement of other languages (see chapter 3, section 3.2) is employed, are discussed in the following chapter. The remaining 16 movies with a presence of other languages are investigated in chapters 6 and 7. In any study which uses cultural texts to gain insights into social practices, there is the inherent danger of selecting one’s corpus to confirm the results one would like to obtain. Faulstich (2002: 196) satirizes this method by comparing it to the magician who, to everyone’s surprise, conjures up the very rabbit he has before hidden in his top-hat. For instance, a study of multilingualism in the movies which eschewed the Hollywood mainstream, and focused on art movies by independent or minority filmmakers, could convincingly demonstrate a celebration of multilingual practices, possibly accompanied by an acute criticism of language hierarchies. Conversely, an analysis of low-budget, straight-to-video action movies filled with bearded Arab terrorists, blond German psychopaths, and sleazy Russian arms dealers, would undoubtedly show that the cinematic representation of speakers of other languages hardly differs from, say, the portrayal of Irish characters on 19 th century West End stages. The aim of this study, then, is to find a middle way and to compile a corpus of movies that are highly popular on the one hand, but whose stories focus on aspects of language contact on the other. In short, the selection, while not being representative in any statistical sense of the term, contains many of the best-known English language movies with language contact situations released between 1984 and 2003. In particular, the four sets of criteria listed below were followed: <?page no="54"?> 40 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus Criteria for selection of corpus movies 1. Linguistic: Movies depicting frequent verbal interaction between English speakers and speakers of other major European languages, excluding any Asian, African, or Native American languages. 2. Generic: Movies with a well-defined temporal and geographical setting and a reasonably realistic narrative, excluding genres such as fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, and any settings where fictional languages are used. 3. Economic: English-language productions with medium to high budgets, which were met with impressive US and/ or worldwide box office success. 4. Chronological: Movies released in the two decades between 1984 and 2003. Table 3 lists the 28 movies selected alphabetically by title, with an indication of their director, year of release, cinematic genre, and languages other than English used (or which realistically would have been used) by the characters. The column ‘major other languages’ names the languages that are present (or replaced) in more than one, but typically many scenes in the movie, while the column ‘further languages’ contains a list of languages spoken in a single instance only. The final column states whether the main strategy employed is the presence or replacement of other languages, which is discussed in the final section of this chapter. In the following four sections, I discuss the four sets of criteria in turn. 4.2 Linguistic criteria In most mainstream movies, there is at least one minor case of language contact, often in the person of a tourist or immigrant character who speaks a language other than English, or an L2 variety of English. However, the movies chosen had to feature language contact as a dominant aspect of their stories. Among the preferred sites for language contact in literature, commentators have mentioned narratives of colonialism, cultural contact, and travel narratives (Goetsch 1987a: 67); in the example of medieval literature, the crusades form a prime example (Reichert 2003). In his “Taxonomy of Films in which Ethnicity Plays a Role”, Cowen (1991: 358 ff ) distinguishes, from an American point of view, between “Films with Americans in a Foreign Place” (359) and films with “Foreigners and Ethnic Minorities in America” (364). If we extend and generalize this distinction, we can posit two first prototypical settings for language contact narratives where English is the base language: <?page no="55"?> 4.2 Linguistic criteria 41 Table 3: The language contact movie corpus Movie Director Year Genre Major other languages Further languages Main strategy Amadeus Milos Forman 1984 Historical drama German, Italian, Latin Replacement Behind Enemy Lines John Moore 2001 War Serbian/ Bosnian Presence The Bourne Identity Doug Liman 2002 Action thriller German, French, Italian Dutch, Yoruba Presence Braveheart Mel Gibson 1995 Historical drama French, Latin, Gaelic Presence Clear and Present Danger Phillip Noyce 1994 Action thriller Spanish Replacement Elizabeth Shekhar Kapur 1998 Historical drama French Latin Presence Fools Rush In Andy Tennant 1997 Romantic comedy Spanish Japanese Presence Frantic Roman Polanski 1988 Action thriller French Arabic Presence French Kiss Lawrence Kasdan 1995 Romantic comedy French Presence GoldenEye Martin Campbell 1995 Action thriller Russian French Replacement Green Card Peter Weir 1990 Romantic comedy French Spanish Presence Hannibal Ridley Scott 2001 Action thriller Italian Replacement The Hunt for Red October John McTiernan 1990 Action thriller Russian Replacement The Jackal Michael Caton- Jones 1997 Action thriller Russian, French Presence Just Married Shawn Levy 2003 Romantic comedy French, Italian German Presence <?page no="56"?> 42 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus Movie Director Year Genre Major other languages Further languages Main strategy Licence to Kill John Glen 1989 Action thriller Spanish Replacement The Living Daylights John Glen 1987 Action thriller Slovak, Russian, German, Afghani Czech, French, Arabic Replacement The Peacemaker Mimi Leder 1997 Action thriller Russian, Serbian, German Presence The Pianist Roman Polanski 2002 Historical drama Polish, German Russian Replacement Red Heat Walter Hill 1988 Action thriller/ comedy Russian Spanish Presence Sabrina Sydney Pollack 1995 Romantic comedy French, Spanish Presence Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg 1998 Historical drama / War French, German Czech Presence Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg 1993 Historical drama German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish Russian Replacement The Sum of All Fears Phil Alden Robinson 2002 Action thriller Russian, Arabic, Ukrainian French, German Presence Tomorrow Never Dies Roger Spottiswoode 1997 Action thriller German, Chinese Danish, Vietnamese Replacement Traffic Steven Soderbergh 2002 Action thriller Spanish Presence A View to a Kill John Glen 1985 Action thriller French, German Russian Replacement The World Is Not Enough Michael Apted 1999 Action thriller Russian Spanish, French Replacement <?page no="57"?> 4.2 Linguistic criteria 43 1. English L1 speakers abroad: Narratives where English L1 speakers (hence EL1 characters) travel to, or live in countries where other languages are dominant. 2. Multilingualism in English-speaking countries: Narratives where characters with a non-English L1 (hence OL1 characters) travel to, or live in an English-speaking country (in my case the US, Canada, or Britain). While these two categories cover instances of language contact in a strict sense, there is a third category which caters for settings where the English language is absent: 3. No English speakers: Narratives where English EL1 characters are partly or wholly absent, and where characters with other first languages interact with each other. These settings can be endolingual, in that all characters share the same non-English L1, or exolingual, where there is contact between different other languages. Endolingual interactions, such as a monolingual conversation in Spanish among Mexican characters, would obviously not qualify as instances of language contact in real life. Here, the nature of language contact is purely textual, in that the Spanish dialogue appears within a movie where the English language is also used: the movie itself, rather than the individual scenes, is multilingual. Frequently however, the same characters who appear in endolingual non-English settings meet characters with an English L1 in other parts of the movie. In fact, most movies feature examples of at least two of these categories, and even in movies with many interactions of the third category, EL1 characters are always central to the narrative. Which are the other languages considered for this study? In her seminal study on the language of movie dialogues, Kozloff rightly points out that any study “relying on subtitles”, without the analyst’s knowledge of the languages spoken, is “intellectually bogus” (2000: 26). For this reason, I have only considered movies with a limited number of major European languages. French, Russian, and Spanish are the dominant other languages in the corpus, and at least two movies each contain Czech, German, Italian, Latin, Polish, and Serbian/ Bosnian. Further languages, which do not appear in more than one movie each, and which are not at the focus of my attention, are Afghani, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, (Scottish) Gaelic, Hebrew, Japanese, Slovak, Vietnamese, Yiddish, and Yoruba. Clearly, in Phillipson’s (1992: 99) wording, “it is the big languages that interest” me, and my findings are only of partial relevance for depictions of multilingualism outside Europe and America. Still, <?page no="58"?> 44 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus my hope is that the insights gained from this work can be tested against the evidence from different sociolinguistic settings. Language contact in mainstream cinema has its preferred genres: action thrillers with international settings, historical dramas, war movies and intercultural comedies. From “the most popular and enduring series in motion picture history” (Chapman 2000: 268), the James Bond series, all six movies from 1985 to 1999 were taken (A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights, Licence to Kill, GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough). The movies are centered on the eponymous British secret agent originally created by the writer Ian Fleming. As an American counterpart to James Bond, three movies from the Jack Ryan series, based on novels by Tom Clancy, were considered (The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears). Compared to his British counterpart, the CIA agent Jack Ryan compensates a certain lack of irony and enthusiasm for field missions with his academic background and sharp analytical skills. From both series, one movie released during the relevant period was not included: the Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) did not meet the linguistic criteria (the major other language being Korean), while in Patriot Games (1992), Jack Ryan’s hunt for IRA terrorists does not result in any non-English dialogue whatsoever (but contains interesting representations of Irish English). The nine Bond and Ryan movies are complemented by eight further action thrillers. Five movies qualify as historical dramas, two of which are set in Medieval and Renaissance Britain, and three during World War II. Belligerent activities are a dominant feature of these movies, and these also inform the narrative of Behind Enemy Lines, a war movie with a more recent temporal setting. Finally, five movies qualify as intercultural comedies: three feature a mixed-language couple (with English and another language), and in two comedies, the mishaps of English speakers on the European continent are depicted. Thus, the prime narrative reasons which bring the characters into contact are (1) migration, (2) tourism, (3) cross-border crime, terrorism, and their prevention, and (4) international conflicts (war, occupation, but also diplomacy). In the following, I will combine a discussion of these four categories with some essential plot details from the 28 movies in the corpus. Migration In the movies as in real life, there are manifold reasons for people to move to and settle down in new places. Often however, the movie characters’ exact political, socio-economic, or personal reasons for migration remain vague or appear to be taken for granted. For instance, the French protagonist of <?page no="59"?> 4.2 Linguistic criteria 45 Green Card marries an American horticulturalist for convenience, and while he seems to enjoy his new life in the multicultural environment of New York City, his precise reasons for having moved away from France are never specified. Some characters are shown in occupations typical for lower-class immigrants, such as taxi drivers (in Frantic) or household servants (in Green Card, Sabrina and Just Married ). Narratives of immigrant success include the movie Fools Rush In, where a community of Mexican Americans in Las Vegas is depicted as having lived in the US for more than one generation, and the occupations of its members include a police officer and a photographer. Still, they maintain close emotional and also concrete relationships with their country of origin: in the movie, the female protagonist Isabel Fuentes travels twice to Central Mexico to visit her great-grandmother. Cases of elite migration also appear in the movies. In Amadeus, mainly set in 18 th century Vienna, the protagonist and frame narrator Antonio Salieri migrates from his northern Italian home to the capital of the Austrian Empire to take up a prestigious post as the Emperor’s Court Composer. In Schindler’s List, the protagonist Oskar Schindler has left his Moravian home town of Brünnlitz for Krakow, a city in the south of Nazioccupied Poland, to earn money by employing Jewish slave labourers in an enamelware factory. A final example is the psychopathic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, who appears in Hannibal, a sequel to Silence of the Lambs (1991), where he had managed to escape the snares of the FBI. Lecter is shown living under the false identity of a Romance scholar, Dr Fell, in Florence (Italy), without however having lost any of his criminal energy. The last two examples show that migration in the movies analyzed does not exclusively involve English-speaking destinations. However, the US is the target of migration in most instances, while migration to or within Europe is typically a limited and upper-class phenomenon. Tourism The English-speaking countries have not only been preferred targets of migration for a long time, but they are also undoubtedly attractive tourist destinations. There is an obvious connection between the depiction of certain locations, especially in the US, and the subsequent motivation of viewers to travel to these places (see Branston 2000: 64 f ) - a case in point is California in general, and the movie studio tours in particular. Therefore, it is perhaps surprising that foreign tourists to the US or Great Britain hardly appear at all in any of the movies analyzed. Rather, the focus is on American tourists abroad in Mexico or Europe. A borderline case between migration and tourism can <?page no="60"?> 46 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus be found in Sabrina, where the protagonist spends a year in Paris, working as a trainee for a fashion agency. Academic tourism appears in Frantic, where a cardiology conference brings Dr Richard Walker and his wife Sondra from San Francisco to Paris, and also in French Kiss, where the protagonist Kate, a history teacher, follows her unfaithful fiancé to the French capital, where he is combining a trip to conferences with acts of infidelity. Examples of more casual tourism include a scene in Traffic, where a young American couple is trying to regain their stolen car in Tijuana (Mexico), and a large part of the movie Just Married. There, a couple of honeymooners travel from France via Germany to Italy (not without, incidentally, some geographical licence). To sum up, tourism proper is an important, but not the dominant motivation for language contact in the movies analyzed. In contrast, a greater focus is laid on evil criminals and terrorists and the good guys who oppose them - characters such as James Bond, whom one commentator has rightly named a “professional tourist” (Chapman 2000: 274). Crime and terrorism The wide geographic scope of the depicted criminal activities is closely linked to their seriousness and to the despicability of the movie characters who execute them. Drug trafficking, specifically cross-border cocaine trade, informs four movies, with Hispanic characters involved in all cases. In Clear and Present Danger, the focus is on a Colombian cartel with good contacts to the US, while Traffic depicts cocaine trade between Mexico and California. In Licence to Kill, the drugs come from the Central American isthmus, and even in Red Heat, which is mainly about Russians in Chicago, the dope is sold by a certain Lupo from El Paso. It is fair to say, however, that the Hispanic thugs rely on equally reprehensible English L1 speakers for their activities, and that their language contact is paralleled by cross-border cooperation on the side of the (generally sympathetic) law enforcers. In Traffic, various Mexican and US officials join forces to crack the drug cartels, while in Licence to Kill, James Bond gladly accepts the help of Lupe Lamora, the cartel boss’s attractive girlfriend. Even in Clear and Present Danger, where no Colombian officials are even aware of the Americans’ illegal drug war in their country, the CIA agent Jack Ryan has to rely on the help of a local - ironically, the main cartel boss himself. A second preferred domain of international crime is the smuggling and trade of illegal arms, mostly nuclear weapons of dubious provenance. The sites selected for nuclear explosions by evil terrorists include Manhattan (The Peacemaker), Baltimore (The Sum of All Fears) and, in the Bond movies, <?page no="61"?> 4.2 Linguistic criteria 47 London (GoldenEye), Beijing (Tomorrow Never Dies), and Istanbul (The World Is Not Enough). Moreover, the plan in two earlier Bond movies is to use arms and explosives to flood Silicon Valley (A View to a Kill ), and to crush the anti- Soviet resistance in Afghanistan (The Living Daylights). Again, both positive and negative characters have different linguistic profiles, but in all cases, there is a positive leading character who is an English L1 speaker. These protagonists are, in general, loyal to their government. Two exceptions include James Bond in Licence to Kill, where his action against the evil drug cartel boss is not approved by the British Secret Service, and The Bourne Identity, where the protagonist has to escape from the members of an evil cell of the CIA. International conflicts The final category consists of movies where the reason for language contact is political, in the form of negotiations between state leaders and diplomats, but also of brutal encounters on battlefields. The presence of Isabelle, the French-born Princess of Wales at the English Court in Braveheart, appears politically motivated, rather than an instance of love migration, and the same conclusion can be drawn from the Duc d’Anjou’s largely unsuccessful wooing of the young Queen of England in Elizabeth. The military occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in the Second World War informs the narratives of Schindler’s List and The Pianist. In both movies, the focus is on the effect of the Shoah, the Nazi policy of discrimination against, and eventual extermination of the European Jews, on individual Jewish characters’ lives. In Schindler’s List, these are the Jewish inhabitants of Krakow, while The Pianist depicts the experiences of Wladyslaw Szpilman 12 , a pianist working for the Polish radio in Warsaw, and his family members. Finally, two movies belong to the genre of war films in a stricter sense. The movie Saving Private Ryan starts at the onset of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6 th 1944, and depicts the mission of a small platoon of US Army Rangers to find and repatriate an American paratrooper dropped somewhere inland. In contrast, Behind Enemy Lines is set during the NATO peacekeeping mission in the mid-1990s Yugoslav civil war. The protagonist is a US Navy jet pilot shot down by renegade Bosnian Serb mili- 12 I reproduce all names of characters as they appear in the movie credits, with no attempt to supply missing diacritics, ‘correct’ anglicized spellings, or harmonize different transliterations of identical syllables across different movies. For instance, Szpilman’s first name is correctly spelt Władysław in Polish. Likewise, while the Cyrillic spelling of the Russian ending <ob> (typical for the masculine form of last names) is usually given as <ov> (as in Nemerov, the Russian president in The Sum of All Fears), the credits for The Peacemaker use <off>, as for the characters Kodoroff and Vertikoff. <?page no="62"?> 48 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus tia, who subsequently try to track him down before he reaches safe (Bosnian Muslim) territory. In the latter two movies, the language contact is of a very pronounced kind, because settings where the US characters and their enemies share a common language are rare. Conversely, in the interactions featured in the Shoah movies, the Jewish characters generally understand the German used by their Nazi oppressors. 4.3 Generic criteria The genres of fantasy and science fiction, with settings such as Middle Earth or any parallel universes that resemble the Valley of the Kings, are not discussed in this study. Unfortunately, this excludes any analysis of how languages such as Sindarin (in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002) or Ancient Egyptian (Stargate, 1994) are used in movie dialogues. Clearly, Lippi-Green (1997) has shown how the study of unrealistic narratives - fairy tales in her case - can offer eminently valid insights into language attitudes and ideologies. On the other hand, it is hard to judge the accuracy of representations in genres where basic rules of realist representation do not apply to begin with (see Goetsch 1987a: 44). Therefore, my methodological choice was to analyze movies with a real-life temporal and spatial setting, and relatively realistic storylines. This enables me to contrast any instance of language choice in representation with how the interaction might, in all likelihood, have taken place in reality. Of course, in some James Bond movies the laws of physics are stretched to the utmost degree, the real-life Mozart is unlikely to have been killed by Antonio Salieri, and traces of William Wallace’s DNA might just be absent in the genetic make-up of the members of the present-day Windsor family (as strongly suggested in the movie Braveheart). While the characters of Wallace, Salieri, and Mozart are based on historical persons, the majority of characters are pure invention, as is most obvious in the case of the US presidents Bennett and Fowler in the Jack Ryan movies Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears, respectively. In contrast, in the background in one scene of The Peacemaker, a portrait of Bill Clinton adorns the wall of a DC government office. Cameo appearances of real-life persons are very rare; two exceptions include the Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic in original news footage shown on television in a scene in Behind Enemy Lines, and the popular French music group Jolie Môme, who can be seen performing on a Paris street in Sabrina. Still, the stories of all of these movies are, in general, realistic and well-defined in their setting. The one borderline case is the Bond movie Licence to Kill, which is largely set in a fictional Central American republic named Isthmus City, run <?page no="63"?> 4.4 Economic criteria 49 by the drug tycoon Franz Sanchez and his puppet president Hector Lopez. Still, the movie was included due to its place within the James Bond series, and also because Isthmus City is only a thinly disguised setting for Panama, which was invaded by US armed forces in 1989, the very year when Licence to Kill was released (see Chapman 2000: 240 and Black 2005: 151 ff ). In contrast, one movie which did not meet the criterion of realism was European Vacation (1985), although it would have fitted well with the other intercultural tourism comedies. The movie, which narrates the mishaps of an American family on a holiday trip to the Continent, is just one measure too absurd still to count as realistic, as becomes obvious in a scene where the Griswolds manage to destroy the Stonehenge circle with a domino effect caused by a clumsy parking manœuvre. 4.4 Economic criteria The main reason for my choice of mainstream and high-budget movies is their worldwide audience. On the one hand, these movies have been watched and discussed by a large number of people, which underlines their status as texts with a significant degree of social and cultural relevance (see Flicker 1998: 79). On the other hand, the large audiences also rule out the possibility that a specific ethnolinguistic audience was targeted by any movie. In other words, my imagined viewer is not an active or passive user of the other languages used in these movies; the communicative situation is an exolingual one, where a multilingual movie is watched by an imagined L1 user of English 13 , who may well be an individual multilingual himor herself, but not necessarily know any individual other language used in the movie. Crucially, my focus is not so much on how viewers in German-speaking countries react to German-speaking Hollywood characters, nor on the reception of Hollywood Hispanics by Mexican or Columbian audiences, although these are eminently valid questions in themselves. Rather, I am interested in how the use of any language other than English comes across to a viewer, and might then inform his or her attitudes towards multilingualism in general. The movies are mainly US productions: according to Miller (2000: 145), American movies comprise “between 40 and 90 per cent of the movies shown in most parts of the world”, and also “eighty-eight of the 100-top 13 Viewers who do not understand English are likely to watch a version dubbed or subtitled into another language they know better. In these cases, the contrast between the base language and the other languages usually remains, except of course when the other language and the new base language (that is, the language dubbed or subtitled into) are identical. See the subsection Prayers and songs and footnote 17 below. <?page no="64"?> 50 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus grossing films in 1993”. Monaco (2000: 282 f ) notes that between the midseventies and the early nineties, the ratio of money earned from US movies in Western German cinemas rose from 40 % to 83 %, while in the Netherlands, the share of Dutch film producers in total revenue went down from 78 % to 18 %. By then, a bit less than half of the American movie industry’s annual revenue came from abroad, mainly from Europe - which bought American movies at a tenfold rate, compared to their own movie export to the US (Miller 2000: 153); both figures were predicted to have risen since (see Balio 1998). Some commentators have stressed the active role of US officials in creating and maintaining this near-monopolistic situation (see Ulff-Møller 2001), or have accused the US movie industry of disseminating images that may be “in direct conflict with those of the importing nations” (Segrave 1997: 281). In contrast, others have rejected these accusations of cultural imperialism, sometimes not without a certain degree of sarcasm, as in this quote by Jarvie (1998: 43): What is so deplorable about the worldwide enjoyment of Jurassic Park, with its multinational cast, or of that great Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, or of that great Belgian Jean-Claude Van Damme, or of Clint Eastwood? The answer is, I believe, a political one. A more balanced explanation is found in Branston (2000: 17), who doubts that either “‘a natural talent for entertainment’” or the notion of a “‘free market’” are sufficient explanations for Hollywood’s success. Still, Branston maintains that the presence of mainly white European immigrants during the first generations of the industry contributed to a “more multicultural/ multimarket (universal? ) mode of storytelling than that of other early film-making cultures” (ibid.), which reduces their ‘cultural discount’ (Hoskins and Mirus 1988; see also Jarothe 1997), defined as the extent to which very culturespecific cinematic narratives lose their appeal when exported to countries with different cultural settings. In the era of globalization, Branston writes, the universal appeal of Hollywood blockbusters is bolstered by factors such as locations all over the world, cutting-edge technology, very high budgets and the “market appeal of particular stars” (2000: 67) - factors which are all present in the corpus of movies analyzed. According to the business data available online at the Internet Movie Database (hence IMDb), the budgets of the corpus movies range from $ 18 million for Amadeus in 1984, and $ 135 million for The World Is Not Enough in 1999. The average US gross is around $ 78 million, with Frantic’s $ 17 million (1988) at one end, and the $ 216 million for Saving Private Ryan, ten years later, at the other. For five movies only, the figure for US gross is <?page no="65"?> 4.5 Chronological criteria 51 smaller than the budget, but in all cases, this is compensated by the gross earned outside the US. For instance, Licence to Kill cost approximately $ 40 million, grossed $ 34 million only in the US but $ 156 million worldwide. The four other movies whose success was mainly outside the US are Sabrina, The Jackal, The Peacemaker, and The Pianist. Famous directors of the corpus movies include Roman Polanski and Steven Spielberg (2 movies each), but also Sidney Pollack, John McTiernan, and Ridley Scott. The list of stars among the actors is equally impressive. Among the American actors, some of the big names are Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Salma Hayek, Ashton Kutcher, Meg Ryan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis. The top English-speaking actors from outside the US include Richard Attenborough, Cate Blanchett, Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery, Judy Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ben Kingsley, Liam Neeson, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, to name but a few. Also, there are a number of actors from outside the English-speaking countries, who are as well known for their Hollywood appearances as in their countries of origin. Some examples are Fanny Ardant, Gérard Depardieu, Sophie Marceau, and Jean Réno (France), Armin Müller-Stahl and Franka Potente (Germany), and Marcel Iures (Romania). Eight movies won at least one Oscar presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including awards for best picture (Amadeus, Braveheart, Schindler’s List), best director (Amadeus, Braveheart, The Pianist, Schindler’s List, Traffic), and best screenplay (Amadeus, The Pianist, Schindler’s List, Traffic). Three actors were also awarded for their performances in the movies analyzed: F. Murray Abraham (Antonio Salieri in Amadeus), Adrien Brody (Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist), and Benicio del Toro (Javier Rodriguez in Traffic). 4.5 Chronological criteria The time frame of this study is limited to the two decades between Amadeus (1984) and Just Married (2003). Clearly, the aim is not to write a history of cinematic multilingualism from its beginnings, but to analyze some of its most fundamental patterns with reference to some fairly recent movies. One of the major historical developments reflected in the movies is the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is literally on screen in the form of the Austrian-Czechoslovak border in The Living Daylights, and referred to in more or less obvious ways in most of the James Bond, Jack Ryan, and other thrillers. Another dominant motive is the ongoing concern with the role of Nazi Germany in World War II, and the extent to which racist and fascist ideologies have survived <?page no="66"?> 52 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus in the decades since. A third set of key phenomena are related to cultural and economic globalization, and include mass tourism and transportation (some form of air traffic appears in at least 17 movies), worldwide media and satellite communication, but also the forms of international crime discussed above. Icons of globalization are perhaps most prominent in movies such as Tomorrow Never Dies, where an insane media mogul triggers international conflicts to boost his newspapers and television channels, or The Sum of All Fears, where modern forms of telecommunication (telex hotlines, pagers, and the internet) are prominently depicted. Two further reasons have informed my choice of recent movies. Firstly, they postdate the beginnings of scholarly investigation into, and more widespread public awareness of multilingualism. This is not to claim, obviously, that realistic or favorable fictional accounts of multilingual discourse were inexistent before the second half of the twentieth century. Still, it is only against the background of well-established linguistic findings on real-life multilingualism that its representations can be fruitfully commented on, and it would seem less fair, and also less pertinent, to criticize representations dating from a period when phenomena such as code-switching were much less well understood even by linguists, let alone by the general public. The final reason is purely personal, in that the period from 1984 to 2003 spans the first two decades of my own life as a movie viewer. 4.6 The replacement and presence sub-corpora In the remaining part of this book, the representation of language contact in the 28 movies is discussed in three different chapters. Chapter 5 contains a qualitative discussion of different strategies of replacement (elimination, signalization and evocation, see chapter 3, section 3.2 above) in 12 movies where interactions in other languages are partly or wholly replaced by English dialogues. Chapters 6 and 7, where the qualitative analysis of excerpts is combined with quantitative observations, analyze multilingualism in the remaining 16 movies where the other languages are present. While the presence of other languages in a movie scene is relatively easy to pinpoint, this is not always the case for replacement - especially when the story contains English-speaking characters, and when the characters with other first languages appear to know English as well. Amadeus is the only movie in which no reference is made to English whatsoever, while both in Schindler’s List and The Pianist, the English language makes brief realistic appearances in the form of radio broadcasts (Winston Churchill on V-Day) or literature (a character quoting from an English copy of Shakespeare’s <?page no="67"?> 4.6 The replacement and presence sub-corpora 53 The Merchant of Venice). The best way to pinpoint replacement is the use of English in endolingual settings among L1 speakers of another language, because that is where English is least likely to be used even by characters who know it. In movies with many exolingual conversations between English and other L1 speakers, two clear examples for endolingual interactions are the casual conversations of Florence police agents at their office in Hannibal, or the meeting of the Russian military council in St. Petersburg in GoldenEye. However, the case is less clear for a number of Bond movies: some of them feature hardly any non-English endolingual settings at all, while in others, the strategy of replacement is used alongside that of presence in different scenes. Nevertheless, all six Bond movies are treated in the replacement chapter, since there is at least one replacement scene in each movie, and even where other languages are present, they appear either in barely discernible background utterances, or in only very short interactions. Among the 16 movies with presence of other languages, the two historical dramas set in Britain require further specification. In Elizabeth, the representation of language contact between speakers of English, French, and Spanish is informed by the strategy of presence. One scene forms an exception, however: at the Vatican, a very sinister Pope is shown taking the decision to have Queen Elizabeth excommunicated - in British English. Here, the motivation for replacing the logical language (Latin, or possibly Italian) may have been motivated by the decision to cast the British actor John Gielgud (in one of his last screen appearances) in the role of the Pope, and the preference to have the renowned actor use his first language rather than Italian or Latin. The momentary replacement does not clash with the remainder of the movie, however, because it is limited to a single instance, nor are either Italian or Latin (with the exception of prayers) used elsewhere in the movie. In Braveheart, the situation is somewhat more complex. The movie is set around the year 1300 and depicts the Scottish struggle for independence from the point of view of the protagonist William Wallace. The Scottish characters are distinguished from their English enemies by their regional variety of English (Gaelic is only very rarely used). In contrast, Wallace’s main opponents, King Edward I Longshanks and Edward, the Prince of Wales, speak RP-accented English throughout the movie, while French is only spoken by Wallace as a second language, the French-born Isabelle, Princess of Wales, and by Nicolette, Isabelle’s maidservant. In reality however, French was in all likelihood still spoken at the English Court in the period depicted in Braveheart, although Edward I “was very conscious of his Englishness”, and is even reported to have accused the king of France of aiming at an eradication of the English language (see McCrum et al. 1992: 77). Strictly speaking, <?page no="68"?> 54 Chapter 4: The Language Contact Movie Corpus all English-language interactions between English noblemen would therefore also qualify for replacement. It is easy to see, however, why the makers of Braveheart chose this strategy of historical inaccuracy. The use of French at the English court would have run counter to the cinematic conventions concerning the representation of Medieval Britain, where (possibly slightly archaized) Modern English has always been used to replace both Norman French (see Fraser 1998: xiv) and vernacular Middle English. Furthermore, it would have puzzled most viewers (with the likely exception of a few enthusiastic historical linguists), who lack the background knowledge about the post-conquest English diglossia, and would have identified the Frenchspeaking royals and noblemen as recent immigrants, rather than members of a long-established ruling class. Finally, it would have blurred a contrast (see chapter 3, section 3.4 above) that is crucial for the narrative, namely the opposition between the likable French princess and the despicable English family she married into. In spite of the replacement of Norman French with English, the focus of my attention lies on the language contact between speakers of English and continental French, which is why the movie is discussed under the heading of presence. Therefore, the two historical movies are discussed later in chapters 6 and 7. In the following chapter, my attention is directed to the replacement movies. <?page no="69"?> Chapter 5: Replacement strategies According to one reporter, William Faulkner, hired to write the screenplay for The Land of the Pharaohs, which Howard Hawks was to direct, put off the writing as long as possible. Months went by, Alexandre Trauner’s set went up, but not a line was written. One day Faulkner announced that he had started work. The producer arrived, found the writer splitting his sides with laughter, and asked the reason for his mirth. Faulkner showed him the first line of dialogue. The Pharaoh, visiting the building site, has asked his workers: “How’s it going, boys? ” This simple English phrase he had put in the Pharaoh’s mouth kept Faulkner laughing uncontrollably for hours. But later he did finish the screenplay. (Carrière 1994: 44) 5.1 Introduction William Faulkner’s hilarity, which was obviously caused by the absurd idea of an L1 speaker of Ancient Egyptian using colloquial present-day English, illustrates the defining feature of the replacement strategies in movies: the language the viewer hears is essentially the wrong one. Quite clearly, the 18 th century Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have addressed his wife Constanze in American English as little as he would have played the electric guitar or travelled to Prague by plane. Yet, throughout the history of film, literature, and theatre, audiences and critics have mostly accepted this sacrifice of realism for the sake of comprehension. Few commentators in Medieval Studies have objected to, say, the Beowulf poet’s elimination and replacement of varieties of Old Norse with Old English, nor has there been an intensive critical debate among Renaissance scholars about Shakespeare’s reluctance to write Hamlet in Danish, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Greek, or Romeo and Juliet in Italian. In literature, writers choose languages they can expect their preferred audience to read, and translators cater for the need of audiences who do not know the original language of the text they want to read. Movies are subtitled, dubbed, or produced in a different language (in our case, English) to begin with. In the case of replacement, one task of cinematic narration is to prevent the viewer from assuming that in the fictional world of the story or fabula (Bordwell 1985), the characters would really have spoken English, especially if mistaken assumptions about the sociolinguistic setting can result in serious misunderstandings of the narrative. <?page no="70"?> 56 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies The first section of this chapter contains a discussion and illustration of the strategies of elimination, signalization, and evocation (Mareš 2000a; 2000b; 2003; see chapter 3, section 3.2 above), which form different stages of making the replaced language known to the viewer. Then, I discuss instances of partial presence of other languages within the replacement movies, such as in the background of scenes with English conversations, or after code-switches that would not realistically have taken place. One main question which informs this qualitative discussion is to what extent the different strategies can be seen as instances of linguicist stereotyping. The observations are based on the following corpus of 12 movies which were chosen according to the principles discussed in chapter 4 (see also the complete list of movies in table 3): Table 4: List of movies with replacement of other languages Movie Year Genre Major other languages Further languages Amadeus 1984 Historical drama German, Italian, Latin Clear and Present Danger 1994 Action thriller Spanish GoldenEye 1995 Action thriller Russian French Hannibal 2001 Action thriller Italian The Hunt for Red October 1990 Action thriller Russian Licence to Kill 1989 Action thriller Spanish The Living Daylights 1987 Action thriller Slovak, Russian, German, Afghani Czech, French, Arabic The Pianist 2002 Historical drama Polish, German Russian Schindler’s List 1993 Historical drama German, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish Russian Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 Action thriller German, Chinese Danish, Vietnamese A View to a Kill 1985 Action thriller French, German Russian The World Is Not Enough 1999 Action thriller Russian Spanish, French <?page no="71"?> 5.2 Elimination and signalization 57 5.2 Elimination and signalization Elimination is characterized by the complete absence of any linguistic hints as to the nature of the language(s) replaced. Instead, the viewers may be offered relevant extralinguistic information, which enables them to become aware of the replacement. Since languages are typically associated with geographic entities, such as nation-states or well-known cities, geographical setting often permits sociolinguistic inferences (and also the other way round). Some viewers may also watch movies with previous knowledge: they may know that parts of Hannibal were filmed on location in Florence, that Amadeus is about an Austrian composer, or that Sean Connery was cast as a Soviet submarine commander for The Hunt for Red October. These viewers may then be well aware of the fact that some characters in these movies would speak Italian, German, or Russian, even if in the movie they speak English. For other viewers, who lack this previous knowledge, a straightforward technique is to name the geographic location of the scenes. Superimposed titles are one way of doing so, as in the opening scene of The Pianist, where “WARSAW 1939” can be read: the viewer knows that the setting is Polish, and an educated guess is that the English spoken replaces the Polish language or, possibly, any other languages spoken in Central and Eastern Europe during the period. Very similarly, superimposed titles at the beginning of Schindler’s List name “September 1939” as the moment of the Polish army’s defeat by the Germans, and of the beginning of the Nazi resettlement of Jews: “More than 10,000 Jews from the countryside arrive in Krakow daily.” Shortly afterwards, deported Jews are shown queuing up at registration desks on a railway platform, and a large sign in the background reading KRAKÓW GŁÓWNY (‘Krakow main [station]’) links the superimposed text to the images. Two further examples are the Bond movie The Living Daylights, where the title “BRATISLAVA, CZECHO- SLOVAKIA” appears right after the opening credits, and GoldenEye, where a massive dam (in real life, the Contra dam in Ticino, Switzerland) is glossed over as “ARKANGEL CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACILITY - USSR”. Another strategy to indicate geographical locations is to show wellknown landmarks or to exploit the conventional meaning of symbols on flags. When the narrative of Hannibal moves from the US East Coast to Florence in Northern Italy, we first see a wide shot of the well-known Dome, followed by a short sequence where Dr Lecter’s antagonist, the police officer Pazzi, is standing on the famous Piazza della Signoria, with the replica of Michelangelo’s Davide statue clearly in sight. Later in the movie, a short scene takes place at a bank in Geneva, and the transaction is conducted in a room adorned by the flags of both Switzerland and the canton of Geneva. <?page no="72"?> 58 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies In contrast, the movie Amadeus does not make use of any visual hints with regard to its setting. Instead, a dialogue at the beginning of the movie contains the following lines: Excerpt 1 (Amadeus, 0 06 28 - 0 06 41) (…) Salieri How well are you trained in music? Father Vogler I know a little. I - I studied it in my youth. Salieri Where? Father Vogler Here in Vienna. (…) By combining the name of the capital city of the Austrian Empire with the deictic adverb here, Father Vogler (who acts as the protagonist Salieri’s confessor in this scene) clearly states that the movie is set in a German-speaking environment. Still, different languages are used in Amadeus: Salieri is obviously of Italian origin; he is addressed in a mixture of Italian and English in the opening scene of the movie, and further Italian characters appear shortly afterwards at the Emperor’s Court, as well as in some scenes set on opera stages. Moreover, some religious settings feature the use of Latin. To point to the German language in a more obvious way, the metalinguistic strategy of signalization is used. The following excerpt features the Austrian Emperor Joseph, discussing his plan to commission an opera from Mozart with his political and artistic advisors: Excerpt 2 (Amadeus, 0 24 05 - 0 25 10) (…) Joseph Well then, we should make some effort to acquire him. We could use a good German composer in Vienna, surely? I’m sure he could be tempted with the right offer. Say erm an opera in German for our national theatre. Van Swieten Excellent sire. Orsini-Rosenberg But not in German, I beg Your Majesty. Italian is the proper language for opera. All educated people agree on that. Joseph M-hm. What do you think, Chamberlain? Von Strack In my opinion, Sir, it’s time we had a piece in our own language. Plain German for plain people. Joseph M-hm. Kapellmeister? Bonno Majesty, I must agree with Herr Direttore. German is, scusate, too brute for singing. (‘excuse me’) (…) <?page no="73"?> 5.3 Evocation 59 Signalization is defined as the literal naming of a language in the text, and in this scene, the naming of the German language serves additional narrative purposes. The viewer’s attention is drawn to a language hierarchy, reminiscent of diglossia, which is defended by some characters but contested by others, including (shortly afterwards in the movie) Mozart himself. The reference to Italian as the ‘right’ language for opera motivates and underlines the influential position of the Italian characters - especially Salieri, Mozart’s envious opponent - in the story. Moreover, it announces the ensuing conflicts between Mozart, who is in many ways a representative of the “plain people”, and his more elitist adversaries among the Viennese nobility. Finally, it prepares the Mozart aficionados among the audience for a particularly strict feature of the replacement strategy used in Amadeus: the fact that no German is sung on any of the stages. Whereas lyrics are often left in the original language in replacement movies (see subsection Prayers and songs below), in Amadeus this only applies to Italian. In contrast, the excerpts from The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Magic Flute - both operas with German libretti - are sung in English, and English is also used in a scene featuring a German-language parody of Don Giovanni - one of Mozart’s Italian operas - that is staged at a popular theatre. Very consistently, German is not only replaced by English in the characters’ conversations, but also as a literary register in the lyrics of vaudevilles and operas. In contrast, Italian is present in Amadeus whenever its use within the story appears as realistic. Signalization appears as a straightforward and useful technique, but it requires the viewer to be attentive at the very moment when the name of the language is uttered. Furthermore, a recurrent use of signalization in the same text is likely to appear as oddly redundant, unless there is a strong narrative motivation for such metalinguistic comments. Apart from Amadeus, the only movie in the corpus with obvious signalization is Hannibal, where the Italian language is mentioned in the context of Italian Renaissance literature. In many cases however, evocation appears as a more sensible strategy, because it permits the viewer to keep the replaced language in mind throughout the movie. 5.3 Evocation Evocation is defined as the use of a marked variety of English (the base language), characterized by interference from the replaced language. Although it is a very common strategy, its main shortcoming lies in the fact that an L2 variety (such as English with a Spanish accent) is used to replace what in reality would be an L1 variety of Spanish (or any other language). This paradox can <?page no="74"?> 60 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies cause a number of problems. Firstly, it can fuel language ideologies according to which anybody who is not an L1 speaker of English is somewhat linguistically challenged. Secondly, there is the challenge of distinguishing instances of evocation from conversations where the (same) characters are indeed speaking English, as L2 users with the same accents or other interference phenomena. Moreover, a very ignorant viewer might even be tricked into the belief that English is the only language spoken around the world - ‘natively’ by its L1 speakers, and with funny accents by everyone else. Finally, an overall use of L2 accents by every character runs counter to an important narrative convention: the use of non-standard language for contrastive characterization only. It is probably this last feature which explains why the extent to which evocation characterizes the speech of different characters varies greatly in many movies. Accents and code-switching In theory, evocation could appear on any level of linguistic analysis, but phonology (L2 accents) and lexis (code-switches into the other language for certain words or phrases) are clearly its preferred sites. Instances of morphosyntactic interference used for evocation are practically inexistent (see Herbst 1994: 126), precisely because they would point to an L2 variety in an all too confusing manner. From the point of view of acting, lexis is certainly a more convenient method, in that anybody can utter words or longer utterances in unknown languages, whereas not all actors are equally gifted at imitating certain accents (see Lippi-Green 1997: 84). One solution to this problem is to cast L1 speakers of the replaced language(s) as actors, given that they should have no problem performing the requested accents. This clashes, however, with Hollywood’s preference for stars whose first language is English to play the main characters. In some cases, actors with a non-English L1 are cast in minor roles, where they speak English with marked L2 accents, whereas the stars who impersonate the leading characters may contrive an L2 accent as well - or indeed abstain from doing so altogether. The replacement of German in Amadeus is the most extreme example of the latter strategy, where evocation is used by a single character and in a single scene only. The scene (see figure 1 below) is set in a barber shop, where Mozart has come to find a suitable wig for his impending audience at the Emperor’s Court: Excerpt 3 (Amadeus, 0 26 12 - 0 26 46) Barber Ei ei ei this is a beautiful wig for you. Es looks so marvellous and I love it. Mozart The other one. <?page no="75"?> 5.3 Evocation 61 Barber Here is the other one. I think you will love it. Barber Here is the third one. So. Here we go. How do you like it? Mozart They’re all so beautiful. Why don’t I have three heads? (laughs) Barber This is funny! (laughs and applauds) Three heads! Ha! Figure 1: Mozart (Tom Hulce, on the right) and his barber (Karl-Heinz Teuber) in Amadeus The barber has a marked German accent, and switches into German for three short utterances: the interjection ei ei ei (used to indicate surprise or similar emotions), the personal pronoun es (‘it’), and the discourse marker so (‘so’). As further features that are potentially indicative of interlanguage, one can mention the reliance on repetitions (“love it”; “Here is the …”), the odd coordination in “It looks so marvellous and I love it”, and the slight redundancy of the observation “This is funny”. The barber’s overall linguistic clumsiness is contrasted by Mozart’s concise order (“The other one”), as well as by his imaginative joke about the three heads; needless to say, the composer’s accent is not German, but American. As a whole, the scene provides light amusement at the expense of German speakers: the only character with a German accent in Amadeus is indeed an effeminate, slightly ridiculous, and comical character. Moreover, what seems odd from the point of view of realism is that Mozart’s and the barber’s linguistic skills appear to be very different, whereas in reality, they would have been largely identical. <?page no="76"?> 62 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies A further contrast employed in Amadeus is between American accents, such as Mozart’s, and British RP (Received Pronunciation) accents. The latter are used mainly by aristocratic characters, such as the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg (Mozart’s first employer), and also courtiers such as Orsini- Rosenberg and Van Swieten. Conversely, American accents are mainly used by the commoners, such as Mozart, his wife Constanze, and their maidservant Lorl. Tellingly, Mozart’s friend Emanuel Schikaneder (the author of the Magic Flute libretto), who urges Mozart to leave the “snobby court”, sounds American as well. The social differences indexed by the contrast between American and English accents 14 do not map easily onto instances of positive and negative characterization, though. The RP speaker Van Swieten repeatedly supports Mozart, while an arrogant and nouveau-riche character, whom Mozart haughtily refuses to work for, has an American accent. More clearly, the non-English accents (Italian and German) index their speakers as either evil (Salieri), or at least not to be taken absolutely seriously (Kapellmeister Bonno, the barber, the singer Katerina Cavalieri, and others). Different patterns of phonological evocation appear in The Hunt for Red October, where English replaces Russian in a number of scenes set in and around two Soviet submarines. In the use of L2 accents by the Russian characters, three categories can be distinguished in terms of military hierarchy 14 Writing about the differing uses of British and American accents in historical movies, Fraser (1988: 6; see Wood 2003: 151 f for a similar commentary on the Star Wars trilogy) notes: But in the main the rule holds good, that the man on the throne, or riding in pride with attendant lackeys, or smiling cruelly on the protesting mob, has spoken with the voice of the West End stage, while the fearless spokesman of the oppressed, the self-made hero or rebel, the people’s choice, is good old American. Crucially, the usefulness of the contrast between the two accents is grounded in the fact that they are both standard national accents, rather than regional varieties. As numerous commentators have observed, the use of regional accents for evocation (in replacement movies, movies dubbed into another language, or written texts) is highly problematic, even in cases where their social connotations in the replaced language are meaningful for the narrative (Whitman-Linsen 1992: 48 ff; Gillon 1994: 124; Hoenselaars 1999: xiv f ). Although regional varieties have unambiguous social connotations, their geographical associations remain (Herbst 1994: 96 f ), and they unmask the illogicality of the evocation strategy too obviously. It is only the standard varieties which escape this paradox because they are “unmarked for locality” (Poussa 1999: 27). Clearly, the English language has the rare advantage of being known in two distinct and, broadly speaking, equally prestigious standard accents. This does not seem to be the case for Irish English, for instance: the choice of the makers of Alexander (2004) to use the contrast between RP and Irish accents to represent different ethnic groups in Ancient Greece seems to have puzzled many viewers, as can be seen from IMDb discussion threads such as ‘Why are there so many Irish people in Greece? ’ <?page no="77"?> 5.3 Evocation 63 and narrative importance: the protagonist and his main opponent, a number of secondary characters with medium importance, and minor characters such as sailors or officers with only one or few speaker turns in the movie. The latter characters, who also occupy the lowest position in the military hierarchy within the story, have mostly Russian accents, and some of them are also impersonated by Eastern European actors. The more important characters are played mostly by British actors, who use standard British accents, irrespectively of whether they are good guys, such as the protagonists’ loyal supporter, Captain 2 nd Rank Borodin, or more negative characters, such as Political Officer Putin, or the annoyingly doctrinaire ship’s doctor Petrov. A Russian accent is not even used by the deceitful Russian ambassador Lysenko, despite the fact that Lysenko appears in exolingual settings only, where his use of English is logically plausible, and not part of a replacement strategy. Then, there are the protagonist Captain Ramius and his antagonist, Captain Tupolev, who use different varieties of English again. For Ramius, the actor Sean Connery’s idiosyncratic Scottish accent distinguishes the character from the RP speakers among the Soviets, which adds credibility to the portrayal of Ramius as of Lithuanian (as opposed to Russian) origin. Likewise, Tupolev is played by the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, whose English also features a different accent from those of the other Russian characters. While this pattern may appear fairly complex, it has one major advantage: no American accents are used for any replacement of Russian, which prevents any confusion that could arise, due to frequent changes of setting, between the Soviet and US characters. Different accents, rather than different languages, keep the narrative strands apart - until the protagonists Jack Ryan and Captain Ramius meet towards the end of the movie (see subsection Unrealistic code-switching below). A similarly complex use of evocation strategies characterizes the Shoah movie Schindler’s List. Most characters speak English with relatively distinctive German, Polish, or Yiddish accents. The sociolinguistic setting of Schindler’s List is not always directly accessible, but German is the major replaced language, since most interactions are partly or exclusively among Nazi German characters. In less numerous cases, such as interactions among Jews exclusively, accented English more likely replaces Yiddish or Polish; in general, the Jewish characters appear to master all three languages. While the Jewish and German characters vary in the extent to which their accents differ from standard British or American English phonology, I have found the claim by Goldstein (unpublished; quoted in Lippi Green 1997: 102 f ), that “the more sexually available and attractive a female character was, the less distinctive her accent”, hard to corroborate. On the one hand, while individual examples <?page no="78"?> 64 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies of strong accents are easy to pinpoint, an objective assessment of different degrees of accent strength is far from straightforward, and there is a clear risk of confusing the actors’ individual abilities with the aims of narration. On the other hand, Goldstein’s observation does not hold true for two of the most important and attractive female characters in the movie, Helen Hirsch (a Jewish woman working as a maid for the main negative character Amon Goeth), and Emilie Schindler, the protagonist’s wife. While Mrs Schindler’s German accent is characterized by distinctive trilled / r/ sounds, Hirsch’s Central European accent includes strongly aspirated / h/ (velar fricative) sounds, which makes her pronunciation of her own name sound like Khelen Khirsch. However, there is a clear sense in which evocation through code-switching, rather than accents, distinguishes negative characters from the more positive ones. A case in point can be seen in a comparison between the language of Amon Goeth, the brutal camp commander, and that of the protagonist Oskar Schindler. In his first scene, Goeth is shown arriving at the Krakow ghetto and receiving explanations from Kunde, another SS officer: Excerpt 4 (Schindler’s List, 0 48 50 - 0 49 18) Kunde This street divides the ghetto just about in half. Right side Ghetto A. Civil employees, industrial workers and so on. Left side Ghetto B. Surplus labour. The elderly and infirm mostly. Which is where you will want to start, huh? Do you have any questions sir? Goeth Ja why is the top down? I’m fucking freezing. Goeth’s utterance is cynical (he is being driven in a car, while the Jewish inhabitants are freezing outside), obscene in wording - and marked by a turninitial tag switch for the German word ja (‘yes’), a distinctive feature of many of Goeth’s contributions throughout the movie. For instance, he uses it twice in the following scene, where he chooses Helen Hirsch to be his maid, as well as at a business lunch where he first meets Oskar Schindler. In contrast, there is only a single scene in which Schindler uses the word ja (or indeed any German at all, apart from specific expressions such as the title Scharführer; see the subsection Other forms of evocation below). The scene is set two hours into the movie at a railway station in Krakow, where Schindler oversees the departure of Jewish slave labourers, locked inside crowded and overheated animal wagons. As a clever businessman, Schindler has drawn great profits from Jewish slave labourers in his factory, but at the same time, he has been able to save many of his workers from deportation to the death camps at Auschwitz. At the railway <?page no="79"?> 5.3 Evocation 65 station, he fears that his workers could collapse and die from overheating and dehydration, and asks Goeth’s subordinates to sprinkle the wagons with water hoses. At first, his order is met with reluctance, but Schindler insists, and the soldiers comply with much cruel amusement: Excerpt 5 (Schindler’s List, 2 04 35 - 2 04 46) (…) Schindler (handing his addressee a basket containing wine and food) Scharführer, every time the train stops, you open the doors, you give them water, ja? Scharführer Jawohl. Schindler Ja. This car! This car! Schindler’s use of the German tag ja is motivated by his emotional agitation, and it can also be interpreted as a case of linguistic convergence. Since Schindler depends on the cooperation of the evil and frequently code-switching Nazis, he converges towards them by code-switching himself, in order to have his request fulfilled - even though in reality, there could not logically have been any cross-linguistic convergence. The bilingual potential of the replacement strategy is fully exploited by this pattern of representation, in that the same effect could hardly be conveyed if the scene were, as it would have been in reality, in monolingual German. However, the cost of these narrative contrasts lies in the marking of German as the language of evil Nazis, rather than just as one of different languages involved - and of course Schindler’s own L1 as well. Thus, while Goldstein’s observations on the negative connotations of accents may be called into question, a very similar pattern with respect to code-switched tags is nevertheless observable. In any case, what distinguishes Schindler’s List from all the other movies in the corpus is that more than just one language is replaced - a complex pattern which would be hard to uphold without either signalization or evocation. In The Pianist, the other Shoah movie in the corpus, the English language only replaces Polish, while the German language is present in all interactions with Nazi characters. The protagonist Wladyslaw Szpilman and his family members use fairly indistinct varieties of British English, with only slight traces (if at all) of a Polish or another Central European accent. In the speech of some minor characters (a member of the Jewish police force, or a deranged Jewish woman looking for her missing husband), accents are somewhat more pronounced. While some characters with clear L2 accents are negative, there is nothing particularly non-British about the speech of Antek Szalas, a gentile who exploits Szpilman’s dire situation by embezzling money <?page no="80"?> 66 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies collected on his behalf. Thus, in The Pianist, no strict patterning of accent use and characterization can be discerned. The contrast between non-Germans and Germans appears through the use of English and German, rather than different L2 accents, and no linguistic differentiation pits the gentile Poles against the Jewish characters. Other forms of evocation So far, the discussion of evocation has mainly focused on accents and the use of short code-switched words from the other language, such as the German ei and ja in the examples quoted above, or, as another example, the Italian pronto (‘ready’; the usual turn to answer a phone call) in Hannibal. A further strategy is the use of words or expressions from the replaced language which, due to their high cultural specificity, index a different language and are hard to render in English anyway. A first case in point are given names: characters in replacement movies typically bear names that are obviously non-English 15 , and their effect can be reinforced when culture-specific naming patterns are depicted. These include Russian names, where the first name is usually followed by a patronymic, as in GoldenEye, where General Ourumov is addressed as Arkady Grigorovich in one scene (see excerpt 8 below). Another example are hypocorisms (nicknames based on personal names) derived via language-specific word formation processes. In Amadeus, the German hypocorisms for Wolfgang and Constanze, Wolfie and Stanzi, can pass as German as well as American English - however, the latter hearing 16 is encouraged by Constanze’s pronunciation of the first vowel in Wolfie as [ vυlfi ] rather than German [ vɒlfi ]. In contrast, a clearly non-English abbreviation of a first name is used in The Pianist. The protagonist’s first name, Wladyslaw, is replaced by Wladek by his family members and his close friends, such as Dorota in this excerpt: 15 While in theory, given names are not completely reliable predictors of their bearers’ language use, there is strong evidence that English L1 speakers avoid choosing ethnically marked names for their children - unless these names have already acquired prestige through “global fashions”, such as their appearance in “music and television” (Chevalier 2006: 52). 16 For Thompson (1999: 181) however, the hypocorisms in Amadeus still sound “grating to an Anglophone ear”. <?page no="81"?> 5.3 Evocation 67 Excerpt 6 (The Pianist, 0 09 45 - 0 09 52) (…) Dorota Oh Mr Szpilman, you are quite quite wonderful. Szpilman Call me Wladek please. The word formation process which renders Wladyslaw as Wladek, backclipping and adding of a diminutive velar suffix, is typical for Polish (and other Slavonic languages). Polish titles are not used in The Pianist, though: Dorota addresses Wladek as Mr, not Pan Szpilman. In contrast, titles in the replaced language are extensively used in Amadeus; examples include German Herr (‘Mister’), Frau (‘Mrs’), or Fräulein (‘Miss’), as well as Italian Signore (‘Mister’). The titles Court Composer and Emperor are given in English, while the Italian Bonno is called Kapellmeister (‘Chief Conductor’). In Schindler’s List, the protagonist is addressed as Herr Direktor, and military titles of the SS such as Scharführer, Hauptscharführer and Untersturmführer are inserted into English utterances (see excerpt 5 above). A further sub-strategy exploits the different language versions of place names: whereas the English equivalents of foreign place names are often used when they exist (as in excerpt 1 above), the Italian place name Firenze is used in Hannibal instead of Florence. A more complex use of a place name appears in the following excerpt from Hannibal. The scene shows how Inspector Pazzi, a corrupt Italian police officer, instructs the pickpocket Gnocco to feign an assault on the protagonist Hannibal Lecter, in order to obtain a sample of Lecter’s fingerprints on Gnocco’s large metal bracelets: Excerpt 7 (Hannibal, 0 53 30 - 0 53 55) Pazzi When you go for his wallet, he’ll catch you by the wrist. Gnocco I have done this a few times Inspector. Pazzi Not like this. If there isn’t a clean print on the bracelet, you’ll spend the summer in a cell at the Sollicciano. Gnocco Give me the bracelet. Pazzi Wash your fucking hands. Primarily, Sollicciano is simply an Italian-sounding place name, and only viewers who are very familiar with Florence would recognize it as the name of a major prison. Still, for anyone else the context is sufficiently rich for the utterance to be interpreted correctly. Moreover, the conversation suggests that the metonymical use of the place name for the institution is quickly accessible to both characters. A Florentine insider would not require a circumlocution such as “the prison at Sollicciano”, and by analogy, the characters would <?page no="82"?> 68 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies logically be speaking Italian in this scene. While the place name as such is a case of lexical evocation, its use in context is in fact an instance of pragmatic evocation. Inspector Pazzi’s Sollicciano exemplifies a further set of words and expressions, often used for evocation, that are related, in a broad sense, to institutions and public authorities. In Hannibal, the police headquarters receive their Italian designation Questura, and the abbreviation for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is pronounced by one Italian character in Italian as “effe bi i”. In Schindler’s List, the term Blauschein (‘blue card’) is used for a document which states that its bearers are employed at Schindler’s “Deutsche Email Fabrik”, thereby rescuing them from deportation. Then, there are the names of currencies: Mozart’s unhealthy work for the Requiem is reimbursed in ducats, and in The Pianist, the Polish zlotys are often mentioned. The word form zlotys is a cross-linguistic morphological hybrid in that it contains both a Polish inflectional suffix (-y) and an English one (-s), but in one scene, a boy who sells candy uses the correct Polish form (with a genitive plural ending) when he names the price of his merchandise as “twenty złotych”. Two further categories of culture-specific expressions are greetings and terms of mild or strong abuse. In the movies analyzed, non-English greetings only appear in Hannibal (“buon giorno”; lit. ‘good day’ and “buona sera”; ‘good evening’), and in the special case of Goeth’s “Heil Hitler”, which constitute the last spoken words in the movie, in a brief sequence showing the brutal camp commander’s execution. Conversely, there is a more even distribution of terms of abuse: the Russian word svin’ja ‘pig’ occurs in GoldenEye, while the Spanish gringo and cojones are uttered in The Living Daylights. As a rare and inventive example of a crosslinguistic calque, a Russian IT nerd in GoldenEye teases his colleague by calling her boršč-for-brains after the wellknown Russian vegetable soup. To conclude this discussion of evocation, it is useful to consider a final excerpt. The following scene from GoldenEye depicts a meeting of the Russian security council, presided over by Defence Minister Mishkin. His subordinate, General Ourumov, is asked by Mishkin to report on the recent destruction of a satellite control centre in Siberia: Excerpt 8 (GoldenEye, 0 46 45 - 0 47 31) (…) Mishkin Please, deliver your report. Ourumov As this council is aware, 72 hours ago a secret weapons system, codename GoldenEye, was detonated over Sever- <?page no="83"?> 5.3 Evocation 69 naya. As head of Space Division I personally undertook the investigation. I have concluded this crime was committed by Siberian separatists seeking to create political unrest. Regrettably the peaceful work and much-needed hard-currency earnings of Severnaya have been set back by several years. Therefore I tender my resignation. Members Net. Mishkin It seems the Council does not want your head, Arkady Grigorovich. Merely your loyal assurance that there are no other GoldenEye satellites. Ourumov I can give you that assurance, Defence Minister. (…) In this scene, the replaced Russian language is evoked on the levels of phonology (Russian accents) and lexis. While the Russian place name (Severnaya; ‘Northern’) and Ourumov’s names are the obvious lexical strategies, another striking feature is the excess - even for a formal context of a ministerial meeting - of formality and indirectness in Ourumov’s contributions. In his long first turn, only one sentence (“I have concluded …”) does not begin with either an adverb or an adverbial clause, and the same effect is achieved by his preference for nominalization (“undertook the investigation”; “tender my resignation”; “give you that assurance”). Moreover, Ourumov’s wording is characterized by obfuscation and euphemisms: “political unrest” is used instead of terrorism; Severnaya is a space weapons control centre where much “peaceful work” is not likely to have taken place, and the “much-needed hard currency earnings” all too obviously indicate the ex-Communist’s stereotypical and unhealthy fascination with material goods. Ourumov’s dishonesty (the viewer knows that he is lying to his superior, having caused the explosion himself ) is iconically reflected in Ourumov’s stilted, bookish, and opaque speech style - which results in his depiction as a questionable language user, even though he is not depicted as linguistically incompetent in a more narrow sense. Finally, the English spoken by the two important characters in the scene contrasts with the short intervention in Russian (Net). Strictly speaking, this is not evocation any more, since it is not only a code-switched tag, but a speaker turn that is entirely in the other language. In the following section, my discussion moves on to instances of partial presence, where other languages appear in longer sequences, both to contrast and support the strategies of replacement. <?page no="84"?> 70 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies 5.4 Partial presence Orders and background utterances The strategies of elimination, signalization and evocation are often, though not always, accompanied by utterances where the other languages are not replaced. In the Bigger Little Book of Hollywood Clichés, which contains a compilation of non-academic observations on “rules” or stock features of mainstream cinema, there is one cliché which neatly summarizes the concept of partial presence in movie dialogues (Ebert 1999: 16): Bilingual Nazi Officer Rule. Nazi officers always speak English when talking to each other, even though Nazi sergeants can be heard in the background barking orders in German. TIM BENTON, Huntsville, Ala. The excerpt draws the reader’s attention to a major aspect of partial presence: conversations which reveal vital narrative information feature replacement of the other language, but irrelevant or easily understandable utterances remain in the other language. In Clear and Present Danger, the conversations of Columbian characters are generally replaced with Spanish-accented English. In one scene however, a drug cartel boss interrupts an interaction with his security advisor to address his daughter Oliva, and switches into Spanish: “Ven acá, Oliva, ven acá” (‘come here’; 0 41 20). Likewise, the cartel boss Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill greets the puppet president of the banana republic Sanchez controls in Spanish: “Hector pasa, cómo estás” (‘Come in Hector, how are you? ’; 1 17 17), but then turns to English to discuss essential business with him. It is only in a lengthy truck chase scene towards the end of the movie when Sanchez’s aggressive utterances become more monolingually Spanish. Other instances of shouted orders, which typically accompany scenes with hectic military or police action in various movies, include the Russian davaj (‘come on’), bystro (‘quick’), “što ty delaeš’” (‘what are you doing’), or “bože moj” (‘oh my God’). Spanish examples are adelante (lit. ‘onwards’), vámonos (‘let’s go’), rápido (‘quick’) and cuidado (‘look out’). In a terrorist facility setting in Tomorrow Never Dies, a German voice announces “Gruppe zwei auf Deck drei” (‘group two [report] to deck three’) from a loudspeaker. Less dramatically, in the stables of the French chateau owned by Max Zorin in A View to A Kill, the utterances j’arrive (‘I’m coming’) and doucement (‘gently’) can be heard. Sometimes, background utterances can also be longer: in The Living Daylights, a street scene in Bratislava shows a postman with no narrative function telling an equally irrelevant woman: “niečo som vám priniesol” (‘I’ve brought you something’; 0 38 00). <?page no="85"?> 5.4 Partial presence 71 Schindler’s List is a movie which makes extensive use of partial presence alongside replaced languages. In some cases, there is even a series of several longer turns in Yiddish, Polish or, most frequently, German. In a complex way, these languages are thus sometimes replaced and sometimes present - which forms a sharp distinction to The Pianist, where Yiddish is totally absent, Polish always replaced, and German always present (and in general subtitled). In Schindler’s List, an intensified presence of both German and Polish is a clear index for scenes with especially graphic brutality, as in the long key sequence depicting the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. Later on, in one of the most shocking parts of the movie, a group of Jewish women in the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau are ordered to undress for the showers, but the characters are quite certain that they are about to enter a gas chamber, as they are shouted at in an alternation by two female concentration camp guards, one of whom (Guard 1) uses Polish, while the other one (Guard 2) shouts in German: Excerpt 9 (Schindler’s List, II/ 0 20 12 - 0 20 31) (…) Guard 1 Szybko się rozbierać! Dostaniecie mydło i ręcznik i pójdziecie pod prysznic do dezynfekcji! Szybko się rozbierać! (‘Undress quickly! You will get soap and a towel and you will go under the shower for desinfection! Undress quickly! ’) Guard 2 Schneller! (‘Quickly! ’) Guard 1 Zabierajcie to mydło i szybko! (‘Take the soap, and quickly! ’) Guard 2 Zieht euch schneller aus! Bewegung! (‘Undress faster! Move! ’) (…) For the viewer, the context of the scene is not rich enough to appreciate why exactly both languages are used, since the Jewish characters in Schindler’s List seem, in general, to understand German well enough not to require a translation into Polish. Also, the utterances are not subtitled, which creates an effect of alienation, heightened by the hectic switching between two other languages. Crucially, no difference is made between the language of the Nazi invaders and Polish, the local language - an unequivocal comment on collaboration in Nazi-occupied areas of Europe. To everyone’s surprise, the women in the scene are not gassed in the shower, and shortly afterwards, Oskar Schindler even manages to free them from the death camp to bring them back to his factory. When the camp guards aggressively drive them back <?page no="86"?> 72 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies to the rail track, they still shout at them in German (“Schneller, schneller”). It is only after Schindler succeeds in liberating the women’s children as well, and when all are ready to get on the train that brings them from Auschwitz to safety in Moravia, that the camp guards suddenly shout in English: “Back on the train! Back on the train! ” (II/ 0 28 20). Quite clearly, while German and Polish are the languages of the Shoah, liberation from Auschwitz comes in English. Prayers and songs While the above examples for partial presence are, within the reality of the story, mainly instances of spontaneous language use, other languages are also typically present in more narrowly defined speech genres, such as prayers or songs performed by characters in a scene. Latin prayers accompany scenes set in churches (two in Schindler’s List) as well as Mozart’s wedding and funeral in the movie Amadeus, which also features a discussion between Mozart and Salieri on the Latin text of the Requiem. In Schindler’s List, Hebrew prayers appear prominently in a number of key moments, including the very first scene of the movie, the morning of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, and a wedding service performed shortly before the Jews’ final deportation to Moravia. As the defeat of the Nazi regime becomes imminent, Schindler encourages Rabbi Lewartov, who had worked as a mere slave labourer ever since the arrival of the Nazis in Poland, to initiate the preparations for Sabbath on a Friday night - a gesture which best captures the German protagonist’s eventual humanist (rather than just economic) motivation to rescue his Jewish workers from the Shoah. A final Hebrew prayer is intoned by Lewartov in reaction to Churchill’s D-Day radio address broadcast in the Moravian factory. In all these scenes, the Hebrew is left untranslated and thus largely incomprehensible; in Kozloff ’s words, “a statement about its preferred viewers” (2000: 80 f; see also Fleischer 1999: 236) is made by this movie. The songs and musical lyrics include mundane examples such as the “Feliz cumpleaños” (‘Happy Birthday’) sung in a Colombian scene of Clear and Present Danger, or, more loftily, the Soviet hymn (“Sojuz nerušimyj”; ‘Unbreakable Union’) sung by the crew of the Red October. In Amadeus, there are the Italian (as opposed to German) opera lyrics (see the subsection Elimination and signalization above), and an Italian opera is also featured in Hannibal. The same movie contains a scene where the protagonist Hannibal Lecter holds a trial lecture for the post of a chief librarian, and while his observations on Renaissance Italian literature are in English, he quotes from Dante’s epic Purgatorio in the original version. In Schindler’s List, German <?page no="87"?> 5.4 Partial presence 73 and Polish songs are performed for the Nazi occupiers at their decadent feasts, but also played on loudspeakers in the working camp to accompany life-threatening physical exercise drills. In most cases, the exact content of the lyrics is not directly relevant, although an understanding usually adds further nuances to the viewer’s interpretation of the scene. An interesting exception to the presence of other languages in songs occurs in The Pianist (1 07 02). In a scene set on a Warsaw street on New Year’s Eve, an exceptionally sadistic (and, in this scene, drunk) SS officer is shown beating a group of Jewish males including the protagonist, and then dismisses them with the German order to sing “etwas Lustiges” (‘something merry’). That the Jews intone a patriotic Polish song is made obvious to the viewer by the English lyrics (“Hey ranks unite, and follow the White Eagle, stand up and fight the mortal enemy”). Moreover, the SS officer’s failure to intervene and stop their song underlines the fact that the German characters do not, with one important exception discussed below (section 5.5, excerpt 14), understand Polish 17 . The Jewish characters are granted a short instance of hidden triumph, which is underlined by the foregrounding of their individual multilingualism as an attribute of positive characterization - whereas in Schindler’s List, it appears rather to be taken for granted. Linguistic landscape A final set of examples for partial presence concerns the use of other languages in filmed writing. Replacing other languages in writing can be considered a very marked strategy because it results in a visual, rather than just aural, falsification of the depicted reality. While viewers can put up with English-speaking characters in 1940 Warsaw, an English billboard in their background would certainly be met with puzzled reactions. Therefore, the linguistic landscape of the movies, which includes public signs as well as filmed documents, is usually left in the original language. While exceptions to this pattern exist (typically in historical movies, such as The First Knight, 1995 or The Three Musketeers, 1993), there were no clear-cut instances of English writing replacing other languages in the corpus. One borderline case, which occurs in GoldenEye, depicts an online exchange of instant messages between two Russian scientists in St. Petersburg - all of which are in English (see figure 2). It is rather unlikely, but not completely impossible, that the two characters (who both know English) would have used this language (rather 17 In the dubbed German version of The Pianist, the song is necessarily in the original Polish wording. <?page no="88"?> 74 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies than Russian, even in Latin script). For the viewer however, it is obviously more convenient to read this text in English, rather than to be confronted with subtitles accompanying the writing on the screen. In turn, the excerpt conveys the notion that the Russian language may not be quite as suitable for electronic communication as English. Figure 2: Two Russian characters’ instant messages on screen in GoldenEye In other spy thrillers, bilingual signs in English and the replaced language function as a semiotic way of having one’s cake and eating it, too. In a scene in The Hunt for Red October, a Russian map of the Atlantic Ocean features the names for some subaqueous landmarks in Cyrillic script accompanied by their English equivalents. For the viewer, the impression of realism is combined with the possibility to read the place names, and especially to recognize a location which had previously been mentioned in an English dialogue. A similar example occurs in The World Is Not Enough, where James Bond assumes the false identity of a Russian scientist to get access to a nuclear site in Kazakhstan. Bond is almost exposed when he fails to observe a standard procedure upon entering the site - collecting a radiation tag - and his attention is promptly directed to a large warning sign (see figure 3). The character of James Bond would have known enough Russian to understand a monolingual sign with no English translation, but for the viewer, the interaction would have remained opaque. At the same time, the <?page no="89"?> 5.4 Partial presence 75 presence of the English language on the sign is perfectly plausible since the nuclear site is portrayed as an area of Russian and US cooperation, and Bond’s interlocutor, Dr Christmas Jones, is American herself. In many cases, however, the exact content of the writing is less relevant. In a shot of a Viennese alley in Amadeus, the shop sign “Friseur und Perückenmacher” (‘barber shop and wig maker’) is visible, but since the scene occurs much later than Mozart’s actual visit to the barber shop (see excerpt 3 above), there is no special need for the viewer to read and comprehend the sign at this stage; its function is one of mere realism. Towards the end of The Pianist, the protagonist Szpilman is on the brink of starvation, and hiding in a deserted house in Warsaw. Luckily, he finds an intact tin can in the kitchen, and from his reaction, the viewer learns that the can really contains food. Viewers who know Polish (or German) have the slight, but not vital, advantage of understanding the print “OGÓRKI” (‘cucumbers’) on the can. Likewise, the final scene of The Pianist shows an army camp where the victorious Red Army has assembled German prisoners. A banner in the background reads “ ΒΠΕΡΕД ΗΑ БEPΛИΗ ! ”, and while the Cyrillic writing itself simply underlines the fact that the soldiers are indeed Russian, the exact meaning (“vperëd na Berlin”; ‘onwards to Berlin’) adds a sense of historical accuracy, again without carrying any strict narrative relevance. Figure 3: A warning sign in The World Is Not Enough <?page no="90"?> 76 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies A different case occurs earlier in The Pianist, during a conversation between Szpilman and his gentile friend Dorota. The two are walking through the streets of Warsaw shortly after the German invasion, and as Szpilman intends to invite her to a café, they become aware of a sign on the door that had not been there previously. The sign “ŻYDOM WSTĘP WZBRONIONY”, which is shown in close-up (see figure 4 below), is both highly relevant for the narrative: it upsets both characters and is a first and, at least in comparison, relatively harmless announcement of the occupiers’ genocidal policy. At the same time, the sign is incomprehensible; even the word Żydom (‘for Jews’; a dative plural) is far too remote a cognate for most viewers to recognize. Of the two most obvious strategies, a character reading the sign in English or a subtitle being added, the latter is chosen: “NO ENTRY FOR JEWS” (The Pianist, 0 08 43). Figure 4: A subtitled sign in Polish at a Warsaw cafeteria in The Pianist Much like any instance of multilingualism in fiction, sociolinguistic realism in the depiction of multilingual landscapes can also fulfil symbolic functions. As already mentioned, the beginning of Schindler’s List contains a scene at a railway station, with the Krakow main station’s Polish name visible above the platform. Later in the movie, when the Nazi occupation is firmly established, the Polish sign is replaced by a German one, “KRAKAU Hbf.”: <?page no="91"?> 5.4 Partial presence 77 Figure 5: The Krakow main station signed in Polish … Figure 6: … then in German in Schindler’s List While there is nothing unusual about the monolingualism of the original sign, the Nazi’s decision not to include the Polish language in their revision of the linguistic landscape serves as one further indicator of their brutality and ruthlessness. Interestingly however, a different language policy appears <?page no="92"?> 78 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies towards the end of the movie, when Schindler has managed to guarantee his workers a safe passage from Poland to Moravia. The railway station of Schindler’s home town is marked in two languages, Czech BRNĚNEC and German BRÜNNLITZ: Figure 7: Brünnlitz, Oskar Schindler’s Moravian home town in Schindler’s List This difference in signing policy may be due to historical circumstances with little relevance for an appreciation of Schindler’s List. However, on a symbolic level, it mirrors the extent to which Brünnlitz is a safe haven for Schindler’s workers. Although they are still clearly within Nazi territory, they no longer fear deportation, and Schindler even manages to keep the German soldiers at bay. A comparable instance of bilingual symbolism occurs in the very last scene of Schindler’s List. The surviving Schindler Jews are showed paying tribute at Schindler’s tombstone, on which a Hebrew and German text appear side by side, as if to suggest the possibility of a reconciliation between Germans and survivors of the Shoah. Unrealistic code-switching To conclude the discussion of partial presence, it is useful to describe a specific narrative strategy which poignantly highlights the difference between replacement and presence by juxtaposing them within the same conversational interaction. The first example is from the Jack Ryan thriller Clear and <?page no="93"?> 5.4 Partial presence 79 Present Danger, which starts with a sequence where US Coast Guards find the murdered family of an American businessman in a yacht which had been captured by South American killers off the coast of Florida. The CIA analyst Jack Ryan soon suspects that the killing is somehow related to Colombian drug cartels, and shortly afterwards, the narrative moves to an impressive Colombian hacienda. There, the entrepreneur Ernesto Escobedo is shown practising baseball, when he is addressed by Felix Cortez, his inscrutable security advisor: Excerpt 10 (Clear and Present Danger, 0 09 39 - 0 10 32) (…) Cortez Tu sabes lo qué has hecho, no? Do you know what you’ve done? Escobedo Maté a un ladrón. Maté a un ladrón que me estaba robando. A mí! I killed a thief. I killed a thief who was stealing … from me! Cortez Y a su mujer, y a su hijo, y a su hija, aparentemente sin pensar en las consecuencias. And his wife, son and daughter, with no thought of the consequences. Escobedo Oh, sí señor. Para que sus hijos venguen la muerte de su padre cuando menos lo espero. So his kids should grow up to revenge their father’s death - when I least expect it …? Cortez Ese tío era un gran amigo y un aliado politíco del presidente de los Estados Unidos. He was a good friend and political ally of the President of the U.S. Escobedo That doesn’t surprise me. Cortez It should at the very least concern you. Escobedo What are they going to do. Come after me? Arrest me? You’re scaring me. (…) The subtitled Spanish dialogue at the beginning of the scene informs the viewer that Escobedo gave the order to kill the American - apparently a dishonest business partner - and his family without having asked for Cortez’s advice. Cortez is visibly irritated, but initially, Escobedo does not appear to take him seriously, and continues hitting the balls while talking back to Cortez. Cortez then explains his disapproval: he fears retaliatory action from the American government, because the murdered businessman was a close <?page no="94"?> 80 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies friend of the US President. At this precise moment, Escobedo is surprised and distracted from batting; he misses the next ball, which is shown rolling away in a brief instance of slow motion. When Escobedo answers Cortez, he is suddenly speaking English, which remains the language of conversational interaction among Spanish speakers in all further scenes of Clear and Present Danger. The characters on screen have changed from Spanish to English although within the reality of the story, it is clear that they would not have done so. This strategy can be named unrealistic code-switching because it operg ates exclusively on the level of narration, and not within the story. Unrealistic code-switches are highly marked phenomena, in that they expose the semiotic absurdity of replacement by contrasting it with the more realistic presence. The fact that they qualify as ruptures of the narrative process explains the use of slow motion in the scene quoted above. However, as the last Spanish expression in the interaction, the words “Estados Unidos” (‘United States’) appear as a likely trigger for a switch from Spanish into English. Thus, while the unrealistic nature of the code-switch is foregrounded by the cinematographic technique, the linguistic context is skilfully adapted to embed the code-switch in the conversation and even lend it some pragmatic likelihood. A second example appears in The Hunt for Red October. Most scenes at the beginning of the movie are among English L1 speakers only, apart from the very first one, where two Russian characters (the protagonist Captain Marko Ramius and his closest ally, Captain 2 nd Rank Borodin) exchange four short and subtitled turns in Russian on the cold weather at the home base of the eponymous submarine. Shortly after the Red October has left the base r westwards for the Atlantic, Ramius surprises Political Officer Putin 18 perusing Ramius’s books in the Captain’s cabin: Excerpt 11 (The Hunt for Red October, 0 14 00 - 0 15 06) (…) Ramius Što ty delaeš’? What are you doing? Putin V moi objazannosti vxodit nabljudenie nad povedeniem členov ėkipaža, tovarišč kapitan. Overseeing the stability of the crew. Ramius Perexodiš’ granicy. By invading my privacy? 18 No allusion to the later Russian president of the same name is intended: when the movie was released in 1990, the real-life Vladimir Putin was still completely unknown to the Western cinema audience. <?page no="95"?> 5.4 Partial presence 81 Putin V SSSR, tovarišč, ličnyx del byt’ ne možet. Takoe ponjatie protivorečit obščestvennomu delu. Privacy is not a major concern in the Soviet Union. It is often contrary to the collective good. Putin (reading) Se, idu kak tat’: Blažen bodrstvujuščij i xranjaščij odeždu svoju. I on sobral ix na mesto, nazyvaemoe po-evrejski ‘Armageddon’. And the seventh Angel poured forth his bowl into the air and a voice cried out from heaven, saying ‘it is done’. A man with your responsibilities reading about the end of the world, ha. And what’s this? ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ “Behold, I am coming as a thief. And they gathered them together in place called Armageddon”. Ramius It is an ancient Hindu text, quoted by an American. (…) Ramius’s turns are very short and to the point, but Putin’s language appears very similar to General Ourumov’s speech style in GoldenEye (see excerpt 8 above). His arrogant superiority and orthodox adherence to Soviet communism is reflected in his preference for indirect phrasing, his repeated use of the term tovarišč ‘comrade’, and the way in which his utterances sound as if they were memorized from manuals of doctrine. As a communist, Putin cannot hide his unpleasant surprise, but also amusement at Ramius’s literary predilections. While Putin is reading from the Book of Revelation (16: 15-17) in Ramius’s copy of the Bible, an unrealistic code-switch takes place. Again, there is a cinematographic correlate: while Putin reads, the camera zooms rapidly 19 onto his mouth, stopping precisely when he utters the word “Armageddon”, and then zooms back until he stops quoting from the Bible (“… it is done”). Threre is also a linguistic motivation for the switch: the place name “Armageddon” appears as a convenient place to switch, since it is neither English nor Russian. In Putin’s utterance (though not in the subtitles) it is even preceded by a metalinguistic comment: “nazyvaemoe po-evrejski”: ‘[which is] called in Hebrew’. The unrealistic code-switch into English receives further support from the next text Putin notices, the Bhagavad-Ghita, from which the American inventor of the atomic bomb, Roy Oppenheimer (who is not named in the 19 The same device is employed in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). A more humorous example from the comedy To Be or Not To Be (1983), which is set in Poland, is reported in Kellman (2000: 102): after a few introductory minutes with dialogue in Polish only, “a disembodied, Olympian voice announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in the interests of sanity and clarity, the rest of this movie will not be in Polish.’” <?page no="96"?> 82 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies dialogue), quoted in English, as Ramius informs Putin. The effect of this dialogue is clearly to portray Ramius as erudite and possessing a broad cultural horizon, in sharp contrast to the narrow-minded and nosy communist. Still, it is Putin who performs the unrealistic code-switch, and initiates the replacement of Russian dialogues throughout the movie. Interestingly but logically, the replacement is suspended in one scene towards the end of the movie, when a group of Americans enter the Soviet submarine. Replacement ceases to be an option in a situation of language contact with the base language of narration: in the presence of English L1 speakers, the replacement of an incomprehensible other language with English would appear downright absurd. Thus, Captain Ramius and his crew speak in Russian again, and after an odd initial silence, the ice is broken when Jack Ryan displays his knowledge of Russian, which in turn is met with linguistic convergence on the part of the Soviets (who know English). Next, Ryan’s team and the Soviets join their forces against a third party who is their common enemy - a cooperation which, one should add, takes place in English only. Ryan speaks in Russian in only one more turn in the movie: he tracks down a saboteur deep in the submarine’s bowels, shouts “ostav’te v pokoe! ” (‘stand still’; 2 01 00), and shoots him. Theoretically, it is possible to consider every code-switched speech tag, and every transition from presence to replacement and back as an instance of unrealistic code-switching. It is useful, however, to distinguish unrealistic code-switches on the one hand, and background utterances or code-switching for evocation on the other. While the latter strategies can be used throughout the movie if necessary, unrealistic code-switches typically only appear once, usually sometime soon after the beginning. Their major advantage is to indicate the replaced language in a clear-cut way, and to foreground the stylistic choice of replacement by performing the transition on screen, with cinematographic highlighting to boot. In a way, unrealistic code-switches can be considered a more ‘honest’ strategy than continuous replacement from the beginning. However, they do not solve the dilemma of a potential misinterpretation: viewers can still be tricked into believing that the characters would really have code-switched into English, especially since the unrealistic code-switches occur in a pragmalinguistic environment favourable to codeswitching, as in both examples quoted above. If this is the case, the impression one might get is that conversations may well begin in other languages, but should be carried on in English thereafter. <?page no="97"?> 5.5 Individual multilingualism 83 5.5 Individual multilingualism In the final section of this chapter, I discuss the representation of individual multilingualism in replacement movies. The main question is to what extent the use of interlanguage features for evocation is paralleled by a depiction of non-English L1 speakers as inept L2 users of English (and other languages). A first case in point is the Italian Kapellmeister Bonno in Amadeus, whose depiction as the Emperor’s least competent advisor is mirrored by utterances such as “Majesty, the Herr Direttore, he has removed uno balletto that would have occurred at this place” (1 41 36) - no other character in Amadeus performs trilingual and intra-sentential code-switching to the same extent. In the James Bond movies, both Dr Morten (A View to a Kill ) and Dr Kaufman (Tomorrow Never Dies) are German physicians acting as cynical murderers, and their L2 English is marked with German accents as well as code-switches. For instance, Kaufman encourages Bond to “drop your gun und kick it towards me, ja? ” (0 53 33). Two further Bond baddies, the Russian general Koskov in The Living Daylights and the French-speaking Swiss banker Lachaise in The World Is Not Enough, use words such as the Russian da or the French oui and bon. Other instances of interlanguage index other characters who are not downright negative, but still obviously grotesque. In The Living Daylights, a Slovak technician collaborating with Bond tells him that “when pig goes, his control panel will light up like Christmas tree” (0 17 45). In Licence to Kill, a recurring source of comedy are the frustrating experiences of Pam Bouvier, Bond’s CIA contact. In one scene set in a casino, Bouvier has to rely on a large amount of pantomime to order a Martini that is “shaken, not stirred” (1 03 50; see figure 8) from a linguistically challenged Central American barkeeper. Similarly, when she urgently needs to rent a plane at the airport of Isthmus City (see chapter 4, section 4.3 above), an airport attendant informs her that “nada señorita, no planes” because “Señor Sanchez order it“ (1 38 58). Code-switching and interlanguage are typical for negative or laughable minor characters, whereas higher up in the hierarchy, the evil masterminds are more often portrayed as fluent users of standard English. In four of the six Bond movies considered, they are portrayed as L1 users of English. While two of them, Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye and Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough, have a mixed ethnolinguistic background (both have an English L1, but are also fluent Russian speakers), Brad Whitaker (The Living Daylights) and Elliot Carver (Tomorrow Never Dies), have no non-English background 20 20 However, Black (2005: 19, 209 f; see also Chapman 2000: 29) notes how in earlier Bond movies, there was a more pronounced preference for foreign villains, an observation also confirmed by the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale (2006). <?page no="98"?> 84 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies whatsoever. The two exceptions are Max Zorin in A View to a Kill and Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill. Zorin, a French businessman of Eastern German origin, reportedly “speaks at least five languages, no accent” (0 12 37), but is shown speaking unmarked standard English throughout the movie. Sanchez has a Spanish accent, but his L2 performance is not characterized by any interlanguage features. Rather, he uses English innovatively, as when he presents Bond with the half-dead body of Bond’s CIA contact Felix Leiter, with a note reading “He disagreed with something that ate him” around his neck - Leiter was thrown into a shark pool by Sanchez, and rescued only just in time. Figure 8: Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) ordering a Martini for James Bond in Licence to Kill Among the henchmen in the movies, however, the most multilingual is clearly Necros, a secondary character in The Living Daylights. While his ethnic background remains unspecified, he is shown using American English, a regional British dialect, and Viennese German with completely convincing accents in different scenes, and Necros succeeds in fooling his addressees in all cases - a privilege otherwise reserved for the positive protagonist Bond. The following table lists the second languages used by James Bond in each of the six movies analyzed: <?page no="99"?> 5.5 Individual multilingualism 85 Table 5: James Bond’s second languages in six movies Movie Languages A View to a Kill French, German The Living Daylights Russian, German, Afghani Licence to Kill Spanish, French GoldenEye Russian, French Tomorrow Never Dies Danish, German The World Is Not Enough Russian Clearly, James Bond does not use all languages equally intensively. In The Living Daylights, his German is limited to a “danke” (‘thank you’) addressed to a Viennese coach driver (0 53 45), and likewise his Afghani performance does not exceed one word (“kheista”, which he translates himself as “beautiful”, addressed as a compliment to his Slovak girlfriend Kara Milovy; 1 31 31). In contrast, two scenes in the corpus show him confronted with a language he does not know. Firstly, when Milovy calls him a “horse’s arse” in Slovak, he has to ask for a translation. Also, in Tomorrow Never Dies, he is baffled by a keyboard containing Chinese characters, and is quite happy to delegate the typing to his local contact, Colonel Wai Lin. Conversely, Bond displays his Russian skills in front of his superiors when he translates their enemies’ motto, “smert’ špionam”, into “death to spies” (The Living Daylights; 0 25 47), and in a similar setting in Licence to Kill, he correctly glosses Sanchez’s motto “plomo o plata” as “lead or silver” (0 12 57). In GoldenEye, his use of Russian is only passive, but apparently good enough to label the accent of Xenia Onatopp, his attractive Russian adversary, as Georgian. In general however, there is extremely little dialogue in other languages in the earlier Bond movies analyzed, with a slight increase only in the last two. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond speaks a total of three turns in Danish, while passionately kissing Professor Inga Bergstrom, his language tutor. Later, at a rental car counter in Hamburg, he utters two turns in German, before the local clerk hands her customer over to Q (Bond’s technical advisor), and the conversation continues in English. Finally, a scene in The World Is Not Enough testifies to Bond’s Russian skills. Bond tries to enter a nuclear site under a false Russian identity (see Linguistic landscape above), and because the woman in charge, Dr Christmas Jones, has her doubts about his authorization, she tests him by praising his English (for which Bond has put on a foreign-sounding accent): <?page no="100"?> 86 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies Excerpt 12 (The World Is Not Enough, 0 56 47) (…) Jones By the way, dlja russkogo, vy očen’ xorošo govorite po-anglijski. Your English is very good for a Russian. Bond Ja učilsja v Oxforde. I studied at Oxford. Jones (nods) While any common impostor might not have been able to answer in Russian, Bond passes the test with a coherent, grammatically correct, and convincing answer in that language. Within the reality of the story, his accent even appears genuine enough for Jones to assume that he really is an L1 speaker - in obvious contrast to any real-life viewer acquainted with Russian phonology. What distinguishes Bond from his CIA counterpart, Jack Ryan, is that individual multilingualism has always been an attribute of the British spy. Conversely, while Ryan’s Russian skills are foregrounded in The Hunt for Red October, the American behaves like a complete monolingual in Clear and Present Danger. It is only in the latest Ryan movie (The Sum of All Fears, discussed in chapters 6 and 7), which no longer features any replacement, that Ryan’s multilingualism is again made obvious. A contrast between highly fluent and somewhat deficient L2 use is depicted in Hannibal. While the English language is used to replace Italian in some endolingual interactions, it is an English L1 speaker who excels as a scholar of Italian philology: the insane protagonist Dr Hannibal Lecter easily outperforms local Italian academics (none of whom actually appears in the movie) with his profound knowledge of the Italian Renaissance. Less ambitiously, Lecter’s mortal enemy Mason Verger (another American) quips in Italian (“ciao bello, come stai? ”; ‘hey cutie, how are you’; 0 57 40) on the phone to the Sardinian killer he has engaged to hunt Lecter. In Florence, Lecter is shown in frequent interaction with Rinaldo Pazzi, a local police inspector who gradually becomes aware of Lecter’s true identity. In the following excerpt, the American draws the Italian inspector’s attention to the gruesome history of the Pazzi family (Rinaldo’s forefather Francesco Pazzi was executed after an assault on Florentine leaders in the 15 th century): Excerpt 13 (Hannibal, 0 50 35 - 0 51 12) (…) Lecter Only if you told. Remind me, what was his crime? Pazzi He was accused of killing Giuliano de Medici. <?page no="101"?> 5.5 Individual multilingualism 87 Lecter Ah, unjustly? Pazzi No, no, I don’t think so. Lecter Then he wasn’t just accused. He did it. He was guilty. I think that would make living in Florence with the name Pazzi uncomfortable, even five hundred years later. Pazzi Not really. In fact, I can’t remember the last time (chuckles) before today someone brought it up. (…) Rinaldo Pazzi is neither a Renaissance scholar, nor does he seem especially interested in his family history. Still, for reasons that are not clear to the viewer at this stage, Lecter’s attitude betrays an almost unhealthy fascination with Pazzi’s famous forefather. Strikingly, he not only treats Pazzi like a schoolboy with respect to seemingly irrelevant historical facts, but he also finds it necessary to teach the Italian the English language. The verb accused presupposes, in Lecter’s understanding, that the accusation was unjust - if it wasn’t, he argues, Pazzi’s lexical choice is incorrect, and there is need for the L1 speaker to suggest a remedy. Pazzi remains unimpressed and unaffected by Lecter’s tutoring, nor does he welcome the more critical and practical advice offered to him later in the movie by another American protagonist, FBI Agent Clarice Starling. In all of her phone calls to Italian detectives, Starling remains as curt as possible, and is met either by a disinterested laissez-faire mentality, or - even worse - condescending macho attitudes on the part of her interlocutors. Pazzi’s reaction is of the first kind, and in the end, he pays dearly for his failure both to read between the lines of Lecter’s lectures and to heed Starling’s warnings. While it would seem naive to criticize the way in which Lecter’s evilness is reflected in his aggressive language use, rather than just in his intentions to eat other characters, the use of the replacement strategy in Hannibal does raise a number of issues related to negative stereotyping. Rinaldo Pazzi, as well as the other Italian characters, are portrayed as fluent users of the English language, but as linguistically inferior to the English L1 characters. Moreover, this pattern is mapped onto their supposed performance in their L1, Italian, precisely because in these cases the replacement strategy is used: on the level of narration, their L1 and their English L2 are indistinguishable. Thus, an English L1 speaker functions as the supreme authority both on Italian history and literature, condescendingly explains his findings to the locals, and corrects their English to boot. In sum, the English L1 speakers excel both in the language of international communication and in the local linguistic culture, while the Italian speakers rely on the Anglophones to instruct them in both areas, and pay with their lives because they just wouldn’t listen. <?page no="102"?> 88 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies As a final example, the movie The Pianist contains the most striking representation of L2 interlanguage in the movies analyzed. The scene in question is set on a building site in Warsaw, where Szpilman, who has managed to escape the first big wave of deportations to the death camps, is working with other young Jewish males. The slave labourers, working in utterly miserable conditions and in constant fear of being deported, are addressed by a German SS officer who seems to be offering them a deal: Excerpt 14 (The Pianist, 0 59 30 - 1 01 25) SS officer I have good news for you. There are rumours go around that we will like to er Umsiedlung resettle you. I promise you that now and in the future nothing else is planned. Ja? For this reason we put information posters on the wall to show you our good will. You should vote one of you who be allowded to go in town daily and bring three kilos Kartoffel potato ja and one loaf of bread for each of your workers. So why should we do something else like this if we would resettle you? You can make good business out of the things you don’t eat. Isn’t that something where you Jews are good in, make money? Weitermachen. Since Polish is the only language replaced by English in The Pianist, one must assume that it is an L2 variety of Polish, rather than his first language German, that this officer would have spoken in reality - even if all other German characters in the movie speak German exclusively. The officer’s interlanguage is apparent on various levels of linguistic analysis. With regard to phonology, there are a marked German-Bavarian accent and mispronunciations, such as the avoidance of the second consonant cluster in planned [ plæned]. Morphological mistakes include the hypercorrect past tense allowded, the absence of plural marking in potato, and wrong auxiliaries in “we will like”, “who be allowded”, and “if we would”. Also, the officer seems momentarily unable to recall the word for ‘potato’, which can be deduced from his hesitation and switch into German (“Kartoffel”). Then, his clumsy wording makes his argument partly opaque: does “nothing else” refer to the resettlement, in which case he would contradict himself, or to the status quo of the slave labourers? Finally, although his speech contains one request for confirmation (Ja? ) and two rhetorical questions, the officer’s addressees remain silent. He clearly fails to interpret this dispreferred response, which causes him to abandon his strategy of convergence to Polish, and to switch to German for his final order, weitermachen (‘carry on’). <?page no="103"?> 5.5 Individual multilingualism 89 In this passage, the depiction of interlanguage can be seen as serving a double purpose. On a basic level, there is an attempt to render an L2 variety of Polish as convincingly as possible in English, by substituting mistakes in Polish with mistakes in the replacing language. This mapping of one set of oppositions onto another can be seen as an instance of Irvine and Gal’s (2000) process of fractal recursivity (see chapter 3, section 3.5 above). Moreover, the officer’s interlanguage can also be seen as pointing directly to his character traits: he is either despicably evil, or at least ridiculously naïve, depending on whether we assume that he knows himself that the content of his message is a lie. His bad character, then, is reflected in the totality of his interferences, mistakes and code-switches - not to mention his pragmatic incompetence, when he actually expects his Jewish audience to react to his cynical and anti-Semitic rhetorical question. From there, it is only a small step to the iconic association of L1 interference or lack of idiomaticity with undesirable behaviour and attitudes, a process which is all the more powerful because it is not so easily discernible. Finally, how obvious is it really that (and also why) the SS officer would have spoken Polish in reality? It may be for some European or better-informed members of the audience, but certainly not for everyone (see Blake 1999: 330 f ). While the replacement strategy is largely unproblematic in clearly endolingual and monolingual contexts, this is not the case for inherently multilingual settings, for which the pre-Holocaust Jewish societies in Central and Eastern Europe (see Myhill 2004: 136 ff ) are a paradigmatic example. However, Polish appears to be the only language used autochthonously by all inhabitants of Warsaw in The Pianist (as opposed to Schindler’s List, see Accents and code-switching above), which shows Irvine and Gal’s third process, erasure, in action. Crucially, the more remote in time and space the setting of a movie is, the less clear it becomes even for a well-informed audience which are the actual languages that have been replaced; representation can then contribute to the “popular belief that all the world speaks English, only and always” (Kellman 2000: 102). In a discussion of The Pianist on an IMDb message board, a contributor jokingly suggested that the characters use English because the movie is set in an English-speaking part of Warsaw - but the contributor was obviously taken seriously by at least some of the other message writers 21 . 21 A misunderstanding of a similar kind which has “passed into linguistic legend” (Lippi- Green 1997: 19) is the apocryphal congressman who opposed bilingual education in the Southern US on the grounds that “[i]f English was good enough for Jesus Christ […] then it’s good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas.” <?page no="104"?> 90 Chapter 5: Replacement strategies 5.6 Conclusions This discussion has shown that the more language contact there is within the story, the more problematic or, in the extreme case, absurd the replacement strategies can be (see Mareš 2000b: 253). Not surprisingly, the wholly monolingual pattern of elimination is rare in the movies analyzed, and the strategies of signalization, evocation and partial presence in speech or writing predominate instead. Crucially, there is a diachronic tendency for filmmakers to abandon replacement strategies in movies with prominent English-speaking characters and exolingual interactions, and use the strategy of presence instead. In turn, replacement is unlikely to disappear from the movies in stories with many endolingual non-English settings at least in the near future - despite the noteworthy exception of the most recent movies directed by Mel Gibson, which contain no English dialogue whatsoever (see also chapter 8). While replacement flouts elementary principles of realistic representation, many of the other narrative functions of multilingualism discussed in chapter 3 are fulfilled by various replacement strategies, with the portrayal of multilingual landscapes in the movies being just one example. Similarly, the depiction of interlanguage features for evocation is used for contrastive characterization rather than sociolinguistic likelihood, and characters with pronounced L2 accents, with a preference for code-switching into the replaced language, or with even more obvious instances of interlanguage, are often minor, comical, less powerful, or even downright negative characters. Conversely, the use of standard varieties of English, as well as of highly fluent L2 speech with no interlanguage whatsoever, appears as a privilege of more powerful characters in general, and of positive characters in particular, while the highly fluent speech of negative characters may be marked by an exaggerated formality and indirectness, as in the example of General Ourumov in GoldenEye. Thus, Irvine and Gal’s semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity and erasure are definitely in action. However, there is no straightforward way in which different representational patterns map onto instances of linguicism. For instance, while an absence of evocation erases sociolinguistic realism and results in a simplified pattern of standard English being spoken throughout history and across countries, the use of evocation can result in stereotyping through iconization and fractal recursivity, but is nevertheless slightly more realistic. Likewise, the patterns of partial presence in the background of conversations and after unrealistic code-switches appear as a particularly honest and even selfreflecting strategy of depicting linguistic differences, but their result remains the erasure of the other language in favour of English. <?page no="105"?> 5.6 Conclusions 91 In the following two chapters, I discuss how similar patterns appear in movies where the other languages are no longer replaced, but present whenever their use appears motivated within the story. The presence strategy allows for a more obvious depiction of different levels of L2 use, as well as of various motivations for realistic code-switching between English and different languages. The latter phenomenon informs a large section of chapter 7, while the following chapter treats aspects of individual characters’ language repertoires and their characterization. <?page no="107"?> Chapter 6: Characterization 6.1 Introduction When foreigners appear in movies (Hispanics in particular) they seem to be able to speak perfect English without making one single mistake except it seems they NEVER manage to learn how to say “Sir” or “Thank you” […] they always say “Senor” and “Gracias” (Cairella 2000, online) In this chapter, the focus is on human beings, or rather their fictional equivalents on the movies screens. What are the linguistic repertoires of the characters who appear in the language contact movies, and how do these repertoires relate to other aspects of their characterization? Do speakers of English as an L2 perform just as well as James Bond when he uses German or Russian, or does none of them ever quite get there, as the introductory quote suggests? Crucially, is there a relationship between being a negative character, having a non-English first language, and speaking English badly? As described in chapters 2 and 3, numerous sociolinguists have voiced their concern over linguicism (linguistic discrimination) in recent years, while scholars in areas such as literary criticism, film studies, and cultural studies have dismantled and criticized instances of negative stereotyping in their analyses of different texts. In particular, some scholars have made a case for the validity of Irvine and Gal’s (2000) three semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation in non-fictional linguicist discourses, and I have pinpointed similar instances in the replacement movies discussed in chapter 5. With respect to characterization in movies where other languages are present, I can now formulate the following three hypotheses, based on the three semiotic processes, to be tested against the evidence of the characters in the 16 movies analyzed: Hypothesis 1: L1 speakers of other languages are negative, powerless, and insignificant characters Speakers of other languages as a first language (OL1 characters) are more likely to be negative, less powerful, and less significant characters than speakers of English as a first language (EL1 characters). By constant repetition of this pattern, other languages not only index characters with these qualities, but mark them in an iconic manner. <?page no="108"?> 94 Chapter 6: Characterization Hypothesis 2: OL1 characters are worse L2 users than EL1 characters OL1 speakers are portrayed as incompetent speakers of English as a second language (EL2), while the superiority of EL1 characters is reflected in their perfect knowledge of various other languages. With a pattern of fractal recursivity, the opposition between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters is projected onto the level of linguistic performance: characters’ shortcomings are reproduced as interlanguage phenomena, but desirable attributes as highly fluent speech. Hypothesis 3: Simplification results in erasure The iconic and recursive patterns of characterization erase a number of important aspects of real-life individual multilingualism. Two prime examples are the speakers’ linguistic biographies - the question of how they acquired the languages they speak - and the contexts of the depicted interactions. These depictions also erase the possibility of interlanguage used by prestigious characters, such as the hero protagonists, or conversely highly fluent L2 use by characters with negative evaluation, lower social status, or minor importance. Moreover, characters with an interlanguage speak in the same way throughout their appearance on the screen, and their utterances remain unaffected by different contexts characterized by, say, different levels of formality. To test the three hypotheses, a corpus of 518 movie characters was compiled, and each character was coded for the relevant socio-demographic, linguistic and narrative information. The methodology is described in the following section, and the results are discussed in section 6.3. The penultimate section treats the issues of L2 use and interlanguage in more depth, and the findings are summarized and put into context in the conclusion. 6.2 Coding procedure Selecting the characters The textual material that underlies the corpus of movie characters is identical to the one used for the analysis of movie scenes in chapter 7. From the 16 language contact movies with presence of other languages (see table 6 below), all 587 scenes were considered where at least one character is not an L1 user of English, or where at least one word in a language other than English is spoken. Put differently, I chose all scenes except those with an endolingual EL1 setting and monolingual English use (see also chapter 7, section 7.2 below). <?page no="109"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 95 Table 6: List of movies with presence of other languages Movie Year Genre Major other languages Further languages Behind Enemy Lines 2001 War Serbian/ Bosnian The Bourne Identity 2002 Action thriller German, French, Italian Dutch, Yoruba Braveheart 1995 Historical drama French, Latin, Gaelic Elizabeth 1998 Historical drama French Latin Fools Rush In 1997 Romantic comedy Spanish Japanese Frantic 1988 Action thriller French Arabic French Kiss 1995 Romantic comedy French Green Card 1990 Romantic comedy French Spanish The Jackal 1997 Action thriller Russian, French Just Married 2003 Romantic comedy French, Italian German The Peacemaker 1997 Action thriller Russian, Serbian, German Red Heat 1988 Action thriller/ comedy Russian Spanish Sabrina 1995 Romantic comedy French, Spanish Saving Private Ryan 1998 Historical drama/ War French, German Czech The Sum of All Fears 2002 Action thriller Russian, Arabic, Ukrainian French, German Traffic 2002 Action thriller Spanish <?page no="110"?> 96 Chapter 6: Characterization Since language contact is a defining feature of the movies analyzed, the corpus contains the majority of all speaking characters, especially the more important ones, in the 16 movies. Sometimes however, characters do appear in endolingual and monolingual English scenes only. For instance, in the romantic comedy Green Card, one scene and one character were not considered. In the scene, the American protagonist Brontë discusses the implications of her marriage of convenience with her lawyer. Since the communicative situation qualifies as an endolingual and monolingual English one, and because the lawyer does not appear elsewhere in Green Card, he was not included in the corpus of movie characters, nor was the scene considered for the analysis in chapter 7. A similar case is the movie Traffic, which is characterized by a number of distinct sub-plots with different characters, only some of whom eventually meet in the movie. One important character is Caroline Wakefield, the teenage daughter of a protagonist, but since she is never shown in interaction with L1 users of other languages, nor speaking a language other than her L1 English, she was not considered either. For each of the 518 movie characters, a set of relevant socio-demographic data was collected. The socio-demographic categories are their sex, age, nationality or ethnicity, and occupation or function. Then, the linguistic data include the number of languages a character speaks, the name(s) of the language(s), the nature of their L2 proficiency, and the levels of linguistic analysis where their L2 performance appears as specially marked. To account for the characters’ narrative attributes, the categories of importance and evaluation were considered. These categories are discussed in the remainder of this section. Sex and age The category of sex proved unproblematic, in that the few instances of cross-dressing (uniquely by negative characters, such as the Duc d’Anjou in Elizabeth) clearly do not call these characters’ biological sex into question. In contrast, the character’s age is sometimes harder to determine, in that different criteria have to be weighed against each other: the characters’ physical appearance, their occupation, and also the actors’ age (if available). Still, a decision was not possible in the case of 48 characters, mostly because they are partly or wholly invisible. Typically, they are voices at the other end of phone lines, whose function (mainly employees of some kind) simply characterizes them as adults. The following table shows an overview of the characters’ sex and age: <?page no="111"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 97 Table 7: Sex and age of movie characters Male Female Total Child (0-10) 11 3 14 (3 %) Teenager (11-19) 2 2 4 (1 %) Young adult (20-35) 153 56 209 (40 %) Middle-aged adult (36-50) 122 18 140 (27 %) Senior adult (51-65) 64 14 78 (15 %) Elderly person (66 and older) 20 5 25 (5 %) Adult (undefined age) 41 7 48 (9 %) Total 413 (80 %) 105 (20 %) 518 (100 %) Of the 518 characters, 413 or 80 % are male, and only 105 or 20 % are women. The striking overrepresentation of men 22 is mainly due to the dominance of military and other conflicts in the movies analyzed. For instance, the two war movies Saving Private Ryan and Behind Enemy Lines feature almost no women at all. In other movies, females appear in roles that are low in number but high in narrative importance, so that important women are typically outnumbered by a multitude of less relevant men. While three movies are named after a male protagonist or character (The Bourne Identity, The Jackal, and Saving Private Ryan), two titles highlight their female protagonists (Elizabeth and Sabrina). Apart from the latter two, there are six movies where the female protagonist is at least equal in importance to her male counterpart. Four of these six are romantic comedies, but two are action thrillers: The Bourne Identity and The Peacemaker. Across the age groups, the characters are represented somewhat more evenly, with the exception of children and teenagers, who occupy a very marginal role in the movies. 349 characters (209 + 140) or 67 % are between 20 and 50 years of age, which clearly shows that especially young adults, but also middle-aged ones, are at the centre of the stories. For romantic comedies, where people are looking for a partner for marriage, or for thrillers and war movies, with young soldiers or agents at the beginning of their career in espionage, these results do not come as a surprise. Still, another 103 (78 + 25) or 18 % are older than 50; they typically represent the younger characters’ superiors or parents. A comparison of the age distribution of men and women 22 In Lippi-Green’s (1997: 87) Disney cartoon corpus, there are just over 30 % women. <?page no="112"?> 98 Chapter 6: Characterization reveals that there is a higher ratio of 20-35 year old women (56 or 53 % of all women, as opposed to 153 or only 37 % of all men), while among the characters aged 36 or older, there are 37 or 35 % of all women but as many as 206 or 50 % of all men. Quite clearly, and unlike their male counterparts, the women in the movies become less interesting the older they get. Nationality/ ethnicity and L1 In discussions of multilingualism, the categories of nationality and ethnicity are rarely irrelevant, but also seldom unproblematic. In the movies, a typical pattern is to show America and Britain as countries characterized, at least to some degree, by ethnic diversity, whereas in other countries, a differentiation of ethnic categories rarely appears. For instance, France is usually portrayed as ethnically homogeneous, although it is in real life a home to numerous autochthonous as well as immigrant minorities. In The Peacemaker, the nations of Germany and Austria are even conflated into one: the American protagonist Thomas Devoe designates an Austrian businessman as “a German” - a goof that has not escaped the attention of some commentators on the Internet Movie Database message boards. An interesting exception to this pattern is Red Heat, which shows Moscow as the multiethnic, rather than Russian-only, capital of the Soviet Union (the movie appeared and is set before 1989) - only, however, to portray the Mongolian and Georgian characters as brutal and negative (see Strada and Troper 1997: 186 f ). The simplification of ethnic diversity outside the English-speaking countries also results in relatively homogeneous linguistic profiles of the movie characters. For every character, their first language (L1) was noted, with great care to avoid ethnolinguistic stereotyping in the few cases where this category posed problems. For instance, American characters of obvious Hispanic ethnicity were coded as monolingual users of L1 English, unless they are shown (or referred to) as speakers of Spanish. The following table juxtaposes an overview of the characters’ nationality and ethnicity on the left side, and the corresponding languages as L1 on the right: <?page no="113"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 99 Table 8: Nationality versus L1 of characters Nationality of characters L1 of characters USA 221 257 English Canada 8 Britain, Ireland, Jamaica, South Africa 43 Total English-speaking 272 France 91 97 French Russia and former USSR 51 54 Russian Germany, Austria, Switzerland 23 23 German Mexico 18 35 Spanish 23 Spain 2 Former Yugoslavia 18 18 Serbian/ Bosnian Italy 12 13 Italian Rest of Europe 4 3 Other European languages Arab countries 9 8 Arabic Asia 4 1 Asian languages Africa 2 2 Yoruba - 4 Unknown non-English Total non-English speaking 234 258 Total OL1 Unknown 12 3 Unknown Total 518 518 Total 23 An important preliminary observation is that the number of EL1 characters is practically equal (257) to the sum of the OL1 characters (258). Similarly, a slight majority of characters (272) come from (predominantly) English-speaking countries, while 234 are from countries with other official 23 The 35 speakers of Spanish include eight Mexican Americans depicted as balanced Spanish- English bilinguals in the movies Fools Rush In and Traffic. <?page no="114"?> 100 Chapter 6: Characterization languages. In 12 and 3 cases respectively, a character’s provenance and L1 could not be ascertained with any degree of confidence. Then, there is a large, but not complete overlap between the dominant languages of characters’ countries of origin, and their individual first languages. Characters from linguistic minorities (e. g. Franco-Canadians or Hispanic Americans) explain why more people are citizens of an English-speaking country than there are EL1 characters, and why in turn there are more French, Italian, and Spanish speakers than characters from France, Italy, Mexico and Spain. On the other hand, among the German speakers and Bosnians or Serbs from former Yugoslavia, there is a complete coincidence of provenance and first language. In general, Hollywood’s view of Europe chimes in perfectly with the axiom of ‘one nation - one language’, where neither territorial nor immigrant multilingualism have any degree of significance. The one noteworthy exception is the movie Frantic, where some minor characters stand for the large Arabic-speaking population in the French capital. In contrast, there is a reasonable amount of ethnic diversity among the characters of American and British origin. Of the 229 Northern American characters, 20 are Black or African Americans, 18 Hispanic, and 2 Asian Americans. 157 (71 %) are white Americans of Anglo or unclear European background; only two are recognizable as Italian Americans, and no ethnic category could be assigned to 22 minor characters. US characters appear in all 14 movies where their presence is historically possible, although in French Kiss, the EL1 characters are predominantly Canadian. Conversely, the appearance of British and Irish characters is largely limited to the two movies set in Britain, Braveheart and Elizabeth, with three exceptions: Sabrina Fairchild and her father Tom in Sabrina, who are English, and the former IRA terrorist Declan Mulqueen in The Jackal. Likewise, Mexicans are chiefly portrayed in Fools Rush In and Traffic (both partly set in and near Mexico), and no Bosnians or Serbs are shown apart from The Peacemaker and Behind Enemy Lines. Other nationalities are more evenly distributed across the corpus: Russians appear in four movies; Germans, Austrians or Swiss in five, and French citizens in a total of eleven movies. Linguistic repertoire Apart from every character’s L1, their active or passive use of any further language was coded as an aspect of their linguistic repertoire. The main distinction is between monolingual characters, who always only use their L1, and multilingual characters, who use more than one language. The evidence is mainly the characters’ performance in the movie scenes, and in some cases <?page no="115"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 101 also metalinguistic comments made by themselves or by other characters, such as Marie Kreutz’s statement that her “French sucks” (1 10 16) in The Bourne Identity. The definition of a multilingual character is formulated as inclusively as possible, to distinguish between characters who only ever use their L1, and characters who use two or more languages 24 , even in the most limited manner conceivable. At one extreme end, there is the amnesiac CIA agent Jason Bourne from The Bourne Identity, whose quest for his identity is compromised by the fact that he speaks German, French, Dutch and Italian as well as English - and all with equally impressive fluency. It is only after a certain while that he realizes that his first language is English. At the other end, one finds the repertoires of two further American characters. When in Frantic, Richard Walker says “Je parle non français” (‘I speak not French’; 0 39 46), the audience has every reason to believe him - but it is precisely the fact that he can say this in approximate French which makes him a multilingual individual. Likewise, by uttering a single sentence in Russian (“esli možno k delu”; ‘if we could get to the point’; 0 10 07), the Jackal qualifies as an L2 user of Russian; what makes him trilingual is a remark, by another character, that he “learnt Spanish in El Salvador” (0 33 07) as a part of his military training. An overview of the different linguistic repertoires is shown in table 9 below, from which the three characters with an unknown L1 are necessarily excluded. Table 9: L1 and linguistic repertoires of characters Linguistic repertoires English L1 (EL1) Other L1 (OL1) Total Monolingual (L1 only) 214 127 341 (66 %) Bilingual (L1 + L2) 31 127 158 (31 %) Trilingual (L1 + L2 + L2) 10 4 14 (3 %) Quadrilingual and more 2 0 2 (0 %) Total multilingual 43 131 174 (34 %) Total characters 257 (50 %) 258 (50 %) 515 (100 %) 24 This also includes passive use only: Nicolette, the French princess Isabelle’s maidservant in Braveheart, is a rare example of a character who only ever speaks in her L1, but who is clearly represented as understanding English. In one scene, she is shown eavesdropping on an important conversation between King Edward and his counsellors, and later breaks the news to Isabelle, who informs William Wallace in turn. <?page no="116"?> 102 Chapter 6: Characterization Even in movies where language contact is foregrounded, the majority of all characters are monolingual: in total, only about a third of all characters (174 or 34 %) speak more than one language. Among the EL1 characters, their number is particularly small: there are three times as many multilingual OL1 characters (131) than multilingual EL1 characters (43). Accordingly, one out of two OL1 characters is multilingual, but only about every sixth EL1 character. However, the linguistic repertoires of the few multilingual EL1 characters are particularly impressive: there are three times as many EL1 characters who speak three languages or more (12) than among the OL1 characters (4). The former include terrorists and secret agents (such as the Jackal, Jason Bourne, or Jack Ryan and John Clark from The Sum of All Fears), but also political and military leaders and officials such as William Wallace (who uses English, French, Latin and Gaelic), and linguists such as the army translator Corporal Timothy Upham from Saving Private Ryan (English, French and German). Among the second languages used by EL1 characters, there is considerable variation: 21 characters use French, nine each speak Russian and Latin, five Spanish, four German, and two characters each use Italian and (Scottish) Gaelic. Finally, there is one L2 user each of Arabic, Dutch, Japanese and Ukrainian. In contrast, the choice of second languages for the OL1 characters is strikingly limited. There is only a single one of them (a Parisian taxi driver in Frantic) whose repertoire does not contain the English language. Every one of the 130 remaining OL1 characters has English as an L2, and only four trilingual characters use yet another language (Russian or French). The viewer does not usually learn much about the multilingual characters’ linguistic biographies. Apart from those few who represent linguistic minorities, most characters do not seem to have grown up multilingually; however, they only rarely mention how they learnt their languages. In The Peacemaker, Julia Kelly states that she learnt her Russian at Princeton (see excerpt 19 below), while in Red Heat, Ivan Danko explains that his English was acquired in “compulsory training” at a “language school in Kiev” (0 21 50). Other characters whose L2 knowledge is explained by university studies are the Russian President Nemerov in The Sum of All Fears, the Mexican General Salazar in Traffic, and his unlucky hitman Francisco Flores. A less academic form of language acquisition is mentioned in Just Married: when Tom Leezak marvels at his wife’s knowledge of French, she explains it with “that summer abroad” when she “backpacked to Europe” (0 33 00). Depictions of language learning in a narrow sense are rare: Alex Whitman is shown listening to a cassette with Japanese for beginners in the opening scene of Fools Rush In, and a brief scene in Traffic shows a rather dreary Spanish lesson in the US, where <?page no="117"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 103 a high school teacher lectures his students on the difference between the nearsynonymous verbs ser and estar (‘to be’) - in English. Sometimes, characters start out as monolinguals and have suddenly learnt the language at a later point in the movie. For instance, Whitman does not appear to speak any Spanish at the beginning of Fools Rush In, when he falls in love with a Mexican American, nor is he ever shown learning the language. However, when he has to travel to Mexico on his own at a later stage, he is already able to use some basic phrases (see chapter 7, excerpt 37 below). Likewise, the female protagonist of Sabrina moves to Paris speaking no French at all, and uses English in all scenes that document her stay in France. It is only after her return to New York that she can speak the language fluently. Occupation The movie characters’ occupations range from Russian president to hotel bellboy and from Queen of England to restroom cleaner. 435 of all 518 characters have a clearly definable occupation, which have been assigned to four major categories: elite, mainstream, services, and criminals. The elite category contains professions with a high financial or social status, including all academics, persons in leading positions (in politics, military, economics and administration), as well as various kinds of artists (photographers, a writer and a pianist). The mainstream category contains characters with comparatively less prestigious occupations. These are mainly military servicemen and subaltern police officers, but also some nurses, industrial workers, business employees, caretakers and servants. In the third category, the characters work in broadly service-oriented jobs and include counter persons, receptionists, drivers and transportation employees, waitpersons, and telephone operators. These characters are largely similar to the mainstream characters with respect to social status, but their occupations involve communication with a typically wider range of interlocutors. The fourth category contains terrorists, drug dealers, and petty thieves. Finally, there is a fifth category of characters with no or unknown occupations. They include all minors, students, characters mainly defined as somebody’s friend or family member, and a group including neighbours, casual passers-by and bystanders. Table 10 shows the distribution of the five categories over the entire corpus. <?page no="118"?> 104 Chapter 6: Characterization Table 10: Occupation of characters Occupational category Characters Elite occupations 170 (33 %) Mainstream occupations 147 (28 %) Service occupations 67 (13 %) Criminal occupations 39 (8 %) Other or no occupations 95 (18 %) Total 518 (100 %) The reasons for language contact discussed in chapter 3 clearly influence the socio-economic structure of the movie character population. There is a predominance of characters with elite occupations on the one hand, and of criminals, law enforcers and military men 25 on the other. In contrast, there are relatively few ‘normal’, every-day occupations, with the exception of the service jobs, which are motivated mainly by the touristic narratives. One distinction requires further explanation, namely the one between intelligence agents (in the elite category) on the one hand, and terrorists (in the criminal category) on the other. The characters coded as terrorists are those who employ a large amount of violence for ideals or goals that appear as either clearly wrong and unworthy, or as marginal or irrelevant. While most terrorists are depicted as selfish, evil, and motivated by greed or fascist ideas, some are not portrayed as wholly negative, even if their goals are despicable (as in The Peacemaker). The only good guys among the terrorists are two characters from The Jackal: Declan Mulqueen, an IRA member imprisoned in the US, who can be convinced to help the FBI with a manhunt, and Mulqueen’s former lover, the Basque separatist Isabela Zancona. Both readily offer their valuable skills and knowledge to the US officials and - importantly - their terrorist acts predate (and are largely irrelevant for) the story narrated in the movie. A final example is the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace and his allies in Braveheart. The entire movie is essentially an apology for their struggle for independence, with no credit whatsoever given to the English, who are depicted unequivocally as brutal and cynical colonial oppressors. In Braveheart, the protagonist is clearly not a terrorist, but a military leader. This discussion shows to what extent different patterns of narration can influence 25 Two female CIA agents appear in the 16 movies, but not a single woman serving in an armed force. <?page no="119"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 105 categories that appear straightforward in reality. Therefore, it is to the obvious narrative attributes of the movie characters, their importance and evaluation, that I turn next. Narrative importance Narrative importance is defined as a character’s role in the movie, with a distinction between three different levels. The protagonists are the leading characters, who are present throughout most scenes in the movie, and whose goals are central to the story. In mainstream Hollywood movies, the protagonists are typically impersonated by the best-known actors, and it is their privilege to also appear on the movie posters. Next, the secondary characters are those who appear in a number of different scenes and are clearly less relevant to the narrative than the protagonists; their typical functions are either to assist the latter, or in turn to prevent them from achieving their aims too easily. Finally, the minor characters are those who only appear in a single scene, or at the most in two scenes with an identical setting. Table 11 shows the distribution of characters over the three categories, in total and according to their sex: Table 11: Narrative importance and sex of characters Male Female Total Protagonist 21 10 31 (6 %) Secondary character 138 34 172 (33 %) Minor character 254 61 315 (61 %) Total 413 (80 %) 105 (20 %) 518 (100 %) 31 characters (6 %) qualify as protagonists, which reflects the fact that in 13 of 16 movies, there is a (typically mixed-sex) protagonist couple. Two movies have only one protagonist (Elizabeth and Saving Private Ryan), while Traffic has three. Women appear more prominently among the leading characters than in the entire corpus: every third protagonist is female, as opposed to every fifth character in total. Then, 172 or 33 % are secondary characters; examples include the protagonist’s older half-sister Queen Mary in Elizabeth, Isabel Fuentes’s Mexican grandmother Nanita in Fools Rush In, and Yuan, the Asian American butler in Just Married. Finally, the majority (315 or 61 %) are minor characters. While they are often unnamed and perform functions such as soldiers, taxi drivers, or counter persons, some minor characters are also protagonists’ family members - such as the parents who, in romantic <?page no="120"?> 106 Chapter 6: Characterization comedies, appear in a single scene for a particularly inconvenient surprise visit (examples occur in Green Card as well as in Fools Rush In). Narrative evaluation Since the concept of evaluation is central to my approach, it needs to be elaborated on in detail. Whether any given character is perceived as positive or negative depends, to some extent, on the attitude and preference of each individual viewer. Different viewers are likely to experience different degrees of sympathy towards individual movie characters (see Tan 1996: 168), and “perverse spectators” (Staiger 2000) may even enjoy wholly unconventional readings of mainstream movies, and sympathize entirely with those characters whom many other viewers would consider the bad guys. Still, these viewers are likely to be aware of the extent to which their interpretation is an unconventional one. Powers and Rothman (1996: 10) argue that “most members of most audiences” not only agree on basic items such as characters’ professions, but that “even if they do not feely articulate such beliefs […], [b]y and large they can even tell the good guys from the bad guys.” In some cases, the evaluation of certain characters is mentioned explicitly in a dialogue, as in this excerpt from The Jackal, where the two male protagonists discuss the virtues of their colleague Valentina Koslova, a senior Russian police officer: Excerpt 15 (The Jackal, 0 50 36 - 0 51 02) (…) Preston Major Koslova ends the debate about women in combat as far as I’m concerned. Mulqueen How’s that? Preston When she saved my life and took out Terek’s brother she did it knowing she’d be drawing a death sentence down on her own neck. But when we offered to set her up some place else when this is over, you know what she said? ‘The good guys don’t hide’. (…) In another action thriller, The Peacemaker, Colonel Thomas Devoe offers an equally categorical definition, with an ironic intertextual allusion to a practice in early Hollywood Westerns, where positive and negative characters were distinguished by the white and black colour of their hats: <?page no="121"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 107 Excerpt 16 (The Peacemaker, 0 34 00 - 0 34 20) (…) Devoe Doctor you can run your charts and your theories all you want, in the field this is how it works. The good guys, that’s us, we chase the bad guys, and they don’t wear black hats. They are however all alike. They demand power and respect and they’re willing to pay top dollar to get it, and that is our highly motivated buyer. (…) In unison with Powers and Rothman (1996), as well as Lippi-Green (1997), I distinguish between positive, mixed, negative, and neutral characters. To be a positive character - a good guy - implies a combination of respectability, kindness, morally desirable behaviour, and the character’s own respect of laws unless these appear as unjustified to begin with. The protagonists are generally positive characters, and so are those secondary characters who actively - rather than just coincidentally or forcedly - support them. Negative characters are the very opposite of positive ones: their intentions are overtly evil, their actions are far more brutal than necessary, and their motivations are greed, selfishness, or cynical and hate-inspired fascist ideologies. A prime example is Aleksandr Kodoroff, a corrupt Russian general and one of Devoe’s main adversaries in The Peacemaker. In one scene, Kodoroff ’s truck is stuck in a traffic jam in a mountainous region of Central Russia, because a long line of refugees is blocking the country road. Kodoroff ’s reaction is as follows: Excerpt 17 (The Peacemaker, 0 58 00 - 0 58 23) Kodoroff (honking) Bystree, barany, bystree dvigajtes’. Filthy fucking refugees. Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakhstani. (‘Quicker, sheep, move quicker’) Mirich Hey don’t curse them. Kodoroff I don’t care what bitch gave birth to them, Muslim, Serb. I don’t hate them for who they are. I hate them because they are poor. (…) In comparison with the Serbian character Vlado Mirich, who buys a nuclear bomb from Kodoroff, the Russian is clearly a much worse character, since he completely lacks any kind of empathy with or respect for other human beings. His cynical statement that he hates refugees “because they are poor” underlines that for the corrupt army general, other people’s lives do not matter, only money. Another frequent attribute of negative characters like <?page no="122"?> 108 Chapter 6: Characterization Kodoroff is that they kill their own collaborators, or even intimate partners, whereas the good guys avoid unnecessary violence, and are genuinely touched at least if persons close to them are hurt. It is important to point out that characters who appear in military conflicts are not automatically coded as negative simply because they are members of an armed force opposing the EL1 protagonists’ countries. Rather, to qualify as bad guys, they have to be depicted as unnecessarily brutal and blatant violators of international humanitarian law. This distinguishes some (but not all) of the Serbian militia in Behind Enemy Lines, who mistreat a prisoner of war and lie to the NATO officials responsible for the ceasefire, from the Russian anti-aircraft soldiers in The Peacemaker, who nearly shoot down the protagonist’s helicopter (see chapter 7, excerpt 41 below). In the latter case, the Russian soldiers are clearly entitled to do so, since they cannot know that the Americans’ unauthorized intrusion is not an act of aggression against Russia. The Russians are shown as left with no other reasonable choice than to take action against the good guys, but this alone does not make them bad - they are simply neutral characters. In the case of mixed characters, positive and negative motivations and actions are combined, and these typically appear in different scenes of the movie. This occurs in cases where a character’s personality changes as the story unfolds, or because some aspects of their personality remain disclosed for narrative reasons, and are revealed only late in the movie. Furthermore, the mixed category includes characters whose negative actions and motivations appear, to a certain degree, understandable, for instance when powerful psychological reasons are given for the viewer to experience some degree of empathy with the perpetrators. In The Peacemaker, one of the Serbian terrorists explains his motives on a videotape left behind for the US authorities (see figure 9 below). Dusan Gavrich’s testimony is hardly intended to convince the viewer that a mass murder of New Yorkers is a valid project, but his explanation cannot be considered completely absurd either. Excerpt 18 (The Peacemaker, 1 22 02 - 1 23 41 (…) Dusan Gavrich (on videotape) You will look at what I have done and say ‘of course, why not, they are all animals, they have slaughtered each other for centuries.’ But the truth is, I’m not amongst them, I’m a human man, I’m just like you whether you like it or not. For years we have tried to live together until a war was waged on us, on all of us. A war waged by our own leaders. And who supplied the Serb cluster bombs, the <?page no="123"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 109 Croatian tanks, the Muslim artillery shells that killed our sons and daughters? It was the governments of the West who drew the boundaries of our countries. Sometimes in ink, sometimes in blood. The blood of our people. And now you dispatch your peacekeepers to write our destiny again. We can never accept this peace that leaves us with nothing but pain. Pain the peacemakers must be made to feel. Their wives, their children, their houses and churches. So now you know, now you must understand. Leave us to find our own destiny. May God have mercy on us all. (…) Figure 9: Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iures) in The Peacemaker Gavrich’s monologue betrays deeply humane sentiments, such as profound sadness and frustration, and his strikingly well-formulated argumentation discourages the viewer from assigning him to the same category as Aleksandr Kodoroff. Also, he underlines his refusal to subscribe to any of the strict ethnic categories associated with the warmongers responsible for the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, he concludes his message with an invocation to God which, since it is in English, reminds one of an address by a US president rather than of a statement by a mere religious fanatic. Not surprisingly, however, Gavrich’s ethnic background is clearly depicted as that of a (Bosnian) Serb - much like the Americans’ enemies’ in <?page no="124"?> 110 Chapter 6: Characterization Behind Enemy Lines, and of course in the real-life US military interventions in the Balkan region. Besides Gavrich, other mixed characters include Robert the Bruce in Braveheart and the German soldier credited as ‘Steamboat Willie’ in Saving Private Ryan. Robert’s positive traits are his general support and admiration for Wallace’s and the Scottish people’s cause, and also his special role as the movie’s implied narrator. In one of Wallace’s key battles, however, he betrays the protagonist by fighting on the side of the English, and at the end of the movie, he also fails to prevent Wallace’s capture and imprisonment in his home town of Edinburgh. The German soldier in Saving Private Ryan does nothing exceptionally laudable, but the viewer is allowed to empathise with him in a scene where is almost lynched by some overly aggressive American soldiers, despite the fact that he has clearly surrendered to them. ‘Steamboat Willie’ is then set free with the order to give in other US troops, but he rejoins his German Wehrmacht comrades instead. His decision not to take his chances with further American servicemen is understandable, and lacks the completely evil intentions that define the really negative characters. Still, he is punished for having broken his promise by Corporal Upham, the translator, who had saved him from being lynched during their first encounter; Upham shoots him when they meet again on a different battlefield at the end of the movie. Negative and mixed characters also appear in comedies, although often in smaller numbers, and also without the fatal actions and motivations than in the case of killers or nuclear arms smugglers. Still, there are numerous comedy characters whose sole purpose is to make life harder for the protagonists. In romantic comedies, these are mainly the protagonists’ exor would-be-partners, and also their overly sceptical parents. In Fools Rush In, Isabel Fuentes’s and Alex Whitman’s marriage is tested by the stubbornness of both their fathers and the persistence of Alex’s ex, the New Yorker Cathy Steward, and of Isabel’s one-time fiancé, the Mexican American police officer Chuy. Other negative characters in comedies do not directly interfere with the protagonists’ love relationship, but they give them a hard time by stealing their belongings (Bob in French Kiss), bossing them around at their workplace (Martine in Sabrina), or simply by being unnecessarily rude (the French concierges in French Kiss as well as Just Married). The final category of characters are the neutral ones, who cannot be assigned to either category. Table 12 shows the numbers for the four categories, in total and cross-tabulated with their narrative importance: <?page no="125"?> 6.2 Coding procedure 111 Table 12: Narrative evaluation and importance of characters Protagonists Secondary characters Minor characters Total Positive characters 28 56 12 96 (19 %) Mixed characters 2 37 25 64 (12 %) Negative characters 1 50 39 90 (17 %) Neutral characters 0 29 239 268 (52 %) Total 31 172 315 518 (100 %) Overall, about half of the characters (268 or 52 %) are neutral, and these are also predominantly minor characters. It is clear that the more important a character is the less neutrally he or she will be depicted, and that minor characters who say little more than a few words are less likely to fall into a non-neutral category of evaluation. If they do, however, the odds that they are positive are small: there are twelve good guys among the minor characters, but 64 (25 + 39) negative or mixed ones. A comparison of the three nonneutral categories shows that in the total corpus, the number of positive and negative characters is largely equal, while the mixed ones are fewer in number by about a third. This ratio is roughly similar among the secondary characters, but completely different with respect to the leading roles. With only three exceptions, the protagonists are good guys, whom the viewer is encouraged to admire and also to suffer with. Indeed, most viewers hardly rejoice in William Wallace’s or Captain John Miller’s death, nor are they upset by the prevention of nuclear wars, or offended by some of the happy romantic endings, where the likeable protagonists (rather than their self-important rivals) finally fall in love for good. Arguably however, some of the protagonists are harder to sympathize with. In the case of Art Ridzik and Ivan Danko in Red Heat, it does not take a large amount of left-wing liberalness to consider some of their actions, as well as their attitude towards women, as unnecessarily violent, cynical, and obscene. At the same time, these phenomena are in part explained by their frustrating lives, and some scenes show them as more caring human beings. However, their attitudes are contrasted with the much more brutal and despicable characters their task it is to track down, which makes them appear downright positive in comparison. The only negative protagonist is the eponymous professional killer from The Jackal, while two are mixed. Linus Larrabee from Sabrina develops from being a cynically calculating businessman with no sense for the joys of life to a charitable and <?page no="126"?> 112 Chapter 6: Characterization even romantic person through the influence of the attractive female protagonist. Conversely, Manolo Sanchez in Traffic starts out as a reliable friend and workmate of Javier Rodriguez, another protagonist, but his greed incites him to perform dangerous actions that put both their lives at an unnecessary risk. In the following section, the focus is on the interrelations of the sociodemographic, linguistic and narrative categories discussed so far. 6.3 Results How are the movie characters’ socio-demographic and narrative attributes related to their linguistic repertoires? This section contains a discussion of five charts which compare the distribution of the characters’ sex, age, occupation, narrative importance, and narrative evaluation to their L1 and their linguistic repertoires. For each of these five categories, the distribution over the entire corpus is compared to eight different subcorpora, each based on the different first languages (English or other) and repertoires (monolingual or multilingual). The three characters with an unknown L1 are again excluded from the subcorpora. The first four subsets are as follows: Speakers of English as a first language (EL1) and speakers of other first languages (OL1) on the one hand, and monolingual characters and multilingual characters on the other. For the second four subsets, the characters’ first languages and their repertoires are combined. Thus, there are monolingual or multilingual EL1 speakers (EL1 mono and EL1 multi), and accordingly monolingual or multilingual OL1 speakers (OL1 mono and OL1 multi). Throughout this section, it is important to bear in mind that while the number of EL1 and OL1 characters is practically equal, there is a clear majority of OL1 multilinguals (131), as opposed to only 43 EL1 multilinguals (see table 9 above). <?page no="127"?> 6.3 Results 113 Sex, L1, and linguistic repertoire Chart 1: Sex, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters In general, there is not an important amount of variation across the different linguistic profiles. In two cases, however, the proportion of female characters clearly differs from the entire corpus: the EL1 multilinguals and the OL1 multilinguals. Among the former, there are visibly more females, whereas among the latter, their ratio is smaller. This means that multilingual EL1 characters are more likely to be women than multilingual OL1 characters, where men are even more dominant than in any other category. In general, the movies highlight a small number of positive, powerful, and multilingual females, often in leading or secondary roles; examples include Queen Elizabeth in Elizabeth, Princess Isabelle in Braveheart, and Major Valentina Koslova in The Jackal. Many other women characters, however, are simply portrayed as mothers, sisters, or friends, with no clear occupational profile, nor many opportunities to use several languages. Accordingly, women in heterosexual relationships are often less multilingual than their partners. William Wallace can show off his knowledge of French in front of his monolingual fiancée Murron MacClannough in Braveheart, and a similar constellation appears twice in The Sum of All Fears. CIA Agent Jack Ryan speaks three languages, and the Russian president Nemerov received the highest honours in English at university (see chapter 7, excerpt 55 below). On the other hand, Ryan’s fiancée Dr Cathy Muller is shown to be as monolingual as Mrs Nemerova. <?page no="128"?> 114 Chapter 6: Characterization When Lieutenant Chris Burnett meets a group of friendly Bosnian Muslims in Behind Enemy Lines, a young male (Babic) talks to him in English, while Babic’s female friend does not appear to speak English at all. The Peacemaker features an ironic subversion of these gender-specific patterns of individual multilingualism. The following excerpt shows Dr. Julia Kelly, a nuclear arms specialist and advisor to the US government, and the US Army Colonel Thomas Devoe, who are both investigating an atomic explosion on a train in Central Russia. Kelly is shown perusing a list, which has been faxed from their contact in the Russian army, containing the names of the servicemen on board the train who are reported as killed in the incident: Excerpt 19 (The Peacemaker, 0 27 59 - 0 28 18) Devoe Departure orders, forty men on board. Kelly Mh this is meaningless. Devoe It’s in Russian. Kelly Ėto ničego ne značit, potomu što zvanija ne ukazany. (starts reading list) It’s meaningless because they haven’t listed anybody’s rank Devoe Otkuda vy govorite po-russki? Where did you learn to speak Russian? Kelly Princeton. Devoe Mh the blue-blooded backbone of our country. Kelly My father’s a mailman. Devoe You never know. (…) Devoe misinterprets Kelly’s meaningless as her inability to read Russian, whereas what she means is that the servicemen’s names only, without indication of their ranks are, for some reason, useless intelligence. As an impulsive macho, who is somewhat better at taking rapid action than at reflecting on the consequences, Devoe is shown here as naïve and arrogant enough to assume that Kelly lacks the knowledge of Russian that he has. In turn, Kelly’s cleverness is illustrated by her quick repartee in that very foreign language, and her hierarchical superiority appears as clearly justified. In sum, while this example may fail to affect the overall picture, a convenient way of showing a female character as equally or even more powerful than her male counterparts is to depict her as a fluent multilingual 26 . 26 A very similar scene occurs later in The Peacemaker, when Devoe introduces Kelly to his Russian friend, Colonel Vertikoff. From outside the corpus analyzed, one could also mention Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in A Perfect Murder (1998), and Angelina Jolie’s in Taking Lives (2004). <?page no="129"?> 6.3 Results 115 Age, L1, and linguistic repertoire Chart 2: Age, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters The ratio of the different age categories remains fairly constant across the linguistic profiles. In all subcorpora, the young adults (20-35 years) are the most important group, but they are especially prominent in the one subcorpus that shows a picture different from the others: the EL1 multilinguals. Among these characters, 25 of 43 characters (almost three out of five) are young adults, as opposed to 209 (two out of five) in the entire corpus. What this result represents is that many leading characters (12 of the 25 in this category) are young, and since they speak more than other characters, they are also more likely to use another language at one stage in the movie. An intriguing result is that among the few characters who are younger than 20 (see table 7 above), only a single one (Babic in Behind Enemy Lines; see excerpt 20 below) qualifies as a multilingual. Thus, multilingualism in childhood or adolescence is almost absent from these movies, which underlines the extent to which the characters’ individual multilingualism typically remains unexplained. <?page no="130"?> 116 Chapter 6: Characterization Occupation, L1, and linguistic repertoire Chart 3: Occupation, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters A comparison of the different occupational categories shows a number of interesting differences. The first observation is that the EL1 characters work in different jobs than the OL1 characters: they dominate in the elite professions as well as in the mainstream occupations, whereas in comparison, more OL1 characters work in service jobs or as criminals. Then, a comparison of the occupations of monolinguals and multilinguals shows that mainstream occupations are the preferred option for monolingual characters, irrespectively of their L1. Conversely, criminal occupations and service jobs are domains where multilingual characters prevail. Thus, soldiers, steel workers and office secretaries tend to use one language only, whereas people who break the law, sell tickets or serve drinks are more likely to be multilingual. Specifically, the status of English as the international language of tourism is reflected, in a reasonably realistic way, in the high number of multilingual OL1 service employees (35). In contrast, their 24 monolingual counterparts often contribute to an atmosphere of alienation in movies such as Frantic and Just Married, which depict American characters’ mishaps as tourists on the continent. This narrative function is then contrasted with the appearance of friendlier and more helpful characters (Michelle in Frantic, Bernardo Salviati in Just Married) - who are again fluent L2 users of English. <?page no="131"?> 6.3 Results 117 However, the largest occupational group among the multilinguals are neither the criminals nor service employees, but the elite professionals. A comparison of monolingual and multilingual EL1 characters shows how the proportion of elite characters rises markedly for the multilingual ones (28), although in raw figures, there are still more monolingual EL1 elite characters (74). In contrast, while the majority of OL1 elite characters is multilingual (38), the difference in proportion is not nearly as pronounced as for the EL1 characters. This means that for EL1 characters, individual multilingualism is closely associated with higher status, but not necessarily for OL1 characters, where it seems to be taken rather for granted. It also means that for an EL1 character, it is quite normal to be monolingual and yet to exercise a prestigious occupation, whereas for monolingual OL1 characters - people who do not speak English - this is clearly much less of an option. In fact, a recurrent pattern in the movies is that a very limited number of EL1 characters - often only the protagonists - display their L2 proficiency, while many others - typically their superiors - use English only 27 . In Fools Rush In, not a single Anglo-American character uses any Spanish, apart from (rather late in the movie) the protagonist. Likewise, in The Sum of All Fears, the two CIA agents Jack Ryan and John Clark excel as users of Russian, Ukrainian, and Arabic, while the US President and his entire staff never speak a single word in another language. Even Ryan’s superior, the Director of Central Intelligence William Cabot, cannot read Russian, as becomes clear when he asks for the translation of Russian writing on a visit to an arms decommissioning site. 27 An exception from outside the corpus is the action thriller Air Force One (1997), where the protagonist is the US President himself, who puts his L2 Russian to different important uses; in one scene, he expresses his gladness about having learnt Russian, and not French, at school. <?page no="132"?> 118 Chapter 6: Characterization Narrative importance, L1, and linguistic repertoire Chart 4: Narrative importance, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters The EL1 characters form a clear majority among the leading characters, with 22 out of 31. Similarly, there are more secondary characters with English as a first language (96 as opposed to 75), and accordingly fewer minor characters. A comparison of monolingual and multilingual characters shows that being multilingual results in higher narrative importance, in that there are visibly more protagonists and secondary characters among the multilingual characters. Still, obvious differences with respect to the characters’ first language persist. For five EL1 characters, being monolingual does not prevent them from being protagonists. Of these five, only Lieutenant Chris Burnett in Behind Enemy Lines is shown, in one scene, to be at a real disadvantage due to his monolingualism, while the other four characters can always rely on translators 28 or OL1 interlocutors who speak English. Conversely, there is not a single monolingual among the nine OL1 leading characters: in these movies, speaking English is a prerequisite for a leading role. Accordingly, the linguistic category with the most minor roles (112) is that of the monolingual OL1 characters. In many cases, their monolingualism is clearly due to the fact that 28 On characters acting as translators (interpreters) in multilingual movie scenes, see chapter 7, section 7.3 below. <?page no="133"?> 6.3 Results 119 their single appearances occur in endolingual non-English settings; examples include the Mexican soldiers in Traffic or the Serbian soldiers in Behind Enemy Lines. Still, the general picture is clear: for narrative importance, it’s best to have English as one’s first language - and not to know English at all is a real handicap. Narrative evaluation, L1, and linguistic repertoire Chart 5: Narrative evaluation, L1, and linguistic repertoire of characters To begin with, different first languages clearly result in differing narrative evaluations. A comparison of EL1 and OL1 characters shows that while the ratio of neutral characters remains fairly constant, 61 English-L1 characters are positive, as opposed to only 35 OL1 characters. Conversely, the negative characters are the smallest group in the EL1 category (only 31), while they dominate among the OL1 characters with 58 bad guys. Thus, characters with a non-English L1 are almost twice as likely to be negative compared to their EL1 counterparts. Then, linguistic repertoires are also highly relevant. Almost two thirds of all monolingual characters are neutral (211), but only about one third (55) of the multilingual characters. While their depiction is thus more pronounced, the proportion of positive and negative characters among the multilinguals (55: 42) does not differ greatly from its overall distribution (96: 90). <?page no="134"?> 120 Chapter 6: Characterization The picture changes, however, if different first languages are considered. Only 32 of 214 EL1 monolinguals (about one sixth) are good guys, as opposed to 29 or two thirds among the EL1 multilinguals. However, the same pattern is not reproduced among the OL1 characters. Although there are about three times as many positive OL1 multilinguals (26) than monolinguals (9), there are also twice as many mixed or negative characters than good guys (20 + 36) - as opposed to 8 (6 + 2) among the multilingual EL1 characters. This means that to speak English as an L1 is a much stronger predictor of positive characterization than not to, and to be an EL1 multilingual means being a good guy in two out of three cases. In contrast, there is nothing really positive about being an OL1 character, nor does knowing English as a L2 help to any visible extent: individual multilingualism clearly fails to turn the OL1 characters into better people. Cross-genre differences To what extent are these last results predetermined by the bias of crime and terrorism stories in the language contact movie corpus? To answer this question, it is useful to differentiate between the different genres. In chart 6, the OL1 characters are the focus of attention. The chart shows the evaluations of the OL1 characters in the five comedies as opposed to the remaining eleven movies comprising action, war movies, as well as historical dramas. These evaluations can be compared with the total number of OL1 characters and the entire corpus. <?page no="135"?> 6.3 Results 121 Chart 6: Narrative evaluation of OL1 characters in comedies and non-comedies This chart shows that genre is indeed relevant: while there are more positive than negative OL1 characters (15 as opposed to 10) in the comedies, there is a clearly inverse picture in the remaining eleven movies. There, the sum of mixed and negative OL1 characters (23 + 48 = 71) is more than three times as high as the positive ones (20), whereas it is only slightly higher in the case of the comedy characters (8 + 10 = 18) - a picture which mirrors that of the EL1 characters in chart 5 above. There are both fewer negative OL1 characters in comedies, but also more positive ones, which shows that intercultural comedies can in no way be accused of drawing humorous profit from negatively stereotyping speakers of other languages. At the same time however, the overall absence of terrorist plots and of brutal violence does not result in a uniquely positive portrayal of these characters either. Cross-textual differences In the final part of this section, all sixteen movies are considered individually. To answer the question which movies represent OL1 characters as more positive than other ones, a simple subtraction of the number of positive minus negative characters was done (mixed and neutral characters were left aside in this calculation). In table 13, the sixteen movies are ranked by a decreasing difference of positive minus negative OL1 characters. <?page no="136"?> 122 Chapter 6: Characterization Table 13: Number of positive and negative OL1 characters in all 16 movies Rank Title Positive OL1 characters Negative OL1 characters Difference 1. Green Card 3 0 3 Fools Rush In 6 3 3 2. Braveheart 2 0 2 3. Sabrina 2 1 1 4. The Bourne Identity 2 2 0 Frantic 4 4 0 The Jackal 2 2 0 Saving Private Ryan 0 0 0 5. French Kiss 3 4 -1 Just Married 1 2 -1 6. Elizabeth 0 3 -3 7. Behind Enemy Lines 1 5 -4 The Peacemaker 2 6 -4 8. Red Heat 3 9 -6 Traffic 3 9 -6 9. The Sum of All Fears 1 8 -7 The above finding, that the comedies depict OL1 characters more positively than the other movies, is illustrated in this chart as well: two comedies lead the list, and there are none near its bottom end. In contrast, the highest number of bad guys appear in the action thrillers which occupy the bottom five ranks from 7 to 10. However, there are also some rather violent movies near the top end, which shows that it is the precise nature of the story that matters more than just its generic category. Movies such as Braveheart and The Bourne Identity, where the protagonists’ enemies are EL1 speakers, and their supporters OL1 characters, are obviously characterized by a surplus of good guys among the latter. The inverse pattern appears in, for instance, The Peacemaker and The Sum of All Fears, where the evil characters have a European and OL1 background. Another interesting result is that chronology <?page no="137"?> 6.3 Results 123 does not play an important role. Among the top eight movies in the table, we find four out of six movies released before 1995, while two of the bottom three movies have appeared since the year 2000. In other words, a diachronic tendency towards more favourable representations of OL1 characters cannot be discerned in the corpus selected for this study. Two notes of caution are warranted in this discussion. A mere count of positive or negative characters, without taking their narrative importance into account, is in some ways misleading. A typical feature of action movies is an emphasis on the protagonists’ valour which, as argued by Faulstich (2002: 35), creates the illusion that societal problems could be solved by the deeds of one individual. The outcome of this pattern is that there are typically fewer hero protagonists and helpers than the bad guys they have to overcome, because this imbalance makes the protagonists’ success all the worthier. Furthermore, an emphasis on negative characters and evil deeds is commonplace in many fictional narratives; in Strada and Troper’s (1997: 201) words: “negative social processes are more potent forces than positive ones. Negative images sell.” However, one should also point out that one of the most significant helping characters is very often an OL1 character. The FBI relies on the Russian police officer Valentina Koslova in The Jackal, Jason Bourne is saved from the CIA by the German student Marie Kreutz, and cross-border crime prevention in Traffic only works once the Mexicans and Americans cooperate as equal partners. In statistics like the above, therefore, the few but important good guys are outweighed by the less significant, but more numerous secondary and minor negative characters. The second issue worth mentioning is the depiction of the different other languages in the movies. While the numbers of L1 speakers of each individual other language (French, Russian, German etc.) are too small for valid generalizations, there is a recurring pattern of contrastive juxtaposition which merits attention. In several movies, there are marked binary oppositions between different other languages, where one of them is positively foregrounded at the expense of the other one, which is spoken only by bad or irrelevant characters. Both in Green Card and Sabrina, French is the language of romance, culture, and a desirable life-style, while Spanish is the language spoken by poor or powerless immigrants. Likewise, The Sum of All Fears paints a bright picture of constructive cooperation between Americans and Russians, while fascists speak German and French (or South African English). Thus, it is not only the contrast between English and another language which is exploited, but also contrasts between different, and hence differently connoted, other languages. While the exact nature of these oppositions varies from movie to movie, they only too clearly reflect the larger zeitgeist of the period. <?page no="138"?> 124 Chapter 6: Characterization For instance, apart from the brutal and greedy stock Russians like General Kodoroff in The Peacemaker, some movies also feature important positive Russian characters who are willing to cooperate with the protagonists - a pattern of depiction which mirrors the détente and end of the Cold War since the mid-1980s. A more recent phenomenon, which is hardly a matter of chance either, is the proliferation of negative French-speaking characters, both Canadian and from ‘Old Europe’. While the corpus movies alone do not contain enough examples to illustrate this trend, recent movies such as Maid in Manhattan (2002), The Whole Nine Yards (2000), and a number of movies starring the French actor Oliver Martinez, such as Unfaithful (2002), S.W.A.T. (2003), and Taking Lives (2004), certainly do. In these movies, the French characters are dishonest, criminal, dangerous and uncooperative, whereas in some of them, Spanish becomes associated not only with erotic attraction, but also upward social mobility. In sum, while there is a clear tendency to depict OL1 characters as less important, of lower social status, and more negative, these patterns cannot be considered unambiguously iconic, due to the numerous counter-examples across different movies. In the next section, the focus is on the question of fractal recursivity, or the interrelation between characterization and L2 performance. 6.4 Representation of L2 use How well do the movie characters speak their second languages? This section is concerned with the representation of different levels of L2 proficiency in the speech of multilingual characters. Here, the linguistic performance of the actual actors is not the issue, especially in cases where they impersonate characters whose L1 differs from their own. In other words, I am not concerned with how well the Irishman Ciarán Hinds (President Nemerov in The Sum of all Fears) or the German Armin Mueller-Stahl (Colonel Dimitri Vertikoff in The Peacemaker) can imitate L1 speakers of Russian, nor indeed if the Norwegian actor Sven-Ole Thorsen’s impersonation of Nikolai, a Russian L1 speaker, in Red Heat sounds more or less convincing than the German L1 he produces as Herr Haft in The Sum of All Fears. The simple reason for this methodological choice is that the extent to which such actors’ language use may appear odd or unconvincing is clear only to a minority of viewers who know the respective languages (Russian, German etc.) well enough. In contrast, the focus of attention here is on how differences in proficiency are made obvious to an English-speaking audience with no specific L2 knowledge. Thus, I am mainly concerned with how the multilingual OL1 characters’ use of English as a second language is depicted. <?page no="139"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 125 Each multilingual character’s proficiency in their only, or their most important L2 was coded on a scale of four degrees: fluent use, interlanguage, almost absent, and unknown. Fluent L2 users are those whose L2 is largely or completely unmarked except on the level of phonology and who, on the whole, appear able to use the language as efficiently and as creatively as L1 users. In other words, it is only their L2 accents which index their linguistic performance as that of an OL1 character. The label of interlanguage is used for the characters whose L2 use is characterized by repeated and obvious grammatical, lexical, or pragmatic errors, simplifications, or avoidance phenomena (such as markedly short and simple utterances). Still, these characters are typically successful in getting their message across in their L2. Characters with almost absent L2 proficiency are those who use an L2 - usually in short, single utterances - despite the fact that they hardly know it at all; a behaviour which can be compared to the concepts of language crossing and language display discussed in chapter 2 (Multilingual discourse as a political strategy). Finally, many characters’ utterances were too short and too small in number for me to be able to assign them to any of the three categories defined; they are the ones with unknown proficiency. In the following, the preferred sites of interlanguage in grammar, lexis and pragmatics are discussed and exemplified. Interlanguage grammar and lexis The major grammatical phenomena in the OL1 characters’ use of English are determiner deletion (omitting words such as the or a in noun phrases) and a simplification of inflectional morphology. Examples for determiner deletion are the utterance of a Zurich bank employee in The Bourne Identity, who tells the protagonist that she will direct him “to appropriate officer” (0 13 37), and the Mexican General Salazar in Traffic, who says “sorry for boxes and paintings and things” when admitting an American visitor to his office (1 24 46; see chapter 7, excerpt 58 below). In the domain of inflections, the -s ending used for the plural of nouns, or for verbs in the third person singular, are omitted, and another pattern is to use present tense verb forms in utterances where the past tense is called for. Lexical interlanguage phenomena include lexical gaps, where characters appear unable to remember an English word, and utter an inappropriate or non-existent alternative one, or switch into their L1 for compensation. In Frantic, a French concierge cannot remember the English term “cotton balls”, and elicits the term from the protagonist Richard Walker, his EL1 interlocutor, by means of pantomimic gesture (0 29 18). A different French <?page no="140"?> 126 Chapter 6: Characterization hotel employee reverts to code-switching because he seems unsure about the word toiletries, and says to Walker: “This is your - les affaires de toilette” (0 15 37). In rare cases, lexical comprehension also appears as problematic. Despite her high EL2 fluency, Marie Kreutz has to ask Jason Bourne about the meaning of his utterance “we’re blown” (without being granted an explanation, however; 1 11 41). Somewhat more oddly, Marie de Guise, talking to Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabeth, hesitates about an English word that is almost identical to its French counterpart (and historical source): “Your Queen is weak. She has no army, no friends, only - comment vous dites ça déjà - enemies? ” (‘how do you say that? ’; 1 25 47). Some characters use an especially marked form of EL2 interlanguage, which consists of nouns and verbs only, without any inflections or function words. An example of this telegraphic style occurs in Behind Enemy Lines, when Miroslav Lokar, a Serbian militia commander, interrogates Gabriel Stackhouse, a captured US Navy pilot, about the purpose of his mission: “Reconnaissance mission, yes? Not bombing mission, right? You photograph? ” (0 30 00). In this utterance, Lokar avoids using either full verbs or auxiliaries, and forms simple questions consisting of compound nouns only, followed by a reduced tag question with the appropriate intonation. Still, his use of tag questions appears rule-governed, in that the tags “yes” and “right” are only added to the first two questions, not to the final one. A likely explanation is that for Lokar, the answer to the third question is less obvious and more important. He expects that the Americans have not been flying a bombing mission, since a ceasefire is officially in place, but he has every reason to fear aerial photography on the part of the Americans, because this would prove illegal military activity on the part of his troops. Lokar is very clearly a negative character: he pokes fun at Stackhouse by addressing a side-comment in Serbian, “uplašen je” (‘he’s afraid’), to his comrades, and soon afterwards has him executed on the spot, before he sends his subordinates out to track down his comrade Burnett (the protagonist). However, while his evilness might be seen as recursively reflected in his interlanguage, a very similar variety is spoken by Babic, the one very positive OL1 character in Behind Enemy Lines. A young Bosnian Muslim fighter, Babic helps Burnett because the Serbs are their common enemy. When Burnett first meets Babic and asks him “Do you have water”, Babic’s answer is “Water? No water.” Babic’s approximate command of English appears realistic for a youth in a remote and war-torn region with little opportunity to use English. What distinguishes him from Lokar, however, is his higher integrative motivation, which becomes apparent when he displays his enthusiasm about American pop culture to Burnett: <?page no="141"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 127 Excerpt 20 (Behind Enemy Lines, 1 04 16 - 1 05 17) (…) Burnett (pointing to Babic’s sweatshirt) Ice Cube! Babic Yes. I like Ice Cube. I like all hip hop, er, rap music. West Coast, East Coast, NWA, Public Enemy. (raps) They said stop freeze, I got froze up, because I’m Public Enemy Number One, One, One, One, One. Burnett That’s good. That’s good, yeah. Babic’s mediocre command of English is compensated, it appears, by his knowledge of American rap lyrics, which he quotes from memory. Babic’s appearance is a first indication that Bosnia is not exclusively an enemy territory, but that there are also people with more friendly attitudes towards the US in general, and the American protagonist in particular. The brief friendship between the American pilot and the Bosnian Muslim fighter announces the eventual successful outcome of Burnett’s critical mission. However, just as Babic’s English is far from any degree of fluency, Burnett’s dangerous flight is not yet over. A similar narrative use of interlanguage as a marker of a turning point in the narrative can be discerned in Frantic. On a visit to Paris, the American protagonist Richard Walker’s wife is apparently kidnapped, but Walker fails to convince the hotel staff of the seriousness of the situation. His own investigations are compromised by the fact that he does not know French, nor do several of the persons he asks for advice and information speak English. Then, in a bar opposite his hotel, a tramp (credited as a ‘wino’) is able to help Walker with essential information. The wino addresses Walker with the words “Coming, coming with me. I explain to you” and leads him to a parking lot behind the hotel: Excerpt 21 (Frantic, 0 23 30 - 0 24 00) (…) Wino Around here. Yes, it is true. Incredible. Incredible story. Walker What exactly did you see? Wino Exactly exactly two friends of mine ont vu la scéne. They erm they saw everything. Richard They saw what? What did they see? Walker One man push with brutality the poor woman in the car. She’s your wife? (…) <?page no="142"?> 128 Chapter 6: Characterization Grammatical interlanguage phenomena in the wino’s English include the use of the present participle “coming” as an imperative, and the present “push” instead of the past tense “pushed”. Furthermore, he switches into French in his second turn, which appears to be caused by a momentary lexical gap, but immediately repairs his divergence by adding a translation in English. The divergence can be explained with situational factors: one is the wino’s state of inebriation, and moreover, Walker’s nervous, impatient, and even slightly aggressive demeanour is not suited to facilitate the wino’s task of speaking English. Still, it is remarkable that the tramp is depicted as a far more skilled multilingual character than a number of service employees (two florists and a barkeeper) who were unable to answer Walker in English in the previous scene. What is more, the wino even outperforms the Californian cardiologist himself, whose French is virtually absent. Two final examples of interlanguage grammar come from the comedy Just Married, where their function is clearly one of belittling and negative stereotyping. On their honeymoon to Europe, the two young Californian protagonists intend to spend their first night at a romantic hotel in the French Alps. At the hotel reception, they are welcomed by the owner, Henri Margeaux, who is portrayed as unnecessarily inquisitive during his first appearance, in which he tells Tom and Sarah Leezak that “it’s so fresh and young to have marriage, no? ” (0 37 24). Later, when Tom Leezak causes a fire in the hotel by mishandling a plug, Margeaux angrily points out that his grandparents “installed the wiring in the hotel before World War First” (0 41 27). In these excerpts, the uncooperative and impolite behaviour of the hotel owner is underlined by interlanguage features such as determiner deletion and confused syntax, and these linguistic shortcomings reflect the belittling portrayal of France as a technological backwater. The second case in point is an Asian American character called Yuan, who works as a butler for the female protagonist’s family at their impressive estate in Beverly Hills (see figure 10 below). One of Yuan’s tasks is to operate an intercom device which connects the villa to the main gate of the premises. In three different scenes, Yuan denies Tom Leezak access to the premises: first because of Tom’s unimpressive car, and later because Yuan is aware of problems in Tom’s and his wife Sarah’s relationship. Thus, in the first scene Yuan tells Tom at the gate: “Why you bring Dodge to front? Park at service entrance.” Tom is only admitted when Sarah, who is sitting next to him, intervenes. In the second scene, Tom drives Sarah home from the airport after their disastrous honeymoon in Europe. At the gate, Yuan wonders why they are still sharing a car, and he tells Sarah: “You and Tom not totogether anymore.” A bit later, the third scene features a more extended interaction. <?page no="143"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 129 Together with his friend Kyle, Tom has come back to the house to make up with Sarah, but Yuan denies him access yet again. Yuan informs him that “You no allowed here any more”, for the following reason: “Relationship over. She no like you anymore.” Asked by Tom if those were Sarah’s own words, Yuan elucidates, with an opaque use of infantile slang: “She say you have kee-kee with bimbo. Same thing”. Yet, Tom insists, and Yuan threatens him: “We call SWAT team on your ass! ” Yuan’s last turn in the movie is directed to Sarah’s mother, who has become aware of the argument over the intercom and asks what the matter is. Yuan’s explanation is brief: “Tom ram gate.” Figure 10: Yuan (Toshi Toda) in Just Married The English spoken by this Asian American character is marked by grammatical simplification, a telegraphic style, and also an inappropriate use of register. There is something pathetic about the alternation between very simple language on the one hand, and the absurd reference to the Special Weapons and Tactics force - hardly needed to cope with two unarmed offenders - which appears like a phrase memorized from a movie. Yuan’s final, trisyllabic turn even comes across as an imitation of the isolated morphological patterns typical of certain Asian (especially Chinese) languages: his English seems marked by some very potent process of L1 interference. The Asian American is a rare but especially poignant case of a ridiculous character with ridiculous language - and it is hard to miss the implication, namely that he is perfectly well placed in his position as a butler, since this occupation appears <?page no="144"?> 130 Chapter 6: Characterization already challenging enough for the skills - linguistic and other - he has to offer. Interlanguage pragmatics In the movies analyzed, the few interlanguage phenomena on the level of pragmatics comprise the use of inappropriate forms of address, violations of conversational maxims, and of linguistic conventions of politeness. A misuse of forms of address occurs in the opening scene of Frantic, where a black taxi chauffeur drives the American couple Richard and Sondra Walker from a Paris airport to their hotel. The driver does not speak any English, but codeswitches between French and Arabic instead, whereby he addresses Walker with an inappropriate imperative verb form (viens, ‘come’). Like in most European languages, French speakers distinguish between an intimate form of address (the so-called T-form), and a different one that is used to index social distance (the V-form; see Brown and Gilman 1960). While there is crossand intralinguistic variation as to which exact constellations of interlocutors are indexed by which of the two sets of pronouns, there is no way in which a middle-aged taxi customer could be addressed with a French T-pronoun or its corresponding verb form, rather than its formal equivalent (which would be venez in the scene in question). However, the taxi driver’s pragmatic faux-pas does not become obvious to the non-French speaking viewers of Frantic, nor indeed to the character Walker himself. A more obvious case of interlanguage pragmatics occurs in Sabrina, where conversational maxims are violated in a Hispanic American’s EL2 performance. Rosa, a maid working for the rich Larrabee family in their Long Island mansion (see figure 11 below), speaks a variety of English marked by a Spanish accent, grammatical mistakes (e. g. the absence of past tense marking), but also on the level of conversational maxims. In the following excerpt, Rosa is talking to her fellow servants in the mansion’s large kitchen, and she has some exciting news to tell them. Rosa has seen the protagonist Sabrina, who has long been hopelessly in love with David Larrabee (the owner’s son), in the unexpected company of David’s elder brother Linus, who is commonly considered the last person interested in a romantic relationship: Excerpt 22 (Sabrina, 1 11 24 - 1 11 55) Rosa I look out the window and I see someone and it is a young woman, so I say, what is a young woman doing in the courtyard at this time of night so I am looking and looking and I see it is Sabrina, and she’s talking, who is she talking to? A man, not her daddy because he’s not as tall - <?page no="145"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 131 Joanna (with an annoyed tone) It was Linus. Sabrina went out with Linus. Rosa It was Mister Linus. Linda Sabrina went out with Linus Larrabee? That’s too weird. Scott I thought the guy was gay. Rosa Mister Linus is not a gay. Joanna It’s not a gay, Rosie, it’s just gay. (…) Figure 11: Rosa (Miriam Colon) in Sabrina In her long initial turn, Rosa continually delays the vital information, Linus’s name. It is not clear whether the intention is to portray her as especially chatty, so much so she forgets the point of her utterance and gets distracted, or whether she delays the information on purpose, in an unsuccessful attempt to add dramatic tension to her narrative. At any rate, she unknowingly violates two of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims, the maxim of quantity (by talking too much) and the maxim of relation (by withholding relevant information but supplying irrelevant information instead). Rosa’s blunders are met with a prompt reaction: with obvious annoyance, Joanna, another household employee, interrupts her in mid-turn and discloses the information in her stead. With a similar attitude, Joanna performs the function of a language teacher shortly afterwards, by correcting Rosa’s use of gay as a noun instead of an adjective, rather than to take issue with the content of Rosa’s contribution. The highlighting of Rosa’s interlanguage is sharply contrasted with the <?page no="146"?> 132 Chapter 6: Characterization depiction of the protagonist Sabrina’s L2 skills, in that Sabrina appears to have learnt much better French during two years in Paris than Rosa, who has lived in the US for much longer, knows English. Moreover, the audience is left with the impression that characters like Rosa are somehow “not worth listening to” (Lippi-Green 1997: 243; emphasis in the original) - indeed, in another scene where she appears, her speech is faded out in the middle of a turn, and there is a cut to an altogether different setting. Impoliteness: beyond interlanguage In a corpus of movies where conflict informs the stories to a greater extent than harmonic situations (see chapter 7, subsection Mood and language choice), instances of linguistic and other forms of impoliteness clearly abound. Consider the following conversation from French Kiss, where the American protagonist Kate asks a concierge at an upper-class Paris hotel to help her to contact her disloyal fiancé: Excerpt 23 (French Kiss, 0 23 00 - 0 24 29) Concierge Oui madame? Kate Yes erm bonjour erm do you speak any English? Concierge Of course madame, this is the George Cinq, not some backpacker’s hovel. Kate Hovel. Of course not. Erm could you tell me which room Charlie Lytton is staying in please, Doctor Charles Lytton, he’s expecting me. Concierge I’m afraid non. Kate Non? Concierge No madame, perhaps madame could try the courtesy phone. Kate Well madame has tried the courtesy phone. (Whispers) ‘Do not disturb’. Concierge Ah. Kate (slowly and distinctly, with gestures) Look I just spent seven hours on an airplane crossing an ocean, I’m tired and I’m hungry and I just want to see my fiancé, now are you gonna help me or not. Concierge Madame it is my duty as concierge to vigorously safeguard the privacy of our guests, and if our guests need safeguarding from their own fiancées, well after all unlike some countries, France is not a nation of puritanical hypocrites. Kate (gives him money, which he takes and walks away) Hey, hey hey hey, I just gave you one hundred francs. <?page no="147"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 133 Concierge Oui madame and I took it, merci. And if there is anything else I can do to help, please let me know. The concierge uses the English language fluently and with a register that is completely appropriate to his function. At the same time, his attitude towards his American interlocutor is strikingly condescending and impolite. First, he attacks Kate in a way for which she is completely unprepared. In his reaction to Kate’s exploratory question about his English proficiency, he insinuates a patronizing attitude on her part, which enables him to talk back to her rudely in turn. A second strategy is linguistic divergence, as in his third turn (“I’m afraid non”), where it accompanies a clearly dispreferred answer to Kate’s question, but also in his marked French pronunciation of cognates such as madame or France. Then, while his insistence on the hotel’s privacy policy is nothing unusual, his designation of the US as a “nation of puritanical hypocrites” is somehow out of line, and his impoliteness culminates in his acceptance of Kate’s bribe, without offering anything in return 29 - an especially clear instance of pragmatic uncooperativeness. An even more extreme example of impoliteness appears in The Jackal. The opening scene shows Ghazzi Murad, a Russian mafia boss, in a Moscovite night club, where he is surprised by a crackdown coordinated by a Russian federal police force, the MVD, in cooperation with a squadron of visiting FBI agents, under the supervision of Deputy Director Carter Preston. When the MVD Major Valentina Koslova attempts to arrest Murad, the criminal offers her a bribe, but she insists on presenting the charges to him: Excerpt 24 (The Jackal, 0 05 35 - 0 06 55) (…) Koslova Ghazzi Murad, vy arestovany za ubijstvo majora Nikolaja Semanko. Ghazzi Murad, you are under arrest for the murder of Mayor Nikolai Semankho. Murad Otsosi, radost’. U tebja svidetelej netu. Blow me, darling! You don’t have witnesses. Nothing. Preston Vaša krov’ - naš svidetel’. Vy ostavili svoju DNK na meste prestuplenija. Your blood is our witness. You left your DNA at the scene of crime. 29 Another corrupt concierge is the Venetian Fredo in Just Married. However, unlike the concierge in French Kiss, Fredo can be got to talk by a payment of 40 Euros from Tom Leezak. <?page no="148"?> 134 Chapter 6: Characterization Murad DNK? What is this? An American? Who the fuck are you? Dna? Preston Deputy Director Carter Preston, FBI. Murad FBI. You fuck Americans now, you ugly militia whore. And you, go fuck yourself. This is not Chicago, this is Russia, so take your bitch and get the fuck out of here. You think I’m afraid of the MVD? (laughs) I swear I will kill you and your fucking whore mothers [if you don’t get] - fuck you, fuck you! You scar-faced cunt! Fuck you! Koslova [I repeat you I advise you -] Preston All right, that’s enough. (…) Murad’s extreme rudeness is apparent not only in his choice of obscene and insulting expressions 30 (Koslova’s character does have a big scar in her face), but also in his disregard for the content of Koslova’s and the American Preston’s utterances directed at him. Likewise, his attitude is reflected on the level of language choice. Preston converges to Murad by describing the forensic evidence in Russian, in what could be considered, on the one hand, a sympathetic gesture towards his Russian interlocutors (especially his colleagues), but on the other hand, a patronizing move towards Murad. At any rate, Murad realizes that Preston is an L1 speaker of English, but his choice of English (a language in which Murad can swear just as fluently as in his L1) is clearly a divergence from Preston’s choice of Russian, not a convergence towards the American’s first language. Both Murad and the concierge in French Kiss represent well-established negative ethnic stereotypes: on the one hand, the arrogant French service employee, whose natural impoliteness is bolstered by outspoken anti-American attitudes. On the other hand, there is the cynical and brutal Russian businessman, who takes lives and considers everyone to be as corrupt as himself. While there is a difference in genre - the concierge’s impoliteness is of a humorous kind, whereas Murad is a brutal thug in an action movie - greed is one of their shared attributes. Also, both characters are duly punished for their impoliteness: Murad is shot by Koslova only moments after the excerpt quoted, and in a later scene in French Kiss, Kate appears much better prepared to speak up to the concierge, and encourages him to disclose vital information with the threat of creating an uproar in the noble George V lobby. Linguistic politeness phenomena are skilfully employed to underline these representa- 30 The authors refrained from complementing Murad’s gross sexism with any racist comments addressed at the black American investigator (Preston is impersonated by Sidney Poitier). <?page no="149"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 135 tions, but there is a crucial difference between the last two examples, and the instances of interlanguage discussed above. While characters such as Rosa in Sabrina display pragmatic interlanguage as a likely result of incomplete second language acquisition, characters such as Murad and the concierge appear completely fluent in English, and moreover fully aware of the pragmatic force of their utterances. In other words, Murad and the concierge are not impolite because they lack an awareness of the pitfalls of intercultural communication, but on purpose. Despite the undoubted narrative appeal of these scenes, the implication they carry is that if EL1 speakers feel insulted by the verbal behaviour of L2 users of English, this is more likely to be caused by their interlocutors’ genuinely impolite intentions, not by possible misunderstandings due to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural pragmatic differences. What is erased in these representations is the fact that in real life, it is precisely such differences that create problems in intercultural communication as easily as, and probably more often than clear-cut instances of negative intentions. Who uses interlanguage? In the remaining part of this section, the focus is on how representative these instances of interlanguage are for the entire corpus of movie characters. In other words, how many of the multilingual characters use a second language, English or other, and with what levels of proficiency? Table 14 shows an overview of all 174 multilingual characters, by different first languages and in total. As mentioned above, the four levels are fluent use, interlanguage, almost absent, and unknown proficiency. Table 14: L2 proficiency of multilingual movie characters EL1 speakers OL1 speakers Total Fluent 14 94 108 Interlanguage 3 11 14 Almost absent 8 3 11 Unknown 18 23 41 Total 43 131 174 The most striking result is the different proportion of fluent and non-fluent L2 users among the EL1 as opposed to the OL1 characters. The 14 fluent EL1 multilinguals make up less than a third of their category (43), and as <?page no="150"?> 136 Chapter 6: Characterization many as eleven (about a quarter) display interlanguage or almost absent proficiency. Thus, the EL1 multilinguals are not only low in number, but also unimpressive in their L2 performance. In contrast, it is the 94 fluent L2 users (almost three quarters) who dominate among the OL1 characters, whereas only 14 characters (about one tenth) are in the categories of interlanguage or almost absent proficiency. Among these characters, three are positive, seven mixed, and four are negative characters; in terms of occupation, only two belong to the elite category. Thus, although interlanguage or almost absent L2 knowledge mainly index negative and powerless characters (for examples, see the previous sub-section), most of the 58 bad guys among the OL1 speakers (see chart 5 above) are fluent L2 speakers of English, which means that no generalized pattern of fractal recursivity can be observed. The extent to which OL1 characters in general are fluent L2 users of English is illustrated in table 15, which contrasts the L2 use of the mixed-language protagonist couples in the seven movies from the corpus where such couples appear. Table 15: Comparison of L2 proficiency of mixed-language protagonist couples Movie EL1 protagonist (origin) OL1 protagonist (origin) EL1 protagonist’s OL2 proficiency OL1 protagonist’s EL2 proficiency The Bourne Identity Jason Bourne (American) Marie Kreutz (German) Fluent Fluent Braveheart William Wallace (Scottish) Princess Isabelle (French) Fluent Fluent Fools Rush In Alex Whitman (American) Isabel Fuentes Whitman (Mexican American) Interlanguage Fluent French Kiss Kate (American) Luc (French) Almost absent Fluent Frantic Richard Walker (American) Michelle (French) Almost absent Fluent Green Card Brontë Fauré (American) Georges Fauré (French) Almost absent Fluent Red Heat Art Ridzik (American) Ivan Danko (Russian) Almost absent Interlanguage <?page no="151"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 137 Of seven EL1 protagonists, only two use the other language fluently: William Wallace has learnt French (as well as Latin) on his educational journey from Scotland to the Continent, while the CIA agent Jason Bourne speaks as many as five different languages (see Linguistic repertoire above). In one scene of Fools Rush In, Alex Whitman demonstrates some formulaic active knowledge of Spanish, but he is unable really to communicate because he does not understand his interlocutor’s Spanish answer (see chapter 7, excerpt 37 below). The remaining four EL1 protagonists do not know their partner’s language at all, but they use it in instances of language crossing in a small number of utterances. Conversely, their OL1 partners’ performance in EL2 is fluent throughout, with the exception of Ivan Danko in Red Heat: while the Russian police captain appears as a confident English user, his turns are often remarkably short and oversimplified in structure - in some ways, they are reminiscent of the Austrian American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance as the non-human ‘Terminator’ character in the trilogy of the same title. In Red Heat, Danko’s L2 performance is mainly used for humorous purposes, where the comic aspects are largely located at the level of conversational interaction. In the following scene, set at the Chicago police headquarters, Commander Lou Donnelly attempts to draw Danko into a conversation on the psychological implications of police routine: Excerpt 25 (Red Heat, 0 27 27 - 0 28 06) (…) Donnelly (To Danko, who is contemplating a fish tank in Donnelly’s office) Stress management. You watch the fishes, you water the plants, special breathing exercises, monitor your blood pressure (switches on tape with New Age music), listen to pleasant sounds, relax. Personally I think it may all be a pile of shit, but when you’re facing a bypass, you stop asking questions. Look, just out of curiosity and er since I figure cops are cops the world over, how do you Soviets deal with all the tension and stress? Danko Vodka. (…) The humorous effect of the dialogue is created in different ways: while it obviously appeals to a well-known stereotype of vodka-drinking Russians, it is also based on the contrast between the American’s exaggerated wordiness and the Russian’s disinterested, disyllabic feedback - a pattern exploited in further scenes in the movie. Danko’s lack of conversational cooperation need not, however, be interpreted as a feature of negative characterization. Rather, <?page no="152"?> 138 Chapter 6: Characterization there is a sense in which the brevity of his utterances appears as a valid alternative to the chattiness of the Americans - a contrast which is reflected in the opposition between Danko’s unconventionally brutal (but, it is suggested, efficient) policing techniques, and the American cops’ inability to fight the ruthless criminals. This contrast becomes apparent in another scene from Red Heat, where Danko’s main collaborator, Detective Sergeant Art Ridzik, tries to explain the Miranda Act (which, in the US, grants basic rights to suspects interrogated by the police) to Danko: Excerpt 26 (Red Heat, 0 40 39 - 0 41 10) (…) Danko This man visits Viktor in jail? Ridzik Only two folks had that honour. A skirt named Cat Manzetti and er the Russian I shot. Alright now the girl teaches dance in Wicker Park for the city. We’re gonna try to catch up with her later on tonight alright? About this pile of shit pimp in here. In this country, we try to protect the rights of individuals. It’s called the Miranda Act and it says that you can’t even touch his ass. Danko I do not want to touch his ass. I want to make him talk. Ridzik I’m gonna handle this one, okay? Danko appears not to grasp the figurative interpretation of “touch his ass”, but it might just be that it is the principle of the Miranda Act as such which he refuses to recognize. At any rate, while Ridzik fails to prevent Danko from using violence against the informer in the subsequent interrogation, a later scene clearly illustrates that Danko has well understood the Miranda Act at least in theory. Danko is shown waiting alone in Ridzik’s car which is parked next to a sidewalk, and while waiting he is confronted by an aggressive passer-by who claims that the parking lot is his. The man urges Danko to “move your piece of shit the hell out now or give me fifty bucks”, and Danko’s reaction is prompt: Excerpt 27 (Red Heat, 0 52 05 - 0 52 13) (…) Danko Do you know Miranda? Passer-by Never heard of the bitch. (Danko knocks him down). Danko (to himself ) Xuligany. Hooligans! <?page no="153"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 139 When Ridzik returns to the car and asks Danko about the unconscious passer-by lying next to his car, Danko answers that he “lives there”, and Ridzik’s chuckling repartee is to compliment Danko as a “real beaut’”. In many ways, Red Heat paints a bleak and violent picture of Chicago populated by frustrated and misogynist white males, cynical and brutal African Americans, and passive, victimized women. As such, it is possible to read it as a movie which carries anti-feminist and New Right ideologies associated with the Reagan years (see Traube 1992, not with reference to Red Heat though). However, these ideological patterns do not coincide with an unfavourable depiction of the Russian-speaking protagonist. Ivan Danko appears as the only character who is determined enough to confront the criminals, and his interlanguage marks him as authentic and real, rather than as corrupt or deficient. While the American cops are caught up in what is portrayed as inefficient and bureaucratic regulations and worthless psychobabble they consider “a pile of shit” themselves, Danko talks little, but solves their problems instead. At the end of the movie, when Ridzik says “I give up. This whole thing’s very Russian”, it is not hard to hear a hint of politically incorrect gratefulness, if not admiration for Danko’s methods. Danko’s interlanguage is clearly employed for contrast, but in a positive sense: it singles the character out as special, different, and ultimately more likeable than most of his EL1 interlocutors (see also Strada and Troper 1997: 186-188) - a phenomenon which is unlikely not to have contributed to the later political success of the actor Schwarzenegger. Marie Kreutz, the female protagonist in The Bourne Identity, is a prime example of a highly fluent EL2 user and a likeable character as well (in fact, the only positive German character in the corpus). The following excerpt shows her driving from Zurich to Paris, with the male protagonist Jason Bourne sitting next to her. Bourne has offered the financially challenged student a large sum of money to help him escape from Zurich, where his pursuers have tracked him down. Due to his amnesia, however, Bourne is a somewhat poor conversationalist, and the burden of talking to get to know each other falls fully on Kreutz’s side: Excerpt 28 (The Bourne Identity, 0 28 05 - 0 28 38) Kreutz (audio fade-in) … which was fine with me because I was ready you know. Because I mean after six months in Amsterdam, you’re not sure if you’ve been there for twenty minutes or twenty years, if you know what I mean. So I went and I took all the money I had and I went in with friends and we took over this really cool surf shop outside Biarritz erm, which was right by the water, it was amazing, <?page no="154"?> 140 Chapter 6: Characterization it was just amazing for about three months until it turned out that this erm jerk who had fronted us the lease was actually shining everyone on and (pauses) Bourne And what? (…) Marie Kreutz’s turn contains features characteristic of informal spoken discourse, such as repetitions (“So I went … and I went”) and hesitations. While Bourne’s failure to give her any feedback heightens her nervousness, her L2 performance is nevertheless highly idiomatic. A case in point is her use of the non-referential determiner this in the phrase “this er jerk”, a pragmatic phenomenon typical of informal American speech. Likewise, the expletive jerk as well as the phrasal verb shining … on suggest her acquaintance with more informal registers. A similar case is the young French woman Michelle in Frantic, who also speaks English fluently, and makes use of slang expressions, for instance when referring to a dead terrorist with a thick wallet as loaded, or when assessing a Paris night club as “for old jerks and really square”. In Green Card, the Frenchman Georges Fauré does not merely appear as a fluent speaker, but also as somebody self-confident enough to talk back to his EL1 wife. In the following excerpt, he questions the purpose of her charitable work, which consists in planting trees in poor areas of New York City. Excerpt 29 (Green Card, 0 43 08 - 0 43 48) (…) Georges Oh you think the gardens make hope? Brontë Well, it’s something. Georges The trees are very good, yes, but go to the country if you want trees. Brontë You try telling that to the children. They live with chaos, despair. You may think it’s nothing to give them a garden to plant or trees to climb, but at least it’s doing something. Georges If it amuses you, then do it. Brontë Amuses me? Ah, ah. (leaves) Georges (to himself ) Chaos, despair. It is useful to compare this excerpt to another one later in the movie, where the tone is somewhat more friendly. On the following day, Brontë and Georges are spending the Sunday afternoon in Central Park, where they ask each other personal questions in preparation for an interview with the immigration authorities (see figure 12 below). The latter have correctly guessed that the Faurés’ bond is a marriage of convenience, and to disprove them, Georges and <?page no="155"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 141 Brontë have to get to know each other just as well as if they had really known each other intimately for quite some time. After exchanging facts about their parents and hobbies, they touch upon the issue of former relationships: Excerpt 30 (Green Card, 1 14 49 - 1 15 29) Georges Okay back to work. Erm, you live with two men. First er Peter, then Steven. Both nice guy. Brontë Nice? Georges Yes, that what you said. Yes. And Steven wanted to marriage you but er you think that marriage is boring. Brontë Ah, except for ours. (chuckles) Georges Ah oh yeah. Then you met Phil, Phil. Him you really love, huh? Brontë But you can’t tell them that. And I left Phil - Georges And married me because - Brontë You’re different and funny. (…) Figure 12: Georges Fauré (Gérard Depardieu) in Green Card In the first excerpt, which is characteristic of most of Georges’s turns, his L2 use of English is (apart from the phrase “make hope”) barely marked as interlanguage at any level. There is even a sense in which he outperforms Brontë with his quick repartees, to which she responds with increasing irritation, and finally breaks off the conversation by leaving Georges behind to ruminate on <?page no="156"?> 142 Chapter 6: Characterization her motivation. Conversely, Georges sounds rather less fluent in the Central Park scene. He substitutes live for lived and nice guy for nice guys, omits the copula in “that what you said”, uses telegraphic syntax in the sentence “Both nice guy”, and even converts the noun marriage into a verb: “… wanted to marriage you”. In this scene, Georges’s linguistic blunders do not come across as particularly amusing, since the overall tone is romantic rather than humorous. Rather, Georges’s interlanguage phenomena are skilfully used to point to his nervousness in this very intimate conversation with Brontë. As becomes obvious when Georges asks Brontë if she really loves her current boyfriend Phil, Georges is sincerely interested in her emotions, and is not just asking for the sake of the looming interview. Somewhat reluctantly, Brontë points out this faux pas to him: obviously Phil must not be mentioned at the interview, so as to keep up the appearance of Georges’s and Brontë’s marriage. Thus, Georges’s L2 performance varies, in a realistic way, according to the context of the interaction, which makes him a likeable and - crucially - more complex character, rather than just a funny Frenchman with poor English. However, highly fluent EL2 speech, such as Marie Kreutz’s or Georges Fauré’s, is not a privilege of positive characters. A striking example appears in the The Sum of All Fears, where an upper-class Austrian fascist gives a public speech to a large audience in Vienna. In spite of his obvious anti-American attitude, Dressler speaks English, because he seems to be addressing an international, rather than Austrian-only audience: Excerpt 31 (The Sum of All Fears, 0 09 40 - 0 10 47) Dressler So what shall we make of Chechnya asking the West for protection? She is like a beautiful virgin escaping the clutches of a lecherous bear and running to Bill Clinton to save her maidenhood. (Laughter in the audience). A poet once wrote ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. He could have been writing of us, of Europe in the twenty-first century. Over fifty years of America and Russia imposing their will on the European Community, East and West, and we are still treated like children, but without the toys or the goodnight chocolates. Each day we lose a little bit more of our separate sovereign ability to determine our own futures, and each day the world comes just a little bit closer to that terrible moment when the beating of a butterfly’s wings unleashes a hurricane God himself cannot stop. Dressler skilfully combines political statements, figures of speech, a literary quotation, and a clever reference to popular science into a witty and intelligent <?page no="157"?> 6.4 Representation of L2 use 143 oral performance, with a pattern of slow escalation, where the humorous tone gives way to a dramatic climax. He also manages to create a rapport with his audience by his frequent use of the pronoun we, as well as by his disparaging reference to the former US president’s private life, which functions as an activation of shared background knowledge. Apart from his German accent, there is no single feature in his literary register of English that would mark him as a second language user. In short, it is hard to see how the evilness of Dressler’s character is reflected in this speech; rather, Dressler appears as an equally good rhetorician as his counterpart, US President Fowler 31 . Narrative reasons explain why in this first appearance of Dressler, he does not yet publicly disclose his true intentions, so as not to awaken the CIA’s interest too early in the movie. The viewer is not duped, however: a swastika engraved on Dressler’s wristwatch, which is shown in close-up at the end of Dressler’s speech, characterizes Dressler in a very clear way, and more unequivocally than if his language had been characterized by many jas or inflected verbs at the end of subordinate clauses. In sum, fluent L2 use characterizes the speech of a large majority of multilingual characters, irrespective of whether they are good guys or bad guys. While the patterns of fractal recursivity stated in the second hypothesis are therefore clearly exceptional rather than the rule, this finding begs the question of whether the depiction of OL1 characters as highly skilled EL2 users is to be considered an unequivocally more progressive representational pattern. In fact, the movies paint a picture of the use of English as a second language that is almost too rosy and unproblematic. The cinematic representations largely erase the fact that a majority of English L2 users worldwide are unlikely to be completely fluent. In the movies, interlanguage features appear as especially marked by virtue of their paucity. They index a few special, and more often negative and powerless characters, rather than to appear in a more realistically widespread manner across all different categories of characterization, including characters with positive evaluation or high status. Furthermore, these representations suggest that English is a universal language spoken virtually everywhere at least by somebody 32 , which makes it 31 Elsewhere in The Sum of All Fears, a comparably humorous and ingenious talk given by President Fowler at an election campaign dinner is interrupted precisely by the breaking news of a terrorist attack caused by Dressler. 32 A repeated pattern in Hollywood movies which chimes with this observation is when OL1 characters, for whatever reasons, only feign to be monolingual, until their EL1 interlocutors eventually find out that they can use English quite well. While none of the movies in the corpus contains any examples, some instances occur in Savior (1998), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Proof of Life (2000), and Birthday Girl (2001). <?page no="158"?> 144 Chapter 6: Characterization an unproblematic option in all cases of exolingual interactions - especially in the light of the EL1 characters’ meagre performance as L2 users. 6.5 Summary and conclusion With respect to the process of iconization (hypothesis 1), the discussion of 518 fictional characters in language contact movies has shown that there is a clear relationship between having a non-English first language and being a less powerful and more negative character. OL1 characters often have less prestigious occupations, and their narrative importance is typically inferior to that of their EL1 counterparts. While the monolingualism of an overwhelming majority of EL1 characters is not portrayed as a major disadvantage, the few who are multilingual are typically powerful and attractive protagonists. Conversely, the monolingualism of OL1 characters greatly reduces their significance, and to add insult to injury, the added value of their individual multilingualism is much smaller than for the EL1 characters. Still, there is no sense in which strictly iconic patterns can be discerned, because the movies do feature powerful and positive OL1 characters as well, and their small number is compensated for by their high narrative importance. However, in cases where the contrast between English and another language is not straightforwardly interpretable in terms of good and bad, similar dichotomies between different other languages (for example French versus Spanish, or Russian versus German) often persist. The pattern of fractal recursivity postulated in hypothesis 2 was not corroborated. OL1 characters, whether good guys or bad, are portrayed as highly fluent in English as a second language in most cases. Clearly, exceptions to this pattern can be found; in fact it is the most recent movie in the corpus (Just Married) which relies to the greatest extent on grossly stereotypical depictions of negative OL1 characters with marked interlanguage features. In contrast, the interlanguage features of Ivan Danko in the much earlier movie Red Heat mark the Russian character as more likeable, and by no means more ridiculous than his EL1 counterparts. But in general, the movies analyzed do not convey the impression that fluent and idiomatic use of English is a privilege of L1 speakers. Therefore, it is hardly Hollywood movies that can be held responsible for purist denunciations of the extent to which the English language is made to suffer by its worldwide use as a second or foreign language, and it is to other forms of public discourse that analysts must direct their attention. The EL1 characters are not only much more monolingual than the OL1 characters, but their L2 proficiency is also much lower. In most cases <?page no="159"?> 6.5 Summary and conclusion 145 however, the high EL2 skills of their interlocutors compensate for these shortcomings, so that the movies do not suggest that English L1 users would benefit from acquiring other languages more intensively, unless of course the viewers wish to emulate hero protagonists such as William Wallace or Jason Bourne. However, the representation of English L2 use as trouble-free and self-evident is also potentially problematic, especially with respect to linguistic politeness. The movies suggest that impolite behaviour of OL1 characters towards their EL1 interlocutors is in general intentional and directly related to narrow-minded anti-American sentiments. This pattern of misrepresentation is potentially dangerous, because it fails to cater for cases of real cross-cultural misunderstandings. These are arguably subtle in communication between similar cultures such as American and European ones, but then again, it is precisely their subtleness which can aggravate misunderstandings. The process of erasure is discernible in this reduction of the complexity of cross-cultural communication, as well as in other aspects of the depiction of language contact in the movies. For instance, the near-complete absence of children or teenagers among the multilingual characters contributes to a sense in which the acquisition of second languages is portrayed as unproblematic as their use - even if, arguably, the movies were hardly produced for an intended audience consisting of applied linguists only. In contrast, an overall erasure of contextual factors that influence speakers’ L2 use in different situations could not be pinpointed. The example of Georges Fauré in Green Card has shown how a character’s different emotional states are skilfully mirrored in differing patterns of L2 use. Not surprisingly, the movie Green Card also tops the list of movies with most positive OL1 characters. In the following chapter, it is precisely the notion of context which is at the focus of my attention. There, I measure the actual amount of dialogue in different languages, and survey to what extent their choice is motivated by realistic contextual factors on the one hand, as opposed to unrealistic instances of linguicist stereotyping on the other. A central question is whether movies like Green Card, which most obviously escape charges of linguicism with respect to characterization, are also movies with a higher quantity of non-English dialogue. <?page no="161"?> Chapter 7: Language choice “Ja sam Amerikanac i ne govorim vaš jezik” (‘I am American and I don’t speak your language’; Behind Enemy Lines 0 29 54) 7.1 Introduction In this chapter, the focus is on the choice of other languages, as opposed to English, in the spoken dialogue of the 16 language contact movies characterized by the strategy of presence (see table 6, section 6.1 above). How multilingual are these movies really? How much dialogue in other languages do they contain, when are these languages typically spoken, how is the content made obvious to the viewer, and what are the dominant patterns of code-switching? As in the previous chapter, my approach consists in a combination of quantitative observations, on the basis of a corpus specifically compiled for this analysis, and qualitative interpretations of movie dialogues. My analysis of language choice in multilingual movie scenes is again informed by three working hypotheses, which are based on the semiotic processes that underlie representations of linguistic differentiation (Irvine and Gal 2000; see chapter 3, section 3.5 above). Hypothesis 1: The use of other languages indexes undesirable social practices A diglossic pattern governs the global choice of the English language in more prestigious or appealing contexts, while other languages are typically used for more mundane interactions. Likewise, the general mood of scenes in which English is spoken is more positive than when other languages are used. By a constant repetition of these patterns, other languages become iconically associated with undesirable social practices. Hypothesis 2: The content expressed in other languages is irrelevant The opposition stated in hypothesis 1 is recursively projected onto how the content of what is said in other languages is made obvious to the viewer. Since what is said in other languages is less relevant than the content expressed in English, there is also no need to render it comprehensible. <?page no="162"?> 148 Chapter 7: Language choice Hypothesis 3: Important factors which govern the use of other languages are erased Even without the use of any replacement strategies, the number of interactions that are partly or wholly in other languages are greatly reduced in favour of English. Furthermore, since the depiction of code-switching merely fulfils the aim of stereotyping for characterization, there is an erasure of realistic sociolinguistic and pragmatic motivations in multilingual discourse. This chapter is divided into five sections. In section 7.2, the focus is on the overall quantity of dialogue in English and the other languages, and on how global patterns of language choice map onto the settings, activities, and moods of the respective scenes. In section 7.3, the issue of comprehensibility is treated: how, if at all, is the content expressed in languages other than English made accessible to the average viewer who does not understand these languages? Then, in section 7.4, the focus is on local patterns of language choice: to what extent is the presence of other languages alongside English motivated by realistic, as opposed to purely narrative factors? Thus, the three sections address the three hypotheses in turn. In the conclusion (section 7.5), the results are summarized and matched against those obtained from the discussion of movie characters in the previous chapter. 7.2 Global patterns of language choice The core unit of analysis in this chapter is the movie scene, defined as a temporally uninterrupted segment of a movie, typically with a unity of place and action. Movie scenes are delimited by other segments which depict actions which, within the reality of the story, neither take place at the same time, nor immediately before or after the scene in question. In general, this textual definition of the movie scene maps well onto the linguistic concept of a conversational interaction: movie scenes often depict one uninterrupted conversation from beginning to end. Still, the notion of conversation is methodologically problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, some scenes begin in the middle of conversations or even speaker turns (for an example, see chapter 6, excerpt 28 above), while others end before the characters can be expected to have stopped talking: what the viewer sees is only a part of an entire (imagined) conversation. Secondly, it is perfectly possible for one scene to contain two or more different conversations: characters may speak to one person, then leave the room and silently walk into another (with the camera accompanying them), and then start a new conversation with somebody else. Thirdly, camera <?page no="163"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 149 movement and editing sometimes allow the viewer to see and hear more than the characters. This is the case, for instance, in scenes where two characters are talking on the phone, and both are shown interacting as well with other characters in their respective backgrounds. Their side-comments to the other characters near the telephone are disclosed to the viewer, but not necessarily to the interlocutor at the other end of the phone line. If different languages are spoken in the two backgrounds, the entire movie scene is multilingual, but not necessarily the individual depicted conversations. Finally, the scene may continue to switch back and forth between the two settings even after the phone call has been terminated. In this case, the juxtaposition of the different languages remains exclusively a result of cinematic narration. From each of the sixteen movies, 587 scenes (an average of 37 scenes per movie) with an exolingual setting, multilingual dialogue, or both (see section 6.2 above) were transcribed and coded for the following relevant data: Linguistic profile of movie scenes Setting of scene Context of scene Mood of scene Comprehensibility strategies Motivations for code-switching In this section, I treat the first four of these categories, whereas the last two are treated in sections 7.3 and 7.4, respectively. Linguistic profile of movie scenes The amount of dialogue in English as opposed to other languages was measured in turns, defined as a movie character’s linguistic contribution to a conversation until interrupted by (1) another speaker’s successful taking of the floor, (2) a pause long enough for other interlocutors to take the floor, or (3) a cut to a different location or a new scene. Each turn was assigned to one of the following six types, based on two aspects. The first aspect is the distinction between English or non-English first languages of the interlocutors (speakers as well as silent addressees), and the second is the language chosen: English turns, turns in another language, or turns containing a code-switch between the two. Thus, six possibilities arise, which are each exemplified in the following list: 1. EL1 turn: English-only turn uttered by an EL1 speaker Jason Bourne: I wiped the whole place down for fingerprints. (The Bourne Identity, 0 59 51) <?page no="164"?> 150 Chapter 7: Language choice 2. EL2 turn: English-only turn uttered by an OL1 speaker Georges Fauré: I’ll make you the best coffee you ever had. (Green Card, 0 30 26) 3. OL1 turn: OL-only turn uttered by an OL1 speaker Princess Isabelle: De l’amour, j’en sais rien. (‘Of love, I know nothing’; Braveheart, 1 03 12) 4. OL2 turn: OL-only turn uttered by an EL1 speaker John Clark: Ja ne videl Sašu s universiteta. (‘I have not seen Sasha since university’; The Sum of All Fears, 0 46 27) 5. Mixed EL1 OL2 turn: Turn within which an EL1 speaker switches between English and another language Kate: Donnez-moi un break. You can’t make a vineyard out of one vine. (‘Give me a …’; French Kiss, 0 35 36) 6. Mixed OL1 EL2 turn: Turn within which an OL1 speaker switches between English and another language Juan Obregon: Bueno, pues, I hear these stories. Your husband in jail, your business in chaos, various people fighting over the scraps. (‘Well, …’; Traffic, 1 46 34) On the basis of these six types of turn, the linguistic profile of every scene was then determined, with a distinction between endolingual and exolingual scenes on the one hand, and monolingual and multilingual scenes on the other. In total, 7,226 turns were analyzed. Table 16 visualizes their distribution over two categories of speakers’ first languages (English versus another language), and three categories of language choice (monolingual English, monolingual other language, and mixed turns with one or more instances of code-switching). Ten turns are unaccounted for in table 16; they include some rare cases such as non-English second languages used by OL1 characters. Table 16: Speaker turns by L1 of speakers and language(s) used Speaker’s L1 L1 Used English OL Total English turn EL1: 3,977 EL2: 1,858 5,835 OL turn OL2: 101 OL1: 1,085 1,186 Mixed turn EL1 OL2: 52 OL1 EL2: 143 195 Total 4,130 3,086 7,116 <?page no="165"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 151 These figures illustrate the predominance of the English language, as well as of the EL1 characters, in a very clear way. Despite the equal number of EL1 and OL1 characters in the corpus (see chapter 6, table 9 above), the number of turns spoken by EL1 characters (4,130) exceeds the turns of OL1 characters (3,086) by more than one third: this means that they are given significantly more opportunities to speak. In the light of Pfister’s (2000: 200) observation that the amount of dialogue of each character in dramatic texts is a valid measure of how important they are, the EL1 characters are clearly depicted as more important than those whose L1 is not English. In contrast, while the OL1 characters speak less, it is they who largely carry the burden of linguistic accommodation, which results in a clear pattern of “linguistic nonreciprocity” (see Shohat and Stam 1994: 193). OL1 characters use English as a second language more than eighteen times as often (1,858 turns) as EL1 characters use a language other than English (101 turns). The outcome is that the English-only turns (5,835) outnumber the OL-only turns (1,192) by more than five to one. The EL1 characters’ monolingualism is also reflected in the number of mixed turns: they produce intra-turn code-switches only about a third as often (52 instances) as OL1 characters. A mere count of speaker turns, however, fails to provide a comprehensive view of language choice patterns, because it does not take the context of the depicted interactions into account. Therefore, the number of different speaker turns has to be matched against the overall communicative situation in every movie scene. To this aim, a distinction is made between endolingual and exolingual combinations of linguistic repertoires on the one hand, and between monolingual and multilingual discourse on the other (see chapter 2, table 1 above). For the linguistic repertoires of all characters present in every scene, four different possibilities can be distinguished: 1. All characters are L1 users of English (endolingual EL) 2. All characters are L1 users of one other language (endolingual OL) 3. Some characters are L1 users of English, others are L1 users of one or more other languages (exolingual with EL) 4. The characters have different non-English L1 (exolingual without EL) For the languages used in the speakers’ turns, four different possibilities likewise exist: 1. English only is spoken (monolingual EL) 2. English and one or more OL are spoken (multilingual with EL) 3. One OL only is spoken (monolingual OL) 4. Two or more different OL are spoken (multilingual without EL) <?page no="166"?> 152 Chapter 7: Language choice Of the 16 possible combinations of these two sets of categories, one is excluded for the methodological reasons discussed above (chapter 6, Selecting the characters): scenes with endolingual EL repertoires and monolingual EL use (number 1 in both lists). Table 17 offers a cross-tabulation of the characters’ linguistic repertoires and the languages used in the scenes: Table 17: Linguistic repertoires and languages used in movie scenes Language choice Linguistic repertoires Monolingual EL Multilingual with EL Monolingual OL Multilingual without EL Total Endolingual EL not considered 13 4 0 17 Exolingual with EL 233 216 10 0 459 Endolingual OL 4 5 93 0 102 Exolingual without EL 1 7 1 0 9 Total 238 241 108 0 587 First, it is useful to consider the total number of scenes according to linguistic repertoires (far right column). In only 17 cases - about one scene per movie - are other languages used by EL1 characters in the absence of any OL1 characters. Then, exolingual settings with EL1 characters are the most frequent, with 459 or almost four of five scenes. About one sixth of all scenes (102) are endolingual interactions among OL1 characters, and nine scenes only are exolingual with no EL1 characters present. In other words, EL1 characters are present in five out of six scenes, although they constitute only half of the total number of characters. In contrast, OL1 characters appear more than four times as often in the company of EL1 characters, which underlines the extent to which language contact informs the movies chosen. The fact that most EL1 characters are monolingual (see chapter 6, table 9 above) explains the differences among the languages used in the scenes (bottom row). The English language is used exclusively in 238 scenes, and partly in 241, which adds up to 479 scenes (four out of five) in total. The remaining 108 scenes are all monolingual in another language, and there is no scene where different other languages are mixed without English being also spoken. Thus, there is no multilingualism without the English language in any of the scenes analyzed. 346 scenes (238 + 108) or almost three out of <?page no="167"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 153 five are monolingual, while 241 scenes contain a mixture of English and one or more other languages. The latter scenes are at the focus of section 7.5 on code-switching below. A closer look at the individual fields in the table reveals that of the fifteen possible combinations, only three (indicated with bold face) are especially prominent, and account for a total of 542 scenes. These three combinations are as follows: 1. EL only: Exolingual with EL/ Monolingual EL (233 scenes): Scenes with EL1 characters and OL1 characters, where English only is used 2. Mixed: Exolingual with EL/ Multilingual with EL (216 scenes): Scenes with EL1 characters and OL1 characters, where both English and the OL are used 3. OL only: Endolingual OL/ Monolingual OL (93 scenes): Scenes where OL1 characters use their L1 only To simplify the terminology, these three categories will be referred to as EL only scenes, mixed scenes, and OL only scenes, however their exact definitions should be kept in mind. In the next subsection, Intertextual differences, the focus is on these three categories of communicative situations: which categories are more prominent in which movies, and how is this prominence related to the actual number (in turns) of different languages per scene? In the following three subsections, the interrelation of the different communicative situations and the factors of setting, activity and mood are then analyzed. The final part of this section contains an account of the minor categories of communicative situations, namely the 17 scenes with endolingual EL1 settings, and the nine exolingual scenes without any EL1 participants (the top and fourth row in table 17 above). Intertextual differences Which patterns of language choice are typical for which movies, and where is the viewer offered the highest quantity of dialogue in other languages? Chart 7 indicates the number of scenes in each movie, according to each of the three categories of language choice: (1) EL only, (2) Mixed and (3) OL only. <?page no="168"?> 154 Chapter 7: Language choice Chart 7: Scenes per movie and category of language choice In this chart, it is the proportions of the different categories which matter more than the raw numbers, since the latter not only vary in relation to the length of the movie, but also to the number of scenes eligible for the analysis. For instance, Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan are both rather long movies, but the number of scenes analyzed is small because of the many endolingual and monolingual EL1 scenes not considered for this analysis, and also because the scenes in these movies tend to be longer than in other ones. In contrast, the 44 scenes analyzed from the much shorter Fools Rush In (40 of which appear in this chart) constitute almost every scene of that movie. A comparison of the 16 movies shows a large amount of intertextual variation. The mixed scenes are the only category which is always present, whereas one movie has no EL only scenes, and as many as five contain no OL only scenes. The absence of EL only scenes in Saving Private Ryan is explained by the fact that the OL1 (German, French and Czech) characters in this World War II movie do not generally know any English, which results in patterns of mutual divergence in most exolingual settings. Then, in the five movies with no OL only scenes, the OL1 characters are simply never shown on their own. In Braveheart, Princess Isabelle is always either accompanied by her English husband or father-in-law, or by the Scottish protagonist William Wallace. Likewise, the French characters in Sabrina and Frantic are only shown together with the EL1 protagonists. The same narrative patterns <?page no="169"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 155 explain why in a further set of five movies (The Bourne Identity, Elizabeth, Fools Rush In, Green Card and Saving Private Ryan), there are only very few and typically marginal OL only scenes. For instance, there is a short conversation among Italian sailors in the opening scene of The Bourne Identity, which remains incomprehensible and irrelevant to the viewer. The only exception among these five movies is Fools Rush In, which contains two Spanish-only scenes with longer, and also highly relevant dialogue (see section 7.3, subsection Subtitles below). In contrast, six movies contain a more significant number of ten or more OL only scenes: Behind Enemy Lines, French Kiss, The Peacemaker, The Sum of All Fears and especially Traffic, the only movie where the majority of all scenes analyzed are OL only scenes. The high number of endolingual Spanish-only scenes in Traffic is due to the existence of one largely discrete storyline that takes place mainly in Mexico, and complements three parallel storylines set in the US that share the common theme of drug trade and consumption. Other narrative motivations for EL1 characters to be absent from at least one storyline is when they pursue OL1 characters (The Peacemaker) but catch them only towards the end of the movie, or, in turn, are hunted by them (Behind Enemy Lines). Sometimes, EL1 and OL1 characters have similar aims but employ different strategies to achieve them (Red Heat), whereas in French Kiss, much comedy arises from the EL1 protagonists’ ignorance about what the OL1 characters are really up to. Now, it is useful to compare the proportion of EL only and mixed scenes. While the former are more numerous in eight of the sixteen movies, the inverse pattern can be discerned in the other half of the corpus. Two major explanations can be found for the importance of EL only scenes. On the one hand, they are numerous in movies which also have few or no OL only scenes, such as Just Married or Sabrina: these are simply movies with comparatively little dialogue in other languages. A second reason is exemplified by the two movies Behind Enemy Lines and Red Heat: there, the other languages are mainly used in OL only scenes, whereas the protagonists’ monolingualism (see chapter 6, table 15 above) results in sparse opportunities for multilingual dialogue despite the high number (especially in Red Heat) of exolingual scenes. In general however, the linguistic repertoires of the protagonists are a poor predictor of the amount of language mixing. Movies with highly multilingual protagonists and many mixed scenes (Elizabeth, The Peacemaker) are contrasted by those where there are more EL only scenes although the characters’ repertoires are similarly multilingual (Braveheart, The Bourne Identity). Moreover, a high proportion of mixed scenes appear in Frantic, French Kiss and Just Married, despite the fact that three <?page no="170"?> 156 Chapter 7: Language choice Table 18: Average of turns in three categories of scenes Movie Turns in EL only scenes (average) EL turns in mixed scenes (average) Mixed turns in mixed scenes (average) OL turns in mixed scenes (average) Turns in mixed scenes* (average) Turns in OL only scenes Turns in all scenes (average) Behind Enemy Lines 5.7 9.9 0.3 3 13.1 5.1 7.3 The Bourne Identity 7.4 11.8 0.6 2.7 14.5 2.3 8.8 Braveheart 10 7.5 0.3 3 10.8 0 11.1 Elizabeth 11.9 6.9 1 1.5 9.3 1 9 Fools Rush In 14.5 19.9 0.4 2.2 22.4 9.5 16.2 Frantic 11.4 18.5 1.1 4.2 23.7 0 19.9 French Kiss 7.4 13.5 1.3 3.3 18.1 4.4 13.3 Green Card 13.1 26 1.1 1.9 29.0 2 18.8 The Jackal 8.6 11.4 0.6 3.2 15.2 0 9.6 Just Married 12 11.3 1 2.3 14.6 0 13.2 The Peacemaker 15.8 18.3 0.8 1.7 20.8 5.4 13.2 Red Heat 11.2 11.5 0.3 1.3 13 4.5 10.2 Sabrina 5.3 4.5 1.3 1.7 7.5 0 6.1 Saving Private Ryan 0 15.8 0.3 3.2 19.3 4 15.9 The Sum of All Fears 7 13 0.5 5.8 19.2 5.6 11.1 Traffic 11.3 10.4 0.9 0.5 11.8 6.5 7.6 All movies 10.4 14.8 0.8 2.9 18.5 5.4 12.3 * Sum of three previous columns <?page no="171"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 157 out of four EL1 protagonists in these movies do not understand the other language. In French Kiss and Just Married, this pattern is sometimes used for humorous effects, while it creates an atmosphere of alienation in Frantic, or even violence in Saving Private Ryan. While the overall picture is reasonably complex, the one possible generalization is that in the genre of comedy, there is a preference for mixed scenes and - apart from French Kiss - an overall avoidance of OL only scenes. Thus, filmmakers refrain from showing fun in other languages, and exploit the conventional comicality of language mixing instead. In a next step, the number of scenes pertaining to different categories of language choice is compared to their average length in speaker turns. Table 18 compares the average length of EL only scenes, mixed scenes (with three different possible turns), and OL only scenes. First, a look at the far right column shows considerable differences in the average length of scenes of different movies. While the thriller Frantic is characterized by the highest average of turns per scene in the corpus, the comedies have typically higher averages than most action movies, the exception being Sabrina (a movie of which, however, relatively few scenes qualified for this analysis). Then, the bottom row confirms the earlier observations concerning the unequal amount of dialogue in different languages: OL only scenes (5.4 turns) contain fewer than half as many turns than an average scene (12.3 turns), a bit more than half as many turns as EL only scenes, and less than a third than mixed scenes (18.5 turns). Within this last category, the disproportion is even more striking: fewer than every sixth turn in a mixed scene is in another language (2.9 turns), and only about every twenty-second turn (0.8 turns) contains a code-switch between English and another language. Which movies display a preference for a greater amount of other languages in mixed scenes and in OL only scenes? An interesting paradox is that in movies with high averages of OL turns and mixed turns in mixed scenes, the OL only scenes tend to be shorter or completely absent. In contrast, movies with especially long OL only scenes have a smaller number of OL turns in mixed scenes. Some movies have few OL turns in either category of scenes, but only two (French Kiss and The Sum of All Fears) have high averages of OL turns both in mixed scenes and OL only scenes. Thus, four broad types of movie arise from this discussion of global patterns of language choice. The first are the two highly multilingual movies just mentioned. Movies of the second type contain a large number or reasonably long OL scenes, and relatively few mixed scenes and/ or low numbers of OL and mixed turns within mixed scenes. This pattern is apparent in Behind Enemy Lines, Just <?page no="172"?> 158 Chapter 7: Language choice Married, The Peacemaker, Red Heat, and Traffic, and these movies 33 also show preference for monolingual EL scenes: they contain a lot of English and other languages, but in the form of discrete and monolingual discourse patterns. In the third type, the small number of other languages in OL only scenes is compensated for by their greater prominence in mixed scenes. A paradigmatic example is Frantic, with the second highest average of OL turns in mixed scenes (4.2 turns), but no OL only scenes whatsoever, and similar patterns can be discerned for Braveheart, The Jackal, Just Married, and Saving Private Ryan. Finally, movies with little OL dialogue in either category of scenes are The Bourne Identity, Elizabeth, Green Card and Sabrina. In a nutshell, languages other than English are either prominent in monolingual settings, or as a side-dish to English in multilingual settings, but rarely in both. In either case, there is a high price to pay for the presence of languages other than English, which explains the large imbalance between EL and OL turns mentioned above. The way in which English and other languages receive unequal treatment is discussed further in the next three subsections, which look at how the patterns of language choice relate to the setting, activity and mood of the individual scenes. Setting and language choice The category of setting comprises two pieces of information: the country where the scene takes place and their local setting, defined as the characters’ immediate surroundings. Table 19 presents the number of scenes per country: Table 19: Settings of movie scenes per country Country Number of scenes In number of movies USA 206 12 Canada 10 2 Britain 34 2 Total EL1 countries 250 15 33 In the case of Fools Rush In, the strikingly high average of 9.5 OL turns per OL only scene is based on two scenes only, as can be gained from chart 7. <?page no="173"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 159 France 164 7 Russia and former USSR 39 4 Mexico 38 2 Bosnia 28 2 Italy 20 2 Germany, Austria and Switzerland 17 4 Other 9 4 Total OL1 countries 315 16 Russia and former USSR + US 11 2 Bosnia + US 5 2 Canada + France 2 1 Other 4 3 Total 2 different countries 22 7 Total 587 16 The geographical settings of the movie scenes reflect my choice of movies with language contact stories and the focus on major European languages: 315 or a bit more than half of all scenes are located in a country where English is not the dominant language. 250 scenes are set in English-speaking countries (the US 34 , Canada and Britain), and 22 scenes depict simultaneous interactions in two different countries. Saving Private Ryan is the only movie where all of the scenes selected take place outside an English-speaking country. US or Canadian settings appear in 13 of the remaining 15 movies, while two (Braveheart and Elizabeth) are almost exclusively set in Britain. Ten movies are set in only one or two different countries, while three or more appear in the remaining six. The two spy thrillers The Peacemaker and The Sum of All Fears are the most international with five countries each, including Russia, the US, Austria, Bosnia, Dagestan, Syria, and the Ukraine. Finally, an Englishspeaking country appears in most scenes set in two different countries, the typical pattern being an American character in the US communicating, on the phone or a similar device, with somebody in Russia or in Bosnia. 34 US settings include scenes which are set in places where US jurisdiction applies, such as inside American embassies and on US warships. <?page no="174"?> 160 Chapter 7: Language choice The places where the scenes are set differ: larger cities dominate in the case of the US and the better-known European countries, while more rural settings are typical for Mexico, Russia and Bosnia. About two thirds of all scenes set in France show Paris, while the movie French Kiss also features Cannes as a major setting. In Austria, all but one scene are set in Vienna, and all Swiss scenes in The Bourne Identity show Zurich. However, of the 39 scenes set in Russia and the former USSR, only 18 take place in Moscow, and no other city or even village appears in the remaining scenes. The Bosnian cities Pale and Sarajevo are featured in The Peacemaker, while in Behind Enemy Lines, most scenes are set outside inhabited areas. The Italian scenes take place either in or around Venice (Fools Rush In) or on a sailing boat off Northern Italy (The Bourne Identity), and the Canadian settings mainly include Toronto and Montreal. The two British movies mainly feature the English and Scottish courts, as well as a number of Northern English and Scottish towns (York and Edinburgh in Braveheart). Mexican settings are Tijuana and Mexico City in Traffic and some more rural locations in Central Mexico (Fools Rush In). Finally, US settings are almost exclusively cities. The capital Washington DC appears prominently in The Sum of All Fears, The Jackal, and The Peacemaker, while New York is depicted in Green Card and Sabrina. Californian cities are featured in Traffic (San Diego) and Just Married (Beverly Hills), Las Vegas appears in Fools Rush In, and Red Heat is set in Chicago. The exceptionally less metropolitan settings include a house scenically located somewhere on the East Coast in The Jackal, the Larraby’s impressive Long Island mansion in Sabrina, and the Hoover Dam, a key site of Fools Rush In. Which global patterns of language choice are dominant in which settings? Chart 8 shows a break-up of EL only scenes, mixed scenes, and OL only scenes by the countries where the scenes are set: EL1 countries, OL1 countries, and scenes taking place simultaneously in two different countries (see Chart 8). These data show that there is a fairly strict relationship between the official languages (English or other) of the countries and the global patterns of language choice. Two thirds of all scenes set on English-speaking territory are held monolingually in English (153). In contrast, OL only scenes and mixed scenes dominate outside the English-speaking countries. Crucially, none of the scenes with a binational setting qualifies as an OL only scene: the dialogue is always at least partly in English. Thus, international communication only held in other languages is not an option depicted in any of these movies. The rarity of monolingual use of other languages in English-dominant countries is best illustrated by the comedy Fools Rush In. In this movie, the young Mexican-American protagonist Isabel Fuentes, much like the members <?page no="175"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 161 of her family and social network, is strongly committed to her Mexican heritage; in addition she is equally well integrated into American society. However, the only occasions where Isabel engages in a Spanish conversation of more than two turns are in scenes set in Central Mexico, in the village where her great-grandmother lives. In Las Vegas, she uses English as the unmarked choice with her ex-boyfriend Chuy as well as her parents. Likewise, the latter generally speak English, except for terms of address such as hija ‘daughter’ or culture-specific expressions like Cinco de Mayo (‘the fifth of May’, a Mexican national holiday). The only Mexican Americans who are not shown using English are two elderly aunts at a family dinner. In general, the romantic comedy Fools Rush In depicts Mexican Americans in an empathetic and diverse way, and pokes equal but mild fun at aspects of both Hispanic culture and the male protagonist’s East Coast Anglo-Protestant background. Yet, this intercultural balance is not reflected in its depiction of Spanish use in the US: Spanish is not granted the status of a normal language of interaction among Mexican Americans; moreover, it is reduced to a mere additional linguistic resource, to which its speakers resort mainly in the state of emotional agitation. Patterns of intensive code-switching (code-mixing; see chapter 2, Code-switching above) - in reality nothing unusual in many Hispanic American communities - is not depicted as a part of these characters’ linguistic behaviour. In a next step, I consider the category of local setting, which accounts for the immediate environment in which the scene takes place: for instance at Chart 8: Countries and categories of language choice <?page no="176"?> 162 Chapter 7: Language choice home, in a hotel, or in the countryside. Table 20 lists the eleven most frequent local settings, all of which form the background of at least 20 scenes, and the number of scenes in which they appear. Table 20: Local setting of movie scenes Setting of scene Scenes At home 111 Street, road, etc. 100 Car, plane, train, etc. 60 Command centre (political, military, police HQ, etc.) 57 Countryside 46 Battlefield, military barracks, etc. 41 Restaurant, bar, night club, etc. 39 Hotel room 28 Shop, counter, etc. 28 Workplace (office, factory, etc.) 23 Airport, railway station, etc. 22 Other 32 Total 587 In a corpus of scenes where language contact is mainly caused by different forms of mobility, it is perhaps surprising that the most frequent local setting is a character’s home. In fact, the number is mainly due to the genre of comedy: 69 of the 111 home scenes are from the six comedies, in particular from Green Card (where the protagonist’s apartment plays an important role in the story) and from Sabrina. In the other categories, the importance of tourism (in hotel rooms, at counters and at airports), but also of conflicts (in command centres, on battlefields) becomes more apparent. More ordinary settings outside people’s homes are rarer; examples include workplaces such as a fashion agency in Sabrina, an insurance company in The Bourne Identity, or a building site in Fools Rush In. However, the activities shown in everyday settings are often different (and more sinister) than those usually associated with these places. Only one of five scenes set in a school actually <?page no="177"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 163 depicts an ongoing lesson, and religious activities are eclipsed in seven of ten scenes set in or around churches (both of which settings are included under ‘Other’). Chart 9 illustrates how the three dominant patterns of language choice map onto the eleven most prominent local settings of movie scenes in the corpus. Chart 9: Local settings and categories of language choice For OL only scenes, the preferred local settings are in the countryside, different means of transport, and especially military settings: there, the OL only scenes even outnumber the other two categories of language choice. Thus, other languages are typically used outside buildings, and also in settings associated with mobility and conflict, but more rarely in prestigious settings. Conversely, OL only scenes are rare in the largest overall category, people’s homes; merely two OL only scenes depict a workplace, and none is set at an airport or railway station, nor at a counter or in a shop. Except for the latter setting, where mixed scenes are prominent, it is the EL only scenes which dominate in these categories: wherever money is being earned, or spent on goods or services, the English language is most certainly present. The possibility of business in other languages is erased, and the command centres, preferred settings in action thrillers, are the only prestigious setting where the OL only scenes are not completely backgrounded. <?page no="178"?> 164 Chapter 7: Language choice Activity and language choice As the above discussion of settings has shown, there is no straightforward relationship between the physical settings and the activities exercised by the characters. Therefore, it is necessary to consider these activities as well. As with table 20 above, only activities which inform at least 20 scenes are considered: Table 21: Main activity of movie scenes Activity Scenes Police and crime 176 Military and politics 124 Family, friendship and love relations 107 Casual encounters, small talk 71 Service encounters 49 Business and work 35 Other 25 Total 587 The top two categories account for more than half of the scenes in the corpus, which illustrates the high importance of conflicts in the stories depicted. The third category, which covers a bit less than a fifth of all scenes, is obviously less violent in nature, but complete harmony is rare. In three of the five romantic comedies, the couples only really get together at the very end of the movie (Green Card, Sabrina and French Kiss). In contrast, they get married early in Fools Rush In and (as to be expected) Just Married, but are shown arguing rather more often than in agreement. Likewise, the intricacies of the espionage plot in The Bourne Identity leaves the protagonist couple little time for romance. The next category, casual encounters and small talk, covers activities such as dinner parties, visits from friends and relatives, but also coincidental encounters in public. Then, service encounters clearly outnumber more mundane occupational activities (business and work) due to the prominence of tourist narratives. The final category contains contexts of education, religion, and a few others. Chart 10 illustrates the interrelation of activities and categories of language choice: <?page no="179"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 165 Chart 10: Main activities and categories of language choice The general picture is that the EL only scenes and the mixed scenes show a more even distribution than the OL only scenes: these two patterns of language choice appear a viable option for any kind of activity, whereas in four out of six categories, the OL only scenes are clearly underrepresented. In contrast, this is not the case for the top two activities associated with conflict and its prevention (police and crime, military and politics). Crucially, these two categories account for 73 (40 + 33) or almost four out of five OL only scenes. Then, the EL only scenes are dominant among the categories of friendship, love, and casual small talk. These activities are only rarely performed in other languages: although there is no lack of exolingual friendship or love relations in the movies, they take place partly or wholly English, while similar scenes are rare among the OL only scenes, where the characters’ familial and social networks are in general eclipsed. A further observation is that for the mixed scenes, service encounters are the most important category, a result which reflects the dominance of mixed scenes in the setting categories of shops and counters, but also hotel rooms (customers talking to hotel personnel) in chart 9 above. <?page no="180"?> 166 Chapter 7: Language choice Mood and language choice The third category considered is the overall mood of the scenes. Here, a distinction is made between a positive or neutral mood on the one hand, and a negative mood on the other. The first category can be exemplified by a scene from Traffic, set in a swimming pool in Southern California, and depicting the protagonist Javier Rodriguez, a Mexican police officer, negotiating the terms of his collaboration with the two DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents Hughes and Johnson. Agent Hughes is trying to find out whether Rodriguez’s aim is to receive bribes from the Americans for helping them to fight the Mexican drug cartels, but as it turns out, Rodriguez has less egoistic motives in mind: Excerpt 32 (Traffic, 1 16 33 - 1 17 22) (…) Hughes Is that what you’re talking about Javier? Getting paid? Rodriguez (shakes head) You like baseball? Johnson Claro. Rodriguez We need lights for the parks, so kids can play at night. So it’s safe. So they can play baseball. So they no become burros para los malones. Everybody like baseball. Everybody likes parks. Listen. I believe it’s important that the United State take an interest in Tijuana now. That’s what I’m talking about, my friends. (‘donkeys for the bad guys’; i. e. errand boys for the drug criminals) The police officers in this scene have no reason to be overly friendly to each other, since it is one of their first meetings, and they do not seem to fully trust each other. Still, they interact in a civil and non-aggressive way, and the overall positive mood of the scene is reflected in their mutual convergence. Rodriguez talks English to his Californian interlocutors, while Johnson (who is depicted as a balanced Spanish-English bilingual) converges to Rodriguez by answering him in Spanish. The positive outcome of this conversation is shown in the very last scene in Traffic, where Rodriguez oversees a game of baseball on a newly built field in Tijuana. As a counter-example, there is a visibly negative mood in a scene from Behind Enemy Lines, which also portrays an instance of international cooperation. On a US Navy aircraft carrier, Admiral Leslie Reigart argues with his NATO superior, the French Admiral Piquet, about how best to assist the protagonist, Lieutenant Chris Burnett, a Navy pilot shot down by <?page no="181"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 167 Serbian militia in an unsafe part of Bosnia. Piquet has repeatedly refused Reigart the authorization for a rescue mission, and Reigart’s response was to contact an embedded news reporter who made the affair public. In the heated conversation, Reigart’s and Piquet’s disagreement about the nature of NATO cooperation for peacekeeping in the mid-1990s becomes apparent: Excerpt 33 (Behind Enemy Lines, 0 50 58 - 01 51 55) (…) Reigart You brought him on my boat. His press report is accurate. Our man is down behind enemy lines. (shouts) Now what the fuck is the problem here? Piquet (shouts) Do you have any idea how much damage this incident may cause to the peace process? Reigart All I know Admiral is that the American people want their pilot back. Piquet Exactly. Americans. All you care about is your own damn pilots. What happens when the fighting starts again? Will America recommit its forces to stop a major war? No. You don’t have any control over that little detail, do you. You might have helped save your man today, Reigart. And I emphasize ‘might’. But you risk the lives of thousands tomorrow. For the American admiral, the first priority is to save his pilot, while his French counterpart urges him not to endanger the peace process with rash action. The conflict becomes clear from the content of the speakers’ utterances, but also their raised voices and use of swearwords. On a larger scale, the conversation reflects a wide range of touchy political issues, including Europe’s dependence on, and simultaneous scepticism towards the deployment of US military force on the continent as elsewhere. It is clear that conversations like this one are nothing unusual in movies; rather, they are more frequent than the neutral or positive ones exemplified above, as illustrated by table 22: Table 22: Mood of movie scenes Mood Scenes Positive or neutral 258 Negative 329 Total 587 <?page no="182"?> 168 Chapter 7: Language choice A majority of 329 scenes qualifies as negative in mood, as opposed to only 258 where the mood is positive or at least neutral. However, the ratio of positive versus negative changes significantly if different categories of language choice are compared, as chart 11 shows: Chart 11: Mood and categories of language choice The fact that there are more scenes with a negative mood in total (329) is reflected only among two categories of language choice: the ones which contain dialogue in other languages (134+61). About three out of five mixed scenes (134: 216), and two out of three OL only scenes (61: 93), are negative in mood, and together they form the majority among this category. The EL only scenes are a different case, however, in that they are characterized by a positive or neutral mood in the majority of cases (126). Good vibes are clearly a phenomenon more closely linked to the English language, while negative atmospheres - brutal executions on a battlefield as well as minor disagreements at a hotel reception - are more likely to be teamed with other languages. The last result in this sub-section, as well as the previous ones concerning settings and activities, betray an obvious bias in the depiction of sociolinguistic realities in the movies analyzed. If these patterns do not only hold true for this limited sample of movies, but for representations of multilingualism in general, then the charges of linguicism are certainly valid. <?page no="183"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 169 Minor categories of language choice To conclude this section on global patterns of language choice, it is useful to consider the 26 scenes with a communicative situation that is different from the three major categories (EL only scenes, Mixed scenes, OL only scenes) discussed so far. This small subcorpus falls into two categories: 17 scenes have an endolingual EL1 setting, where other languages are spoken in absence of OL1 characters, and nine scenes depict exolingual interactions of characters with different non-English first languages (compare table 17 above). The use of other languages among EL1 characters includes, for instance, the Latin utterances associated with certain religious activities, such as prayers or services in the movies Braveheart, Elizabeth and Saving Private Ryan. Similarly, the very few Gaelic utterances in Braveheart appear to be strictly context-dependent, and used only for specific speech acts such as the battle cry “Alba go bragh! ” (‘Scotland forever’). Then, as an example of foreign language teaching, the Spanish lesson in Traffic (see chapter 6, Linguistic repertoire above) can be quoted. Finally, some characters use other languages with performative rather than strictly communicative goals; a behaviour which can be linked to the notions of language crossing and language display discussed in chapter 2 above. Examples include excerpt 19 from The Peacemaker quoted above (chapter 6), and the dialogue from Braveheart discussed below (excerpt 44). While both examples include a note of comedy, an especially humoristic instance of language display appears in the following scene from French Kiss, where the Canadian physician Charlie enthusiastically describes his stay in Paris to Kate, his American fiancée left behind at their home in Canada, and watching television when the phone rings: Excerpt 34 (French Kiss, 0 06 20 - 0 06 47) Kate (answering phone) Hi, right on time, saved me from the news. Charlie Bonsoir chérie. (‘Good evening darling’) Kate Hey, hi, how’s it going? Charlie Ah good, it’s just one conference after another. But this city, it’s amazing Kate, it’s so beautiful, it just casts a spell. Kate Huh. How was dinner? Charlie Hm! They used this sauce, it had a taste I’ve never experienced. C’est er incroyable. (‘It’s unbelievable’) Kate Oh Charlie, the sauces have to be incroyable to cover up the horse meat. I saw this segment on ‘Sixty Minutes’. <?page no="184"?> 170 Chapter 7: Language choice Charlie Hon you keep watching all those shows you watch, you won’t be able to leave the house. As becomes clear later on in the movie, Charlie does not actually know French, but he enjoys using some short phrases to emphasize his francophilia, and also to make Kate feel guilty for not having accompanied him to France. Shortly afterwards, Charlie leaves Kate for a French woman, and he only realizes too late that his new girlfriend’s advantages over Kate are merely of the superficial kind. All too expressively, Charlie’s code-switch into French mirrors his faddishness, and contrasts his character with Kate’s, whose sarcastic echoing of the adjective incroyable (‘unbelievable’) comes across as witty and acute, and underlines (in this utterance) her francophobia, a recurring source of comedy in the movie. In sum, the use of other languages among EL1 characters is either strictly motivated by contextual factors, or performative and potentially humorous, while a real communicative necessity cannot be pinpointed. Not surprisingly, the quantity of other languages in these scenes is very small; only about every seventh turn in these scenes is in another language. Table 23 compares the average number of different turns per scene for the two minor categories of language choice: Table 23: Average number of turns in endolingual EL scenes and exolingual OL scenes EL turns (average) OL turns (average) Mixed turns (average) Total turns (average) Endolingual EL scenes 7.5 1.2 0.4 9.1 Exolingual OL scenes 2.9 2.8 1 6.7 The bottom row shows that in scenes where no EL1 characters are present, the English language is just as often used as the other languages (2.9 turns on average as opposed to 2.8). Criminal or terrorist characters appear in all of the nine scenes, and only one of them contains no English dialogue. The first example of an exolingual OL scene is from The Peacemaker, where Aleksandr Kodoroff, a corrupt and despicable Russian army general, meets the Serbian terrorist Vlado Mirich, for whom he has stolen a nuclear bomb. When paying Kodoroff, Mirich angrily asks Kodoroff why he let another bomb of the same set explode in a rural area in Russia. Kodoroff condescendingly discards Mirich’s fear that the explosion compromises their escape: <?page no="185"?> 7.2 Global patterns of language choice 171 Excerpt 35 (The Peacemaker, 0 21 45 - 0 22 20) (…) Mirich Teper’ oni zablokirujut ves’ dorog. They’ll have the roads blocked. Kodoroff Your Russian is awful. Speak English. (to soldiers, handing them money) Xėj, peredaj rebjatam. (‘Hey, distribute this to the kids! ’) Mirich It was stupid, understand? Kodoroff Your friends made this deal, but this is my operation. Don’t make me start thinking of why I don’t need you. Mirich They will never let us through. Kodoroff Ha, of course they will. Section 21 A, Nuclear Disaster Protocol. One, secure area. Two, control debris. Three, evacuate casualties. (to soldiers). Bratcy, kak tam? Huh? (‘Brothers, how is it going’) Mirich Ėto glupo. (‘It’s stupid’) Their interaction starts in Russian, Kodoroff ’s L1 and a common second language in pre-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, but the Russian general aggressively urges his interlocutor to switch into English. As a reason, he draws Mirich’s attention to a blunder in the Serb’s L2 use of the Russian language. Mirich has confused the grammatical gender of the feminine Russian noun doroga (‘road’), and created a false masculine equivalent 35 dorog, which Kodoroff, with unnecessary exaggeration, calls “awful” Russian. Moreover, by ordering Mirich to speak English, he also indirectly excludes him from the company of the other Russians present, whom Kodoroff continues to address in Russian. Unwillingly, Mirich accepts Kodoroff ’s choice of English as a lingua franca, but at the same time, he openly disagrees with Kodoroff by calling his tactics “stupid”, and by repeating this very attribute at the end of the interaction - in Russian again. Quite clearly, this convergence to Kodoroff ’s L1 is in no way a strategy of politeness, but an act of defiance. The motivations of code-switching are much less clear in the following scene from The Sum of All Fears, which depicts a meeting of elite neo-fascists from different countries planning an evil act of terrorism against the US. The neo-fascists’ meeting in Vienna is chaired by their leader, the Austrian Wolfgang Dressler, whose plans are uncontested by all present except one. Monsieur Monceau, an elderly L1 speaker of French, tries to convince his 35 In Russian, nouns ending in -a are typically feminine, while masculine nouns generally end in consonants. Consistently, however, Mirich inflects the (slightly irregular) adjective ves’ (‘whole’) for its masculine singular form. <?page no="186"?> 172 Chapter 7: Language choice interlocutors of a less violent method of approach, but both Dressler and his subordinate, Herr Haft, insist on going ahead as they intend: Excerpt 36 (The Sum of All Fears, 0 41 18 - 0 43 05) (…) Monceau Je vous prie de m’excuser, but so much has changed. Perhaps the new situation suggests we consider a different approach? Maybe try to bring Russia more into Europe, more into our way of thinking? (‘I beg your pardon’) Dressler We have discussed that, Monsieur Monceau, and with your concurrence, rejected it. Monceau Oh perhaps we were hasty, perhaps our plan is er - Dressler Is what? Monceau Oh, not perfectly conceived. Haft Bist du verrückt? Auf der ganzen Welt arbeiten rechtsradikale Parteien, nationalistische Bewegungen, Nazis, Aryan Nations, zum ersten Mal alle zusammen, das ist doch perfekt. Are you crazy? All over the world, right-wing parties, nationalist movements, nazis, aryan nations, all working together for the first time. Is that not perfect? Monceau Well I respect the will and judgment of my friends but i-in the light of the week’s events I am grown uncomfortable with this plan so I must beg your leave. Gentlemen. Dressler Herr Haft will help you out. Haft Your scarf Monsieur. Most of the conversation takes place in English, which all characters master well as an L2, with a reasonably idiomatic vocabulary and no obvious grammatical mistakes. Still, there is a kind of exaggerated indirectness and formality both in the speech of Monceau and Dressler, in expressions such as “consider a different approach”, “with your concurrence”, or “not perfectly conceived”. Monceau’s stiltedness permits the viewer to consider him a mere weakling rather than a character with a real moral dilemma, and Dressler’s evilness is mirrored in his euphemistic use of “help you out”: just as his Nazi predecessors used the term Endlösung (‘final solution’) for the Holocaust genocide, helping someone out means ‘to kill’ in Dressler’s code. Further, Monceau and Haft are obviously L1 speakers of French and German respectively, but in the situation depicted, there is no apparent pragmatic motivation for either of them to switch into their L1. It is especially unclear why <?page no="187"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 173 Haft addresses Monceau in German in the first place, and also if Monceau is supposed to understand him, because the French speaker does not take direct issue with Haft’s pathetic enthusiasm about the bright future of neo-fascism. The characters’ code-switching seems uniquely motivated by the narrative technique of characterization: in a clumsily indexical way, it merely marks them as speakers of other languages. The general impression is one of persons who use English fluently, but abuse it because their purposes are wrong, and who switch into their first languages to underline the foreignness of their L2 accents. The alternation of accented English and European languages is nowadays a common phenomenon in many formal settings in Europe, but in the movie, it is a pattern that generates feelings of intense unease. This is true for the nine scenes in general, and as such, they sharply contrast with the 16 discussed above. Clearly, a sense of an unequal treatment of English and other languages pervades most findings discussed in this section on global patterns of language choice. In the next section, the focus is exclusively on the other languages, and specifically on how the content expressed in them is made comprehensible to the viewer. If the other languages are represented as so much less relevant than English, does this result in an overall reluctance to make the content comprehensible at all? 7.3 Comprehensibility This section is concerned with the dilemma or “conundrum” (Kozloff 2000: 80) faced by any filmmaker who opts for the strategy of presence, namely that dialogue in other languages comes at the cost of potential incomprehensibility. Mainstream movies address large worldwide audiences, rather than specific groups of viewers who can be expected to understand one or more of the other languages (see section 4.4 above). The main linguistic strategies used to cater for the presence of other languages are subtitles, interpreting, and the use of cognates or other easily understandable words and expressions. In some cases, however, the audience is clearly denied an understanding of what certain characters say. Table 24 shows an overview of how frequently the strategies are used in the 349 scenes that contain dialogue in another language. The first three strategies are sometimes combined within the same scene, whereas the category ‘None’ only contains scenes where no strategy accompanies any OL or mixed turn. <?page no="188"?> 174 Chapter 7: Language choice Table 24: Comprehensibility strategies in scenes with OL dialogue Strategy Number of scenes OL turns (average) Subtitles 145 5.2 Cognates and well-known words 112 1.7 None 63 2.3 Interpreting 46 3.9 Total scenes 349 3.4 The data show that subtitles are the dominant strategy in the overall corpus, followed by turns containing or consisting of cognates and similar words. As many as 63 scenes contain OL turns that are not made comprehensible by any linguistic means, and interpreting is the least often used strategy. While subtitles and interpreting cater for scenes with a relatively high number of OL turns, and the average of OL turns in incomprehensible scenes is still above 2, the category of cognates and well-known words displays the lowest average. In the following, these categories are further discussed and exemplified. Subtitles Subtitles are written translations of the characters’ turns that are superimposed on the frame, usually near its bottom end, for the viewer to listen to the other language and to understand by reading the translation simultaneously 36 . In general, the sociolinguistic advantages of a wide-spread use of subtitles (as an alternative to dubbing) lie in higher degrees of literacy, and also foreign 36 Gottlieb (1998: 247) distinguishes between open (“not optional”) subtitles, and closed subtitles, where viewers can decide whether to activate them or not. The latter case includes the subtitles for deaf or hearing impaired viewers that certain television channels offer for their programmes. Commercial DVDs often differ with respect to the variety of subtitles in different languages offered. In some movies (for instance Braveheart), the open subtitles are an integral part of the frames, so that in any dubbed versions of the movies, the French and Latin turns are accompanied by English subtitles as well as by subtitles in the target language. In other cases the viewer has to select a subtitle track which contains the subtitles for all dialogue (that is, also the English turns) to be offered a translation of the scenes containing OL dialogue. Some DVDs feature a separate subtitle track that leaves any English dialogue unsubtitled, and only provides translations of OL turns where it is deemed necessary. Interestingly, some subtitles even contain a simple transcription of OL dialogue instead of a translation. A general pattern is that if the original cinema version does not provide subtitles for scenes with OL dialogue, these are unlikely to be added in the production process of the DVD. <?page no="189"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 175 language competence, as the case of countries such as the Netherlands or Denmark shows (see Luyken 1991: 116 f; Gottlieb 2004: 87 ff ). Adding English subtitles to the OL dialogue is the strategy which comes closest to replacement, in that subtitles are a strong form of narrative intervention: they are added to the cinematic text for the benefit of the viewer only and have no reality for the characters within the story. Moreover, Gottlieb (2004: 86) challenges the common view that subtitles are a more authentic strategy than dubbing, because their use involves a change from the spoken to a written medium 37 . This change also typically results in a quantitative reduction of the original dialogue, because there are clear limits to the amount of written language that can appear on screen (see Gottlieb 1998: 247). Ideally, subtitles must neither appear earlier that the spoken utterances they translate, nor should they lag behind them. A likely outcome is that subtitles are also linguistically less complex than the original, which carries the potential of a distorted representation of the other language. In the following analysis of an excerpt from Braveheart, I test this claim with a concrete example from my corpus. The excerpt contains one long turn in L1 French, spoken by Nicolette, the Princess of Wales’s maidservant. Nicolette is an attractive young woman with an exceptional talent for overhearing vital information that is eminently useful to the Princess (and eventually to the protagonist, William Wallace, himself; see also footnote 24). In the scene at hand, Wallace himself is the subject of Nicolette’s talk: her description of the Scottish rebel’s heroic deeds arouses the Princess’s interest in the man who, so far, is her enemy as well her husband’s and her father-inlaw’s. In table 25, the spoken French version on the left is contrasted with the written translation in the English subtitles in the right column; Nicolette’s turn is divided into individual sentences to facilitate a comparison of the two versions. Table 25: A French dialogue and its English subtitles in comparison (Braveheart, 1 03 46 - 1 04 34) French dialogue English subtitles Ah, j’oubliais. Un magistrat qui voulait le capturer découvrit qu’il avait un amour secret. Il égorgea la fille afin de pousser Wallace à la révolte. I nearly forgot. A magistrate wished to capture him, and found he had a secret lover. So he cut the girl’s throat to tempt Wallace to fight … 37 Except of course in cases where subtitles gloss over OL writing; see the example from The Pianist in chapter 5, Linguistic landscape above. <?page no="190"?> 176 Chapter 7: Language choice Wallace se révolta. Ses ennemis reconnurent sa passion pour son amour perdu, alors, ils organisèrent de saisir Wallace en profanant les sépultures et de son père et de son frère, et ensuite en s’embusquant à la tombe de sa femme. Mais il s’en est sorti en guerroyant l’arme au poing et cacha le cadavre de son bien-aimée dans un endroit secret. Ça c’est de l’amour, non ? and fight he did. Knowing his passion for his lost love, they next plotted to take him by desecrating the graves of his father and brother and setting an ambush at the grave of his love. He fought his way through the trap and carried her body to a secret place. Now that’s love, no? In terms of pronunciation, grammar and lexis, Nicolette speaks Modern French rather than a medieval or otherwise archaized variety. The one striking feature, however, is her oral use of the passé simple in verbs forms such as “il découvrit” (‘he discovered) and “il égorgea” (‘he cut her throat’). The French passé simple is a synthetic past tense characterized by inflectional endings, much like its historical predecessor, the Latin perfect tense. In modern spoken French, the passé simplé is practically absent, and the analytic passé composé is used instead (which combines, like the English perfect aspect, an auxiliary and the past participle). In Nicolette’s utterance however, there is only one instance of a passé composé, “il s’en est sorti” (‘he escaped’). For viewers who know French, the use of the passé simple in this scene not only evokes a historical variety of French, but also results in a style of literary narration. This impression is confirmed by further linguistic features of the French text: Nicolette liberally coordinates and conjoins main clauses, subsidiary clauses (there are two, for instance, in the second sentence) and participle clauses (two of which appear in the long fifth sentence). A special case in point is her use of the Latinate conjunction “et … et …” (‘as well as’) in the phrase “la tombe et de son père et de son frère” (‘his father’s as well as his brother’s grave’), instead of its less marked equivalent “aussi bien que” (‘as well as’), or even just et (‘and’), as in the English subtitle. Clearly, Nicolette’s turn is quite a challenge to subtitle. However, a comparison of the English subtitles with the French original shows how the amount of text is reduced mainly through the use of shorter equivalent noun phrases, rather than omission or syntactic simplification. The only French phrase that is completely left out is the collocation l’arme au poing (literally, ‘[holding] the weapon in his fist’), while the noun ennemis (‘enemies’) is rendered by the pronoun they, and the long noun phrase “le cadavre de sa bien-aimée” (‘the corpse of his beloved’) is rendered briefly as “her body”. <?page no="191"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 177 Then, the subtitles mirror the French reliance on present participles in the clause “Knowing his passion”, even if in this case the original has a main clause (“Ses ennemis reconnurent …”). A further literary effect is achieved by the fronting of the infinitive in the clause “and fight he did”, which results in a chiastic repetition of fight in the previous clause. Finally, the longest sentence in Nicolette’s turn (“Ses ennemis … de sa femme”) is not segmented into shorter English ones, but rendered as a full sentence as well, in four consecutive subtitles. One of these titles contains a main clause (“they next …”), while the others are participle phrases, in perfect equivalence to the French original. To sum up, this example shows that simplification is not a necessary by-product of subtitles: if they are well edited, they can reproduce both the content and style even in the case of complex passages, so that little to nothing is lost in translation. As the dominant comprehensibility strategy, subtitles are mainly used in OL only scenes. However, they also appear in scenes with exolingual communicative situations, where they sometimes convey more information to the viewer than to those characters who do not understand the other language used. An example of this pattern occurs in a scene towards the end of Fools Rush In. The female protagonist, the Mexican American Isabel, has filed a divorce from her New York husband Alex, and told him that she lost their unborn baby, whose conception predated both their falling in love and their marriage. To reflect on the consequences of her decision, and also to avoid Alex’s attempts to make her change her mind, Isabel leaves the US to visit her great-grandmother (Nanita) in Central Mexico, where she informs her that the miscarriage was a lie: “si el hubiera dado cuenta de qué yo soy embarazada, no se hubiera ido”, which the subtitles correctly render as ‘he never would have left if he knew I was still pregnant’ (1 24 37). In a later scene, Alex actually travels himself to Central Mexico because he expects to find Isabel there, but Nanita has to tell him that she has already returned to Las Vegas: Excerpt 37 (Fools Rush In, 1 32 18 - 1 32 42) (…) Alex Yo me llamo Alex Whitman. Busco Isabel Fuentes. Está aquí? (‘My name is Alex Whitman. I’m looking for Isabel Fuentes. Is she here? ’) Nanita No no está aquí. Se ha ido a casa dar a luz a tu creatura. No, she’s not here. She went home to give birth to your baby. <?page no="192"?> 178 Chapter 7: Language choice Alex Aha I don’t understand that. Nanita A Las Vegas. To Las Vegas. Alex You gotta be kidding. (…) Alex’s first turn in the excerpt, which demonstrates an effort on his part to have learnt some basic Spanish sentences, is not subtitled, but the names and the context of the interaction sufficiently illustrate the content of his request to Isabel’s great-grandmother. Nanita, who does not appear to speak English, answers in Spanish, but the content of her reply remains opaque for Alex, and he remains unaware of Isabel’s ongoing pregnancy. Ironically, Nanita’s aim is to subvert Isabel’s strategy of concealment towards Alex, but since Nanita and Alex do not share a common language, her tactics prove unsuccessful. Still, Alex can obviously understand Nanita’s second turn, and is surprised to learn that his trip to Mexico has been fortuitous. It is only in a later scene, when Alex meets Isabel back in the US, that he realizes that she has not lost the baby, and her surprise and agitation at seeing him again cause her to give birth beside the road that leads over the Hoover Dam. The viewer, however, has enjoyed an informational advantage over Alex all along. Cognates and well-known expressions Five of the sixteen movies analyzed feature no subtitles whatsoever: Green Card, Frantic, Just Married, Sabrina, and Saving Private Ryan. One of the reasons why the OL turns in these movies are still not completely opaque lies in their shortness, and especially in the nature of the OL words and expressions used. Most people know a few potentially stereotypical words and expressions from languages they are otherwise completely unfamiliar with, provided the language is known, at least to some extent, in their culture. Examples include expressions such as inch’Allah (‘if it is God’s will’) in Arabic, za zdorov’e (‘cheers’; lit. ‘to health’) in Russian, or muchas gracias (‘many thanks’) in Spanish. Then, many lexical items are shared by different languages, either as cognates or borrowings with a common source. An early scene in Green Card shows the protagonist Brontë, her boyfriend Phil and two other horticulturalists (Peggy and Harry) ordering dinner at the multicultural ‘All Nations’ restaurant in New York. By pure coincidence, Georges Fauré (legally already Brontë’s husband) works there as a waiter. The two spouses do their best to conceal their surprise, since none of Brontë’s company knows about her marriage of convenience. Still, Georges cannot help placing a mocking comment, as he takes their orders: <?page no="193"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 179 Excerpt 38 (Green Card, 0 11 20 - 0 11 34) (…) Harry Ah, I think I’ll take the fish. Peggy Me too. Georges Fish. Two for the fish. Okay. And er (clearing throat) for mademoiselle, or is it madame? The French word madame poses no problem since it was borrowed into English centuries ago, although its precise meaning in French (‘married woman’; madame is used as a title like Mrs) is not obligatory in its English equivalent. Mademoiselle, the French equivalent of Miss, is slightly more opaque, but it clearly belongs to that part of the French vocabulary which is well-known to many non-speakers of French. Furthermore, the context of the interaction makes it clear that since Georges is addressing Brontë, both words must, in some way or other, refer to a female person, and that Georges is contrasting them. From there, it is only a small step to the correct interpretation: in his injoke, Georges is quibbling about Brontë’s marital status and the fact that none of her friends know that the restaurant guest is in fact married to the waiter. Clearly, there are limits to the number of such lexical items that viewers can be expected to understand, and their list largely matches the words used for the evocation strategy in replacement movies (see chapter 5, section 5.3 above). Typical examples are the equivalents for ‘yes’ (e. g. Spanish si or Russian da) and ‘no’. Other possibilities are greeting formulas (French bonjour ‘hello’), titles (Russian seržant ‘sergeant’), or swearwords (French merde or German Scheisse ‘shit’). Also, the Latin phrases used in well-known religious situations do not require subtitles: no movie glosses the Latin “in nomine patris, filii et spiritus sancti” (‘in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’) from the Lord’s Prayer, nor the prayer “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum” (‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’). For an understanding of the plot, the exact wording of the Latin prayers is seldom relevant; rather, it is the mere fact that the characters are praying which matters. If the context of the interaction - in this case a religious one - is clear enough, even longer utterances do not necessarily prevent the viewer from understanding what is going on. It is only when the interaction departs from a commonly accepted frame that comprehension becomes a problem. This phenomenon is poignantly illustrated in one of several scenes in Frantic where Richard Walker asks French L1 speakers about the whereabouts of his missing wife. Walker enters a flower shop opposite his hotel, where he is served by two salespersons, an elderly man and a younger woman, neither of whom know any English: <?page no="194"?> 180 Chapter 7: Language choice Excerpt 39 (Frantic, 0 21 31 - 0 22 07) Walker Erm, excuse me. Saleswoman Monsieur? Walker Do you speak English? Saleswoman Non, pas du tout. (‘No, not at all.’) Walker Erm. Wait, erm. Just a second please. (shows her a photograph of his wife). Excuse me, I’m I’m looking for this lady. I’m looking ferm (gestures to his eyes). I think she might. Salesman Qu’est-ce que c’est Martine? (‘What’s up, Martine? ’) Saleswoman Je ne sais pas, je comprends pas ce qu’il veut. (‘I don’t know, I don’t understand what he wants.’) Walker Erm I’m looking for my wife erm erm I’m a erm my wife. [ I think she might - ] Salesman [ Ah. ] Vous voulez des fleurs pour votre femme. Pardon. Des roses? (‘Oh, you want flowers for your wife. Excuse me. Roses? ’) Walker No no no it’s. Salesman Non, er non il veut pas de roses. Et [ xxx ] (‘No, no he doesn’t want roses.’) Saleswoman [ Peut-être un bou- ] peut-être un bouquet mélangé. (‘Maybe a boumaybe a mixed bouquet.’) Salesman Oui, oui c’est une bonne xxx - (‘Yes, yes that’s a good …’) Walker (leaves the shop) Walker completely fails to get his point across, because his request is too special to be conveyed in a non-linguistic way. Martine, the woman whom Walker first addresses, does not understand his question, partly because his attempt at pantomime is bound to confuse her. He gestures towards his eyes to translate ‘looking for’, whereas the French equivalent of the English phrasal verb, chercher, is in no way related to any French expressions for ‘seeing’ or ‘looking’. Then, the salesman wrongly assumes that Walker has shown them his wife’s picture to indicate that he wants to buy her flowers. Walker easily realizes this mistake, since the salesman’s question “des roses? ” combines a cognate word with a gesture towards the red flowers, but the salesman remains ignorant of their communicative breakdown. He misinterprets Walker once again when he assumes that the American’s “no” is a request for a different sort of flowers, and before the salespersons decide on the composition of an alternative mixed bouquet, Walker has already given up and left the store without any further comment. <?page no="195"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 181 Incomprehensible dialogue In Frantic as well as in three other movies which lack subtitles, OL dialogue is mainly rendered comprehensible through interpreting, the use of well-known words, and reliance on context. The war movie Saving Private Ryan is a different matter, in that the viewers effectively miss out on certain aspects of the dialogue, unless they have knowledge of German, French and, in one scene, Czech. The interaction in question takes place on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, 6 th June 1944. After a long, gruelling battle, the American troops start to gain the upper hand. While the protagonist Captain Miller reports the status of the battle over the radio, two US servicemen charge a couple of Wehrmacht soldiers who approach them with raised hands and ready to give in. One of them addresses the Americans in an incomprehensible language: Excerpt 40 (Saving Private Ryan, 0 24 01 - 0 24 32) (…) Captain Miller (on radio) Sugar Cane Sugar Charlie Three say again Dog One is open. Send in the dozers I’m waiting [here to tie in my flanks, over.] Czech soldier [Nestřílejte jsem Čech nestřílejte! ] (‘Don’t shoot, I’m Czech, don’t shoot! ’) US soldier 1 What? Czech soldier Nestřílejte! Já jsem nikoho nezabíl! (‘Don’t shoot! I didn’t kill anyone! ’) US soldier 1 What? Czech soldier Já jsem Čech! [Ja jsem xxx] (‘I’m Czech! I …’) US soldier 1 [I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying] (they shoot both Czech soldiers) US soldier 2 What’d he say? What’d he say? US soldier 1 (with mock foreign accent) Look, I washed for supper! The content of the Czech soldier’s turns is obviously lost on the American soldiers, but his intention to surrender is clear even if he seems unable to use any English at all. Still, the Americans shoot them, and their brutal violation of humanitarian principles is paired with an infantilising mock translation of what the killed soldier might have said (“Look, I washed for supper”). In this scene as in the movie in general, the viewer understands the Wehrmacht soldiers’ utterances - whether they are shouted threats, pleas for mercy, or attempts at justification or explanation - as little as the American characters themselves. Moreover, this strategy prevents the audience from appreciating <?page no="196"?> 182 Chapter 7: Language choice an interesting historical detail: it is quite unclear that he is speaking Czech (and not German, or any other language spoken in Nazi-occupied Europe) to begin with. However, the short excerpt fits well with the graphic brutality that characterizes large parts of Saving Private Ryan, especially its beginning sequence. In an effective narrative strategy, the audience is compelled to share the experience of most American (and other) characters in the movie who are, in general, ignorant of their opponents’ languages. Incomprehensible turns are not limited to movies which do not use any subtitles. In scenes with only few turns, a typical pattern is that only selected turns - those which carry narrative importance - are accompanied by subtitles, while other turns, which either contain well-known words or no relevant information, may lack them. An interesting case of selective subtitle use occurs in The Peacemaker, where the incomprehensible turns are longer than usual. The scene depicts a group of three Russian servicemen, a commander and two subordinates, who are in charge of an anti-aircraft base at the Russian border. On their screens, they are notified of the illegal intrusion of three US Army helicopters into Russian airspace. The helicopters are under the command of Colonel Thomas Devoe (the male protagonist), who is desperately chasing a truck containing nuclear arms and was unable to ask for the Russian authorities’ authorization. The beginning of the scene, however, lacks the dramatic mood characteristic of military conflicts: before the Russians see the choppers on their radar, they are shown smoking, drinking tea, and chatting casually: Excerpt 41 (The Peacemaker, 1 08 45 - 1 08 19) Soldier 1 Pomniš’ ėtu staruju šutku, kogda muž s ženoj ležat v posteli, vdrug stuk v dver’, žena govorit: ‘Ax, muž prišël’. Muž xvatajet šmotki i f ’it v okno. Letit i dumaet: ‘A kto že ja? ’ (laughter) (‘Do you remember the old joke, where husband and wife are lying in bed, suddenly someone knocks at the door, and the woman says: ‘Oh, my husband’s come home.’ The husband grabs his clothes and jumps out of the window. While falling, he thinks ‘well who am I then? ’ Soldier 2 U menja byla takaja že situacija. Xm, neopoznannyj ob’’ekt, neopoznannyj ob’’ekt, vy vtorglis’ v vozdušnoe prostranstvo Rossijskoj prinadležnosti. Tovarišč komandir. (‘I was once in a situation like this.’) Unidentified aircraft, you have entered Russian airspace. Identify yourself immediately. Commander … <?page no="197"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 183 US pilot Russian control tower this is Air Force five three seven six two. A flight of three US Air Force helicopters in pursuit of stolen nuclear weapons. Request a weapons-hold status. (…) The long initial turn, where one soldier tells his comrade the joke, is not subtitled, nor is the comrade’s immediate answer. Only after an acoustic alarm begins to sound, and the second soldier reports the appearance of unidentified aircraft on his radar screen, do the subtitles commence and translate the part of his turn addressed to the American helicopters. The viewer can only guess that the beginning of the conversation is casual and funny in key, but its full appreciation is limited to the Russian speakers among the audience - which carries the suggestion that unless we know Russian, we remain excluded from parts of their culture, which might really be a pity. Moreover, the use of the Russian language for content other than barked military commands results in a more inclusive depiction of Russian speakers’ linguistic reality. To show them as human beings who, at certain moments, engage in jocular activities and casual small talk contributes to the less stereotyped and more multifaceted representation that informs The Peacemaker. Interpreting In the case of interpreting, one or more characters in the scene are “handily present to provide a translation” (Kozloff 2000: 80). This strategy presupposes the presence of EL1 characters who do not (but need to) understand what is being said in the other language. Since the translation is offered orally and consecutively, the strategy appears as somewhat less efficient: in general, everything is uttered twice, so that for those viewers who understand the OL, the effect is one of (potentially tedious) repetition. While instances of interpreting are rarer than the other comprehensibility strategies, they are often exploited for specific narrative purposes. As a prime example, a scene from Green Card depicts a recitation of a French poem at an elegant dinner party of well-off New Yorkers, with simultaneous interpreting into English. The party is hosted by the rich and well-educated Mrs Adler, who is a friend of Brontë, the female protagonist. Brontë is a horticulturalist who lives for her plants, her research and her charity projects, which consist in donating plants to poor New York neighbourhoods. Mrs Adler in turn owns many plants herself but hesitates to donate them to Brontë’s charity. Brontë’s French husband Georges is also present at the party, and he wants to make amends for an argument they had in the afternoon (see chapter 6, excerpt 29 above). <?page no="198"?> 184 Chapter 7: Language choice He seizes his opportunity when the party guests ask him (who is introduced as a French composer - a qualification about which Brontë has her doubts) to play the piano. Georges improvises a sad poem as he plays along, and he asks his Francophile host to translate: Excerpt 42 (Green Card, 0 52 20 - 0 53 37) (…) Georges (playing) Would you translate for me madame? Adler Would I - Georges Une fois j’ai entendu le bruit du vent dans les arbres. Adler Once I heard the sound of the wind in the trees, I think that’s it. Georges Une fois j’ai entendu le bruit du rire des enfants. Adler Once I heard the sound of the laughter of children. Georges Et j’ai pleuré à chaud de larmes pour ces arbres perdus. Adler And I wept warm, salty tears for the lost trees. Georges Laissez venir les petits enfants dans les arbres et je leur donnerai de l’espoir, il a dit. Adler Let the little children come unto the tree and I will give them hope, he said. Georges Mais il n’y a plus d’arbres pour ces pauvres enfants perdus. Adler But there are no trees for the poor, lost, poor children. Georges La pourriture est leur jouet. Adler Decay is their toy. Georges La décadence est leur jeu. Adler Despair is their game. Georges Ils n’ont que des ordures à escalader. Adler (with faltering voice) They have only chaos to climb. (…) Mrs Adler’s translations are as polished and idiomatic as Georges’s originals, with minor stylistic license: the attribute salty for the children’s tears is not present in Georges’s original; Adler emphatically repeats the adjective poor in her translation of “pauvres enfants perdus”, and ordures designates ‘litter’ rather than Adler’s more abstract “chaos”. The longer she translates Georges’s sad poem with its clever reference to the Gospel of Matthew (19: 14), the more she is genuinely touched, and their joint performance is enthusiastically applauded by their audience. Georges’s real intention is of course to change Mrs Adler’s mind: after having heard the poem, and translated it herself, she can no longer bear to refuse giving Brontë the plants for her charity. Moreover, Georges’s act of friendship brings the two spouses closer together, <?page no="199"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 185 and he can compensate for his precarious status as an alien in the US by fully exploiting the prestigious connotations of his L1 in this specific context. For the viewer, an understanding of the lyrics is accompanied by an opportunity to appreciate them in the French ‘original’: in sum, the use of the interpretation strategy is carefully and intelligently motivated in this scene. While Mrs Adler’s interpretation of Georges’s poem remains close to the original, this is not true for all instances of interpreting in movie scenes. Instances of misinterpreting can be used for different narrative purposes, but in any case, the viewer has to be made aware of them in the first place. One way of achieving this is to have the same utterance interpreted by two different characters, one of whom is more trustworthy than the other. A comic instance of misinterpreting occurs in a scene at the beginning of French Kiss, which depicts the first meeting of the two protagonists, the American Kate and the Frenchman Luc (see figure 13 below). In an aeroplane set to take off from Toronto to Paris, Luc is seated next to Kate, who is extremely nervous. Her nervousness is due to a combination of a fear of flying and an unwillingness to travel after her unfaithful boyfriend, and Luc’s exaggerated nonchalance is in no way suited make her feel more comfortable. Still, Kate and Luc start a conversation, which is then interrupted by a loudspeaker announcement in French: Excerpt 43 (French Kiss, 0 11 03 - 0 11 31) (…) Loudspeaker Nous rappelons à nos voyageurs que l’usage des appareils électroniques est interdit durant le décollage de l’appareil. Kate What was that? What did she say? That sounded serious. Luc The pilot says there is a crack in the engine but not to worry he take off anyway. Loudspeaker Ladies and gentlemen please remember that the use of cellular phones and other electronic devices is forbidden during takeoff. Kate You know, I don’t know what they taught you in France but rude and interesting are not the same thing. (…) Even without any knowledge of French, most viewers are likely to guess - based on their world knowledge about flight security - that Luc’s translation hardly corresponds to the French original; he is simply making fun of Kate. For her however, this only becomes clear when the ‘official’ English translation is made over the loudspeaker. Kate’s witty repartee permits her character to indulge in her francophobia yet again (see excerpt 34 above), and the <?page no="200"?> 186 Chapter 7: Language choice interaction also lays the foundation for many more lively arguments throughout the movie. In their subsequent dialogues, it is their cultural (rather than linguistic) differences that are continually harped upon, but Luc’s cheeky act of misinterpreting serves as an ingenious introduction to their private version of the Franco-American relationship. Figure 13: Luc (Kevin Kline) and Kate (Meg Ryan) in French Kiss A different way of highlighting a case of misinterpreting is to contrast it with a conflicting translation in a subtitle. A scene in Braveheart shows the protagonist William Wallace with Murron MacClannough, a young villager who had been his childhood girlfriend, and whom he meets again when he comes back from a lengthy period of travels on the continent (see figure 14 below). William has asked Murron for a rendezvous to tell her about his journeys, but his real intention is to confess his love to her. However, his shyness prevents him from doing so, at least in their common L1 English: Excerpt 44 (Braveheart, 0 29 17 - 0 30 22) (…) William Well if I can ever work out the courage to ask you again, I’ll send you a written warning first. Murron Oh, it wouldn’t be much good, I can’t read. William Can you not? Murron No. <?page no="201"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 187 William Well that’s something we shall have to remedy, isn’t it. Murron You’re gonna teach me to read? William Aye, if you like. Murron Aye. William In what language? Murron (chuckles) You’re showing off now. William That’s right. Are you impressed yet? Murron No. Why, should I be? William Oui. Parce que chaque jour j’ai pensé à toi. Yes. Because every single day I thought about you. Murron Do that standing on your head and I’ll be impressed. William My kilt will fly up, but I’ll try. Murron (laughs) Oh you certainly didn’t learn any manners on your travels! William Oh, the French and the Romans have far worse manners than I. Murron You’ve been to Rome? William Aye, Uncle took me on a pilgrimage. Murron What was it like? William Rien qui approchait ta beauté. Not nearly as beautiful as you. Murron What does that mean? William Beautiful. But I belong here. As a well-travelled multilingual individual, Wallace takes pleasure in impressing his monolingual and illiterate female friend, and addresses her twice in French, in spite of the fact that she does not understand this language, and is forced to ask for a translation. Ironically, while William is portrayed as self-confident enough to show off his language skills, he stops short of telling Murron what is really on his mind: that he is in love with her. In turn, while Murron lacks his erudition, she appears genuinely interested in William’s second languages, and is very eager at least to become literate. Moreover, the fact that she pokes mild fun at William’s affectation draws the audience to her side. What she is unable to comprehend at this stage, however, is William’s real intention, because he carefully glosses over the emotional content of his French turns in his translations, and the viewer who reads the subtitles is at an advantage. Ironically and despite his multilingual skills, William’s love confession to Murron in the following scene is a purely non-linguistic one: he presents Murron with a pressed thistle wrapped in a cloth, which she immediately recognizes as the very same flower she had given him as a child, and which he kept during all the years since as a true token of love. <?page no="202"?> 188 Chapter 7: Language choice Figure 14: Murron MacClannough (Catherine McCormack) in Braveheart A final example of misinterpreting, which lacks the humorous connotations of the two discussed so far, occurs in Frantic. As mentioned above, the action thriller set in Paris features no subtitles for any of its French turns, and the American protagonist depends on the interpreting skills of numerous multilingual characters, predominantly French L1 speakers who know English. In the scene in question, Walker has a missing person report filed for his wife at a police station in Paris (see figure 15 below). Based on the testimony of a Parisian tramp (see chapter 6, excerpt 21 above), Walker has come to believe that his wife Sondra has been kidnapped. An apparently monolingual police officer (credited as the ‘Desk cop’) sitting at a typewriter asks Richard to describe his wife, and Pascal, the hotel’s chief of security, translates: Excerpt 45 (Frantic, 0 24 50 - 0 25 30) (…) Desk cop Les yeux? (‘The eyes? ’) Pascal Eyes. Walker Erm blue blue-gray really. Pascal (to the officer) Bleus. (‘Blue.’) (Pascal offers Walker a cigarette, which he declines) (to the other officer) Cigarette. (the other officer takes it) <?page no="203"?> 7.3 Comprehensibility 189 Desk cop Visage. (‘Face.’) Pascal Face. Walker Erm what about it Pascal (gestures) The shape. Walker (gestures) It’s er erm thin and narrow at the jaw with a rounded forehead. Pascal M-hm, oval. Inspector Elle a peut-être eu un coup de foudre pour autre chose que la Tour Eiffel, non? (‘She might have fallen in love with something else than the Eiffel Tower, don’t you think? ’) Pascal Ah, Paris. Inspector City of lights. (all except Walker laugh) Walker Listen listen I expect you people to take me seriously, huh! (…) Figure 15: From left to right: Pascal (Patrice Melennec), the desk cop (Richard Dieux), the inspector (Yves Rénier), another cop and Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) in Frantic Pascal’s unwillingness already appears in his first turn, where he renders the officer’s two-word question, “les yeux” (‘the eyes’) in one word only (eyes). In contrast, Walker tries to answer this and the following questions as precisely as possible: he hesitates between blue and blue-grey as his wife’s eye colour, <?page no="204"?> 190 Chapter 7: Language choice and although he settles for the second, Pascal is content to translate only the first adjective. The question “visage - face” is less clear, and Walker is forced to assure himself what is meant exactly. His precise description of his wife’s face, “thin and narrow at the jaw with a rounded forehead”, betrays his profession (he is a medical doctor), but in another act of blatant reduction, the description is rendered as “oval” in Pascal’s translation. The chief of security’s uncooperativeness and condescending attitude are shared by both police officers present; the superior police inspector even remains silent until the situation escalates, although unlike the desk cop, he actually speaks fluent English. Very obviously, they could not care less about Walker’s wife, and fail to believe his kidnapping theory to begin with: their theory is that Mrs Walker has run off to see a French lover. While the exact content of this insinuation is not entirely obvious either to Walker or the audience, its general pragmatic force is still clear, as Walker’s reaction indicates. In sum, the French speakers’ minimal-length turns and Pascal’s misinterpreting powerfully add to the atmosphere of alienation and hostility that pervades the movie (especially its first part; see also Mareš 2000b: 252), while a further narrative purpose is to justify Walker’s growing scepticism towards the French and American authorities alike, and his eventual decision to pursue his wife’s kidnapper behind their backs. Conclusions The use of comprehensibility strategies such as subtitling, well-known expressions, and interpreting appears carefully motivated in most instances throughout the corpus. Subtitles typically cater for OL turns that are high in number and carry special narrative relevance, whereas well-known expressions are typically fewer and also less relevant. Interpreting is more rarely used, and it carries important narrative functions - humorous as well as very serious ones - rather than just a communicative function. In the case of comprehensibility, it is especially hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint instances of linguicism. For instance, subtitles have the immense advantage of enabling the viewer to eavesdrop on conversations they would never have understood in reality, which can result in a normalization of OL dialogue and a viable alternative to the replacement strategies. However, subtitles also visibly index other languages as incomprehensible, and therefore mark their speakers as foreign. Moreover, as forms of strong narrative intervention, they may broaden the distance between the viewer and the characters, because unlike the other two strategies, they solve the dilemma of incomprehensibility in a manner that is impossible in real life. <?page no="205"?> 7.4 Code-switching 191 This is not to argue, however, that leaving OL turns and scenes incomprehensible is the preferable option. Even if this strategy carries connotations of greater authenticity, as in Saving Private Ryan, and flatters that part of the audience which does understand the other languages (and can show off their knowledge to the other people in the theatre), it has two clear disadvantages. On the one hand, the absence of subtitles can easily be interpreted as an underlining of the irrelevance of OL dialogue, which can be linked to the process of fractal recursivity. On the other hand, viewers are often confused if they cannot understand dialogue which seems to be nevertheless relevant. A few enthusiasts contribute to internet message boards and ask fellow viewers who know the OL and can explain, whereas most others might stop concentrating on the movie. In sum, there is no easy way in which the different comprehensibility strategies can be interpreted as instances of linguicism. To pursue that specific question further, it is necessary to turn to a different aspect of multilingualism in the movies, namely code-switching. 7.4 Code-switching The final section of this chapter contains a discussion of local patterns of language choice: what are the sociolinguistic, pragmatic and narrative reasons which underlie code-switching within individual movie scenes? The aim of this section is to test the third hypothesis stated in the introduction to this chapter, that code-switches into languages other than English are typically unrealistic and linguistically unmotivated, and merely serve the purposes of stereotyping in characterization, as in the scene from The Sum of All Fears (excerpt 36 above). The observations are based on a subcorpus of 241 multilingual movie scenes (41 % of the entire corpus), all of which contain at least one word in both English and another language. While the presence of the English language as the base language of the movies can generally be taken for granted, it is the specific motivations for the characters to use other languages which are the focus of attention. For each scene, one or more types of motivations were coded, depending on whether different instances of code-switching within the same scene are motivated by the same or by different factors. A first distinction was made between linguistic motivations, where the fictional language choices mirror psycholinguistic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic factors that are pertinent in real-life interactions (see chapter 2, section 2.3 above), and narrative motivations, where code-switching is used for narrative aims, specifically characterization or editing. The following four categories were distinguished: <?page no="206"?> 192 Chapter 7: Language choice Motivations for code-switching in multilingual movie scenes 1. Situational code-switching: Scenes where code-switches into another language are motivated by situational factors. These factors include aspects of the communicative situation, such as the speaker’s linguistic repertoire, the addressee(s) of a turn, or the topic discussed. 2. Metaphorical or marked code-switching: Scenes where code-switches into another language are especially highlighted, and appear as a turning point in the interaction, rather than a mere reaction to situational factors. Typically, these instances of code-switching are used for the aims of linguistic politeness and language display. 3. Indexical code-switching: Scenes where there is a complete absence of any psycholinguistic, pragmatic or sociolinguistic reasons for characters to code-switch into another language (typically their L1). Rather, the characters code-switch for the benefit of the viewer, as a mere index of their OL ethnolinguistic background. 4. Edited code-switching: Scenes where different conversations, which are each monolingual but in different languages, are conjoined through camera movement or editing into a single scene. Thus, the juxtaposition of turns in different languages appears purely as a result of cinematic editing. The following table shows in how many scenes from the subcorpus that each of the six patterns can be distinguished (in 51 scenes, different code-switches were assigned to different categories). Table 26: Motivations for code-switching in scenes with multilingual dialogue Motivation for code-switching Number of scenes Situational code-switching 161 Metaphorical or marked code-switching 50 Indexical code-switching 35 Edited code-switching 34 Total scenes analyzed 241 The results are very clear: indexical code-switching is by no means the dominant category. Rather, multilingual discourse in movie dialogues is very plausibly motivated in a large majority of movie scenes: two out of three scenes contain instances of situational code-switching, and the potential <?page no="207"?> 7.4 Code-switching 193 of metaphorical or marked code-switching is also exploited in as many as 50 scenes. In the following, each of the four categories is illustrated and discussed. Situational code-switching Among the different situational factors that underlie characters’ code-switching patterns, addressee selection is the dominant one. A first pattern can be seen in exolingual communicative situations, where speakers sometimes converge to their interlocutors’ first languages to address them. This phenomenon is frequent in action thrillers, where the multilingual protagonist can use his L2 skills in foreign locations. For instance, Jason Bourne uses German with two policemen who urge him to leave the park in Zurich where he has lain down to spend the night, and French with the concierge of the house where his Paris flat is located. Another scene in The Bourne Identity shows the protagonist Bourne faced with an unknown addressee: a killer who has entered Bourne’s Paris apartment and tries to kill the amnesiac ex-CIA agent. Bourne uses his martial arts skills to overpower his opponent, and then addresses the killer in a variety of languages to find out his motivation. Bourne first addresses him in English (“who are you”; 0 44 00), then in French (“Réponds-moi, qui es-tu? ”; ‘Answer me, who are you? ’), Italian (“Dimmi chi sei! ”; ‘Tell me who you are! ’), next German (“Was willst du hier, wer bist du? ”; ‘What do you want here, who are you? ’), and finally English again (“Speak to me, who are you? ”). Bourne’s strategy of quadruple convergence indexes his profession, espionage, as a highly international one, where skills in as many languages as possible are an asset. Unfortunately for Bourne however, the killer does not react to any of the languages - he remains silent and prefers to jump to his death out onto the boulevard. A more jocular kind of accommodation on the part of an EL character is depicted in Just Married, where the protagonist Tom Leezak repeatedly uses some French and Italian - neither of which he really knows. Upon arrival at a Paris airport, he addresses a car rental employee with the words: “Hey, can we get le car for le Zak” (0 33 10), and later in Venice, he asks a gondoliere: “Are you sure this is correcto? ” (0 49 57) Leezak’s convergence is (perhaps surprisingly) not met with irritation on the part of his OL1 interlocutors, who are, in general, reasonably happy to continue the conversation in English 38 . In general however, OL turns uttered by EL1 characters are rare (see table 16 above), whether in cases of convergence or for other reasons, such as language 38 See Kellmann (2000: 108) for similar instances of fun made of monolingual Americans in John Sayles’s movie Hombres Armados (1997). <?page no="208"?> 194 Chapter 7: Language choice display. More often, OL1 characters address other OL1 characters in their common L1, without however necessarily aiming to exclude the EL1 characters present from the interaction. The following example from Elizabeth is set on a Scottish battlefield, where an army sent by the young Queen of England has just been slaughtered by the troops of Marie de Guise, the French-born Queen of Scotland. With her entourage, Marie observes how one of her soldiers is about put an injured English boy soldier out of his misery by stabbing him with a pike, and she orders him to desist: Excerpt 46 (Elizabeth, 0 44 02 - 0 45 02) Marie de Guise (to French soldier) Arrêtez! Stop! (to English youth, pointing to an English banner) Go back to England and take this to your queen, mh. (To herself ) C’est du sang anglais sur un drapeau français. (To her entourage) Renvoyez-le à sa reine et faites en sorte que - qu’il reste bien vivant. Et dites à cette reine bâtarde de ne plus envoyer des enfants pour combattre Marie de Guise. english blood on French colours. Send him back to his Queen and make sure he remains alive. Tell that bastard Queen not to send children to fight Mary of Guise! Marie de Guise addresses four different interlocutors in this short scene. First, she gives a French order to the soldier, but switches to English to address the boy soldier, for whom she seems to feel some degree of compassion. Then, in an instance of self-talk, she decides that to send the French banner stained with English soldiers’ blood to Elizabeth would make a powerful gesture of defiance. For this, she uses her L1, and maintains this choice when she raises her voice to address her entourage and to order them to carry out her plan. In a straightforward and efficient manner, Marie de Guise uses each of her respective addressees’ L1 when talking to them. In some scenes, the choice of a specific other language appears initially reasonable, but has to be subsequently renegotiated. This pattern is typical for the movies Frantic and French Kiss, where many conversations take place between a single EL1 character (often the protagonist) and one or more L1 speakers of French. The following example from Frantic shows the American Richard Walker with his French acquaintance, Michelle, at the TWA baggage retrieval counter at a Paris airport, where they need to pick up a suitcase: <?page no="209"?> 7.4 Code-switching 195 Excerpt 47 (Frantic, 1 02 40 - 1 02 50) TWA clerk Bonjour. Walker We have a lost bag. TWA clerk What sort of bag? Walker Erm, [a] white Samsonite. Michelle (pointing to suitcase) [Elle est là.] (‘It’s there.’) (…) There is nothing odd or spectacular about a French clerk addressing an unknown interlocutor in the local language, nor does Walker’s uncommented switch to English cause any problems. Walker, who does not speak French, can expect an airport employee to speak English, especially if she is working for an American company - although in other settings (see excerpts 39 and 45 above), he has already failed to meet the same degree of convergence. Michelle, a French L1 speaker like the clerk, remains silent initially, but seizes her chance to speak when she notices Walker’s hesitation, and spots the suitcase more promptly than he does. She quickly reacts and points the suitcase out to the clerk in their common L1 - not to exclude Walker from the interaction, but simply as a matter of efficiency: while Walker is still describing the suitcase, “a white Samsonite”, Michelle has already concluded the interaction. While the narrative function of realistic representations underlies many such instances of code-switching, movies with more diverse international settings than Frantic rely on the use of other languages as geographic indexes. In The Jackal, two scenes show the protagonist in Montreal, talking to French-speaking service employees in a car rental firm and a postal delivery office. In both cases, while the Canadian service employees talk English to the Jackal (who is American, but uses a marked Canadian vernacular for the purpose of camouflage), they also address other interlocutors in the office or on the phone in French (“on vérifie”; ‘we’re checking’; 0 20 25, or “je te rappelle”; ‘I’ll call you back’, 0 44 09). The only purpose of these short turns, which have neither subtitles nor any narrative relevance, is to underline the fact that the Jackal is in the Province of Québec (a flag of which appears in the background of one scene). For the viewer, this piece of information is relatively vital: to a large extent, the dramatic tension in The Jackal is built on the question of if, when, and how the top terrorist will manage to enter the US where he intends to kill a person of national importance. Showing the Jackal in different disguises liberally appearing on both sides of the US-Canadian border is a powerful way of suggesting that the Jackal’s target person has good reasons to be alert. <?page no="210"?> 196 Chapter 7: Language choice Examples of divergence from English to exclude EL1 characters also appear, even if they are less prominent than the patterns of code-switching discussed so far. A prime example occurs in Fools Rush In, when the young Mexican American Isabel Fuentes presents her new boyfriend, the WASP New Yorker Alex Whitman, at a garden party at her parents’ Las Vegas home. The policeman Chuy, Isabel’s Mexican-American ex-boyfriend, is upset to see Isabel with Alex, and he addresses her in Spanish, inquiring about the New Yorker in a language Alex cannot understand: Excerpt 48 (Fools Rush In, 0 26 20 - 0 26 41) (…) Chuy Esto es el novio tuyo Isa? (‘Is this your boyfriend, Isa? ’) Isabel Yes Chuy he is my boyfriend, do you have a problem with that? Chuy It’s a pleasure to meet you Alex. You’re a very lucky man. There’s nobody like Isa. Nobody. (…) Isabel accepts Chuy’s choice of Spanish as little as she welcomes his curiosity, and instead of answering his request for information in Spanish, their common L1, she continues the conversation in English, thereby indirectly translating Chuy’s question to Alex. Having chosen an English-speaking partner, Isabel refuses to engage in any linguistic practice which marginalizes him, even at the risk of alienating the members of her Spanish-English bilingual community. In turn, Chuy accepts Isabel’s reaction, switches back to English himself, and even addresses Alex in a reasonably friendly manner. In contrast, the following scene from Red Heat shows a character who persists in the strategy of divergence precisely to act as impolitely as possible. Viktor Rostavili is a Georgian criminal arrested in Chicago (see figure 16 below), and the scene shows him in prison, where Detective Art Ridzik has just introduced him to the Russian police officer Ivan Danko. Danko has travelled from Moscow to oversee Rostavili’s extradition, and he has reasons to believe that Rostavili is involved in drug crimes. Both Danko, who speaks Russian with Rostavili, and Ridzik, who knows only English, are thwarted in their attempts to interrogate Rostavili: Excerpt 49 (Red Heat, 0 29 40 - 0 29 55) Ridzik (very slowly and clearly) Where is the locker that this key opens? Rostavili Ebi svoju mamu v zadnicu. (‘Fuck your mother in the ass.’) <?page no="211"?> 7.4 Code-switching 197 Ridzik What did he say? Danko He say ‘go and kiss your mother’s behind’. Figure 16: Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross) and Art Ridzik (James Belushi) in Red Heat By answering in Russian, Rostavili - who is perfectly able to speak English - kills two birds with one stone: he doubly insults Ridzik by addressing him in a language he does not understand, and with the offensive content of his turn. Moreover, he relegates part of the responsibility to his translator, even if Danko obviously reduces the vulgarity of Rostavili’s slur. The same pattern appears in a scene set in a French hotel in Just Married, where the protagonist Tom Leezak argues with Henri Margeaux, the hotel owner, about the reimbursement for a fire caused by Leezak. As the argument gets more and more heated, it becomes clear that Margeaux has little sympathy for Americans in general, nor does Leezak’s attitude contribute to any kind of reconciliation: Excerpt 50 (Just Married, 0 42 12 - 0 42 39) (…) Margeaux So I must make my hotel of dreams like every other Howard Johnson’s with a bright orange roof. Tom It wouldn’t hurt. Margeaux Imbécile de cochon américain. Tom Cochon what? Sarah Stupid American pig. <?page no="212"?> 198 Chapter 7: Language choice Tom Oh oh yeah? Well that, I guess that makes you a stupid French - frog! (Margeaux steps back, looking shocked ) Oh yeah, I said it, frog! (…) Margeaux takes Leezak’s belittling of his traditional family hotel very personally, and he cannot suffer the American’s preference for the more modern and standardized hotels of the well-known hotel chain. Margeaux insults Tom Leezak in his French L1, in full knowledge that Sarah, Tom’s wife, is able to translate the offending designation. While the comedy in Just Married is often of a rather gross kind, there is a certain ironic twist about Tom’s reaction, in that his francophobic retort frog is able to shock Margeaux, who has, after all, just called the American a pig. In some cases, the characters in a scene display no linguistic accommodation at all, for the simple reason that they do not know each other’s language. The result is a pattern of mutual divergence that can be called Babylonic with reference to the well-known excerpt from the Old Testament (Genesis 11, 1-9; see chapter 2, section 2.2 above). Babylonic conversations are especially present in encounters on battlefields in Saving Private Ryan. One scene shows Private Mellish, a Jewish American soldier, wrestling with an enemy German, who says: “Hör auf, hör auf, du hast keine Chance, lass es uns beenden” (‘Stop it, stop it, you have no chance, let’s put an end to this’). At the same time, Mellish tells the German “let’s stop let’s stop let’s stop listen to me listen to me stop”, but is stabbed immediately afterwards (2 18 20). In a later scene, Sergeant Horvath is named an “Arschloch” (‘asshole’) by another German, whom he labels “son of a bitch” himself, and shoots him in turn. Other examples for Babylonic conversations occur in Fools Rush In (excerpt 47 above) and Frantic (excerpt 39 above), but despite their obvious narrative interest and their comic potential, they are rare on the whole - a result which is perhaps surprising, given that fears of linguistic fragmentation are frequent in real-life discourses that oppose multilingual practices (see, for instance, Huntington 2004: 158 ff ). Another set of factors that explain OL1 characters’ divergence is more psycholinguistic in nature, in that they deviate from the generally monolingual mode in situations of strong emotional agitation, such as anger, sadness, or surprise 39 . In The Bourne Identity, the protagonist couple normally converse in English, although both can speak each other’s first language. However, 39 While the unmarked behavior for multilingual individuals is certainly to switch from an L2 into their L1 in emotionally tense moments, the interrelation between emotional expression and language choice is somewhat more complex, as Pavlenko (2005: 131 ff ) demonstrates in detail. <?page no="213"?> 7.4 Code-switching 199 Bourne’s German partner Marie Kreutz utters the L1 expletive Scheisse (‘shit’) repeatedly at tense moments in the movie. Likewise, the Frenchman Georges Fauré in Green Card says merde (‘shit’; 1 20 22) after breaking something in his wife’s apartment, and also in an encounter with an immigration officer which goes terribly wrong. Slightly less vulgarly, the hotel concierge Henri Gaillard in Frantic uses the words “Oh, les salauds” (‘oh, the bastards’; 0 51 06), when he discovers Richard Walker’s hotel room, which has been left in complete disorder by his wife’s kidnappers. In Fools Rush In, the pains of childbirth cause the protagonist Isabel Fuentes to switch into her L1 Spanish (“Ay dios mío que dolor, que dolor”; ‘Oh my God, what pain, what pain’, 1 36 51), although none of the others present can be expected to understand what she is saying. Earlier in the movie, the emotion of anger causes her to depart from the monolingual mode that informs even her interactions with most Mexican Americans. Isabel has asked her brothers and friends to spend a day out in a desert canyon with her Anglo husband Alex, but when they bring him back drunk and injured after falling into a cactus, she is less than amused: Excerpt 51 (Fools Rush In, 0 51 30 - 0 52 01) (…) Isabel I told you to make it special, idiot, not to kill him. Se me salen de aquí todos, dejan me para fuera get the hell outta here you two come on vámonos! (‘… Get out of here all of you, leave me, outside … let’s go! ’) (…) The meaning of the Spanish insertions can be guessed without subtitles from Isabel’s energetic movements, as she shoves the men out of her house to tend to her husband. While there is nothing unrealistic about speakers mixing languages when they are in such an emotional state, a shortcoming of Fools Rush In I have already mentioned is that it is only in such situations that highly fluent bilinguals such as Isabel engage in rapid code-switching. A final example of emotional code-switching comes from the denouement of The Peacemaker. In the streets of Manhattan, the American protagonists Thomas Devoe and Julia Kelly have tracked down the Serbian terrorists who intend to detonate an atomic bomb in an act of suicidal mass murder. Devoe shoots one of them, Vlado Mirich, but Mirich’s half-brother Dusan Gavrich manages to escape into a church. When Devoe and Kelly find him there, he has the bomb set on a timer shortly to explode. Devoe and Kelly try to prevent this by talking to Gavrich and urging him to stop the timer, but this is not what the desperate man has in mind: <?page no="214"?> 200 Chapter 7: Language choice Excerpt 52 (The Peacemaker, 1 47 18 - 1 48 20) (…) Gavrich Who decided for my wife? My child, murdered, huh? For what? For what? For breathing? For smiling? And now, I am left. Who decides for me? Kelly Mister Gavrich, what is it you want? Gavrich Ja želim da bude kao pre. I want it to be like it was. Devoe Sir, it’s not our war. Gavrich It is now. (shoots himself ) Kelly No! (…) Gavrich is well aware that Devoe and Kelly (whom he has never seen before) are unlikely to understand Serbian, even though the audience know about their skills in Russian. His choice of Serbian can best be explained by the extreme emotional state he is in: he has just been reminded of the traumatic moment when his wife and daughter were shot by a sniper in Sarajevo, his half-brother died only minutes ago, and he is about to kill himself. Kelly, who is portrayed as a sharp thinker as well as a keen observer of human nature, asks him a meaningful question, to which he gives a very personal answer - for which his L1 seems plausible. At the same time, he genuinely wants Kelly to understand him, and adds a correct translation in English: “I want it to be like it was”. What carries the potential of a sincere dialogue between Kelly and Gavrich is, however, spoilt by a Devoe’s rash intervention. Just as Gavrich may have understood the futility of his project - killing thousands of New Yorkers cannot turn back time - Devoe strengthens the terrorist in his original intention. Devoe’s denial of all American (Western) responsibility in the Yugoslav wars is unlikely to convince Gavrich (see chapter 6, excerpt 18 above), and to preserve his upper hand, Gavrich terminates the conversation by shooting himself and leaving the two Americans to deal with the bomb themselves. As in other scenes of The Peacemaker, multilingualism is portrayed in a very complex and intelligent way, defying stereotypical patterns of representation, and exploiting instances of code-switching to create an emotional atmosphere and a certain amount of empathy even for characters such as Gavrich. In general, this is an important function of these instances of code-switching: by indexing the characters as being in a specific emotional state, the filmmaker may well succeed in creating similar states among the viewers (see Smith 2003: 42). A final motivation for OL1 characters to use their L1 is when they can fully expect their EL1 interlocutors to understand them. In Elizabeth, the <?page no="215"?> 7.4 Code-switching 201 protagonist (as well as her major supporters, Cecil and Walsingham) appears to be fluent in French, and the French L1 characters are in a position to address her in English, French, or a mixture of both. In a scene shortly after the battle mentioned in excerpt 46 above, the young queen makes a move to pacify the French: she stages a pompous welcome for Marie de Guise’s nephew, the Duc d’Anjou, who has come to England to ask for Elizabeth’s hand. To everybody’s unpleasant surprise, the Duke’s attitude is a rather silly and childish one: Anjou fools his English hosts by disguising himself as a minstrel of his entourage, and upon disclosing his identity, he kisses Elizabeth in an all too assertive manner. Equally inappropriately, he immediately raises the issue of sex in front of the noblemen and diplomats present: Excerpt 53 (Elizabeth, 0 57 25 - 0 58 37) Elizabeth (to man disguised as Anjou) Enchantée. (‘I’m charmed.’) Anjou No, because - I am Anjou! (laughs). Yes, I am Anjou, yes, I am Anjou. Yes. (kisses her and is slapped in the face by Elizabeth). Oh, nom de Dieu, elle aime! (kisses her again, laughs) My God! She loves it! Elizabeth (forced laugh) Anjou And I can’t wait - j’ai hâte du moment où nous nous trouverons nus seuls dans une chambre, je pourrai regarder tes cuisses, peut-être même la chatte ? Hm? Hm? Would you like that? I dream of the moment when we are naked together in bed where i can stroke your thigh and perhaps even your quinny? Elizabeth Remove your hand. Perhaps, your Grace, we shall think on it, but I am deeply religious. Anjou But I am very religious too! Very religious! Yes! The queen’s convergence to Anjou’s L1 in her first turn prepares the ground for him to liberally switch back and forth between English and French. Elizabeth, although embarrassed both by the disrespectful content of his turns and his aggressive corporal contact, seems reluctant to rebuff Anjou in an all too obvious manner. Her disapproval becomes obvious, however, in her abandonment of the convergence strategy: Elizabeth reverts to English, and Anjou follows her in his last turn. Thus, Elizabeth’s language prevails, much as Anjou’s aspirations to the English court are doomed to failure. There is a further aspect to Anjou’s code-switching in his two mixed turns. In the first turn, the French part contains a reference to Elizabeth in <?page no="216"?> 202 Chapter 7: Language choice the third person (“elle aime”; ‘she loves it’). Strictly speaking, he is addressing his entourage in this part of the turn, to brag about the assumed effect of his attractiveness on Elizabeth. In the second turn however, the addressee is Elizabeth throughout. Crucially, while the English parts sound relatively unobtrusive (“I can’t wait”; “Would you like that”), Anjou uses French only for his obscene reference to Elizabeth being nude, her thighs, and finally her vagina. Thereby, the well-known association of the French language with romance (if not libertinage) is exploited, which constitutes an example of metaphorical code-switching, discussed in the following subsection. Metaphorical or marked code-switching The second-largest category of code-switching contains code-switches into other languages that appear as marked departures from English as the agreed language of interaction. Speakers exploit code-switching as a means of specifically achieving their interactional goals and as a strategy of drawing attention to what they are saying. In the scenes analyzed, two dominant subcategories are linguistic convergence for various reasons of politeness, and language display as a strategy to enhance a character’s self-image. A further scene from Elizabeth serves as a first example of linguistic politeness. At her court, the queen is prevented from enjoying an evening of entertainment by Sir William Cecil, her chief advisor, and Monsieur de Foix, the French ambassador. Both Cecil and de Foix urge her to respond finally to the Duc d’Anjou’s proposal of marriage, however due to her infatuation with the Earl of Leicester, the young queen is not in any particular hurry to make up her mind: Excerpt 54 (Elizabeth, 1 07 41 - 1 08 10) (…) Elizabeth The duke cannot love me so much if he demands my answer so precipitously. Foix Perhaps Her Majesty will not answer because her heart is already set upon another. Elizabeth (sternly) Do not presume monsieur to know the secrets of my heart. Monsieur de Foix may leave. Cecil (to Foix) S’il vous plaît Excellency je vous prie de m’excuser. (to Elizabeth) Secrets madam? You have no secrets. The world knows that Lord Robert visits your chambers at night and that you fornicate with him. It’s even said that you already carry his child. Please, Excellency … (‘I beg your pardon.’) (…) <?page no="217"?> 7.4 Code-switching 203 Elizabeth’s first turn in the excerpt is still characterized by a tone of playfulness and witty casuistry. However, de Foix’s answer, which refers to the rumours about the queen and Leicester, comes across as an illicit invasion of her privacy. She sharply rebuffs de Foix in spite of his high status as French ambassador, a reaction which alarms Cecil, who immediately apologizes and tries to make amends for the queen’s behaviour. Both Cecil and Elizabeth employ a strategy of convergence in their respective turns, but with very different aims. Elizabeth’s use of monsieur as term of address sounds disapprovingly ironic and as a gesture of exclusion. In contrast, while Cecil uses the English term excellency to address de Foix, his turn is predominantly French, and the strategy clearly one of positive politeness: to compensate for Elizabeth’s rudeness, he subserviently addresses de Foix in the Frenchman’s L1. The Sum of All Fears contains a similar scene where an EL1 character has to switch into his interlocutor’s L1 to avoid serious diplomatic tensions. In Moscow, the new Russian president Nemerov welcomes a delegation of top CIA officials, including the protagonist Jack Ryan, to the Kremlin. Ryan is a young analyst who has never met Nemerov in person, but whose research on the politician has earned him respect in the US government. To Ryan’s surprise, some of his classified reports seem to have been read in Russia as well: Excerpt 55 (The Sum of All Fears, 0 25 46 - 0 25 48) Nemerov Ah, vy tot samyj Doktor Ryan, kotoryj menja tak xorošo izučil. Interpreter You must be the Doctor Ryan who has done such interesting research on me. Nemerov Ne udivljajtes’, my dovol’no mnogo znaem. Interpreter You should not be surprised by this, we know quite a bit. Nemerov Naprimer, vy napisali, što v institute ja byl babnikom. Interpreter For instance we know how wrong you were in your report that I had many girlfriends in college. Nemerov Na samom dele, posle togo kak ja vstretil svoju ženu na tret’em kurse, ja ni razu ne posmotrel na druguju ženščinu. Interpreter I met my wife in my third year and have not looked at another woman since. Ryan I was referring to the first two years, sir (embarrassed look by everyone present) kogda vy sdali otličnyj ėkzamen po anglijskomu. Where you received highest honors in English. Nemerov I like him. Cabot (showing relief ) Well in that case so do I. <?page no="218"?> 204 Chapter 7: Language choice The conversation starts with a pattern of mutual divergence, where members of both parties speak their L1. For the viewer, comprehensibility is assured: the Russians understand English, while a Russian interpreter translates Nemerov’s turns to the Americans who, apart from Ryan, do not seem to know any Russian. Nemerov appears eager to assert a position of superiority towards his American visitors, and Ryan in particular, by pointing out flaws in Ryan’s research. In turn, Ryan is irritated by Nemerov’s criticism, and attempts to save his face by specifying the exact period during Nemerov’s college years when the Russian acted as a womanizer. Ryan then realizes the inappropriateness of his remark just in time to code-switch into Russian and to add a flattering comment on Nemerov’s knowledge of English. In doing so, he saves both Nemerov’s and his own face, and the metalinguistic content conveniently prepares the ground for Nemerov to converge by switching into English in turn. This code-switch, combined with Nemerov’s expression of sympathy towards Ryan, proves that the Russian president has accepted Ryan’s implicit apology - to the visible relief of all present, especially Ryan’s superior, DCI William Cabot. In The Sum of All Fears, further interactions between Russians and Americans are held mainly in English. Still, Ryan’s marked use of Russian in this scene carries prime narrative importance, because it depicts his relationship with Nemerov as something extraordinary, and it is Nemerov’s faith in Ryan’s good intentions that plays a significant role in the denouement of the narrative. The second category of metaphorical or marked code-switches can be interpreted as instances of language display, where speakers use another language to express pride in their L2 proficiency, however limited it may be. Although the concept of showing off has a certain potential to lead to interpersonal friction, there is no way in which depictions of language display necessarily inform conflict situations only. An example of a very friendly interaction with language display is the following scene from Green Card, which shows the protagonist couple in a supermarket in New York. The American horticulturalist Brontë and her husband, the Frenchman Georges Fauré, are shopping for lunch when they encounter Lauren Adler, a friend of Brontë’s. Since Brontë and George have married only for convenience, and her plan is to keep this secret from everyone else (see excerpt 38 above), Brontë is rather embarrassed to see Lauren. In turn, Lauren is delighted to meet Brontë in the presence of a mysterious and attractive Frenchman, and Georges is not at all adverse to her enthusiasm: <?page no="219"?> 7.4 Code-switching 205 Excerpt 56 (Green Card, 0 31 40 - 0 33 42) (…) Lauren You’re together? Brontë Sort of. This is an old friend. Georges Fauré, this is Lauren Adler. Georges Hi Lauren. Lauren Ooh, that accent! You’re French, right? Georges Oui. Lauren Oui, oh, exactement, this is so weird. Everything in my life has been French lately. Monday I buy a jacket, it’s French. Wednesday I go see a French movie. And then last night Tony says “Let’s eat French”. Ha! It’s like Carl Jung. What do you call it? A coincidence something. Georges Coincidence, exactement, oui oui. Lauren Ben - So, nice to meet you, Brontë’s French friend. (‘Well - ’) (…) From Georges’s name and accent, Lauren recognizes him as a French speaker, and he takes her positive reaction as an invitation actually to switch into French. His short French turn, “oui”, appears as a performative act of indexing himself as a Frenchman, rather than a sign of a genuine intention to continue the conversation in French: Georges cannot judge how well Lauren knows the language, and he already knows that Brontë does not. However, he has realized that for Lauren, unlike for Brontë, to be French constitutes a desirable attribute in itself, and is quick to exploit this symbolic capital for flirtation. Lauren plays along and converges to French in an instance of language display, if only for two words, which carries the ironic suggestion that she might actually know the language as little as Brontë does. However, in doing so, she emphasizes her enthusiasm about a whole range of aspects of French culture, including fashion, cinema, and cuisine. She chooses to underline her intellectualism by vaguely referring to a psychoanalytical term, which Georges, by repeating the word coincidence in French, is only too happy to appropriate as pertaining to French culture 40 as well. The dialogue in this scene pokes mild fun at the superficially francophile aspirations of New York intellectuals, and the extent to which Brontë appears immune to Georges’s charm throughout a large part of the movie contributes to her characterization as a more earnest, but also more profound personality than Lauren. When Brontë eventually 40 The philosopher and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was Swiss. <?page no="220"?> 206 Chapter 7: Language choice does fall in love with Georges, her emotions are of a more profound kind than just an uncritical admiration of his French background. From the movie Braveheart, a similarly light-hearted example of language display was discussed above in connection with interpreting (excerpt 44 above). In contrast, a scene characterized by a more aggressive mood takes place later in the movie. A series of military exploits by the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace force his adversary, the English King Edward Longshanks, to enter into truce negotiations. Longshanks sends his daughterin-law, the French-born Princess Isabelle, to talk to Wallace. Wallace’s and Isabelle’s first meeting commences badly, and the contribution of Hamilton, an English courtier loyal to the king, does little to improve the tone of the interaction: Excerpt 57 (Braveheart, 1 42 52 - 1 44 07) (…) Isabelle I understand you have recently been given the rank of Knight. Wallace I have been given nothing. God makes men what they are. Isabelle Did God make you the sacker of peaceful cities, the executioner of the King’s nephew, my husband’s own cousin? Wallace York was the staging point for every invasion of my country. And that royal cousin hanged innocent Scots, even women and children, from the city walls. (Isabelle looks at Hamilton, uncertain how to react) Well Longshanks did far worse the last time he took a Scottish city. Hamilton (to Isabelle) Sanguinarius homo indomitus est, et semper dicens mendacium. He is a bloody murdering savage. And he’s telling lies. Wallace Ego nunquam pronunciare mendacium, sed ego sum homo indomitus. Ou en français, si vous préférez? You ask your king, to his face. Ask him. And you see if his eyes can convince you of the truth. I never lie. But I am a savage. Or in French if you prefer? Isabelle Hamilton, leave us. Hamilton Milady? Isabelle Leave us. Now. (…) <?page no="221"?> 7.4 Code-switching 207 From the beginning of their conversation, Wallace impresses Isabelle by his clever repartees and his ability to undermine her, or rather Longshanks’s accusations. Systematically, he dismantles her rhetoric as hollow: he denies having been “given” his noble status by a worldly power, and shows how the attribute “peaceful” is absurd when applied to the cities in Northern England, from where the colonial oppression of Wallace’s Scotland is executed. Overwhelmed by the force of Wallace’s rejoinders, Isabelle is at a loss what to say, and the Englishman Hamilton answers instead. Instead of facing up to Wallace’s accusations, Hamilton aims at excluding Wallace from the interaction, and switches into Latin for a disparaging side-comment: Hamilton does not expect Wallace, whom he labels as a ‘bloody savage’, to understand the highly prestigious language. However, to the surprise of both, Wallace (of whose L2 skills the viewer is aware) has understood Hamilton’s slur, and points this out by answering in Latin himself. In his answer, he dissects Hamilton’s accusation by rejecting, on the one hand, the accusation of perjury, but on the other hand proudly accepting to be called a “homo indomitus” (‘savage’; lit. ‘untamed man’). Then, Wallace takes his language display even further and switches into French, in a formal offer to Isabelle to continue the interaction in her L1. Since she does not react, he switches back to English to point out that it is the king, rather than himself, who qualifies as a liar. Wallace’s contribution has the intended effect: he has succeeded in impressing Isabelle and gained the upper hand. Significantly, Isabelle dismisses Hamilton, and the negotiations take place in the absence of any English characters, which announces the eventual political - as well as romantic - alliance between the Scottish leader and the French-born princess. In Braveheart, the repeated emphasis on the protagonist hero’s multilingual performance creates an important contrast to the gory battle scenes for which the movie is perhaps more vividly remembered. William Wallace is not only a fine soldier, a true husband, and a desirable lover, but also a bright guy and skilled conversationalist in more than just one language. This abundance of positive character traits adds additional support to the movie’s controversial message that illegal acts of violent resistance are perfectly admissible in specific historical circumstances. In total, Wallace speaks very little French and Latin in the movie, but the small quantity is compensated for by the markedness of his OL utterances. This is precisely the defining feature of metaphorical or marked code-switching in the movies: a small number of speaker turns in other languages are used to highlight situations of narrative importance, especially relationships between key characters with a profound influence on the outcome of the story. Despite their clear narrative purpose, these code-switches remain eminently realistic because they depict pragmatic <?page no="222"?> 208 Chapter 7: Language choice motivations typical of real-life multilingual discourse. In the following subsection, the focus is on quite different instances of code-switching, where this kind of realism no longer exists. Indexical code-switching The category of indexical code-switching covers cases where OL1 characters switch into their L1 for no conceivable psycholinguistic, pragmatic or sociolinguistic reason whatsoever. Indexical code-switches are typically short and simple; they match the category of “well-known words” discussed in chapter 5, section 5.3 and in section 7.3 above. Longer turns do not usually fall into this category: since these typically cause problems of comprehensibility for the EL1 characters present in the scene, they are more likely to qualify as instances of genuine divergence, and therefore as instances of situational or metaphorical code-switching. A first example of indexical code-switching was given with respect to excerpt 36 above, where a French and a German L1 speaker (Monsieur Monceau and Herr Haft in The Sum of All Fears) switch between English (the base language of the interaction) and their first language with no other motivation than to index their origin for the benefit of the viewer. The questionable implication, then, is that given their origin, they somehow cannot help using their first languages even if it would be highly implausible for them to do so. A further example occurs in a scene in Traffic, which is set in Mexico City and depicts a bilateral meeting of General Salazar, the highest Mexican official responsible for the country’s anti-drug policy, and Judge Robert Wakefield, who holds the equivalent position within the US government. Salazar, who has only recently been promoted from a similar but less prestigious office in Tijuana, welcomes Wakefield to his new office in the Mexican capital: Excerpt 58 (Traffic, 1 24 46 - 1 25 15) Salazar Judge I’m sorry for boxes and paintings and things but I have been too busy to completely settle in here. Wakefield I know you made very good progress with the Tijuana cartel. Congratulations General. Salazar Muchas gracias. I am confident that before the end of the year, Juan Obregon is gonna be taken into custody. But you must understand that is going to be a very difficult task because of the corruption in the police force. (‘Many thanks’. …) (…) <?page no="223"?> 7.4 Code-switching 209 In this dialogue, the exact reason for Salazar to thank Wakefield in Spanish is very hard to pinpoint. First of all, there is no way in which Wakefield signals any knowledge of or affiliation with the Spanish language in this conversation (or anywhere else in the movie), so Salazar’s code-switch can hardly be understood as a strategy of positive politeness. Conversely, the meaning of the short Spanish phrase is not likely to be incomprehensible to Wakefield, so that Salazar cannot be aiming at puzzling or even alienating his interlocutor either. Therefore, since both situational and metaphorical motivations for code-switching can be ruled out, it is useful to test the narrative motivation as an explanation for Salazar’s code-switch. Unlike Wakefield, the viewer of this scene is aware that Salazar is being highly dishonest in this encounter: his actions against the Tijuana cartel were executed for the benefit of a different drug cartel, which shows that it is Salazar himself, rather than just some of his subordinate police officers, who are corrupt. The mixed turn, which contains a lie, indexes Salazar, who is a negative character, as an L1 speaker of Spanish. However, it is necessary to point out that this is the only instance of indexical code-switching in Traffic. Scenes with exolingual interactions and multilingual dialogue are rare in the movie, as mentioned above (Intertextual differences), but in all other cases, they nevertheless depict realistic motivations for code-switching. With 16 scenes containing indexical code-switching, the romantic comedy French Kiss is the movie that makes the most intensive use of this narrative strategy, and they are mainly uttered by a single character, the male protagonist Luc. As a thief, Luc is a criminal like Salazar, but he is by no means a negative character: Luc is witty, attractive, does no physical harm to anyone, and is likeable enough even to have a French police officer acting as his protector. While in many of his appearances, Luc’s choice of French can be explained as instances of situational or metaphorical code-switching, this is not the case for a number of interactions especially with Kate, the female protagonist. Kate’s knowledge of French is only minimal, and while the two interact in English as their base language, both occasionally use French for emphasis or irony. No motivation is apparent, however, in scenes such as the one in excerpt 59 below. The conversation takes place in an almost dark hotel room in Cannes, where Luc und Kate (whose relationship is not yet an intimate one) discuss Kate’s stratagem to win her ex-fiancé back from his new French girlfriend. In the excerpt, Kate refers to her first, unlucky attempt to talk to her ex (who she has not yet spoken to since her arrival in France), and Luc advises her on how to outperform her attractive opponent at the next opportunity: <?page no="224"?> 210 Chapter 7: Language choice Excerpt 59 (French Kiss, 1 16 37 - 1 17 17) Kate Luc? Luc Oui? Kate Do you er Luc Oui? Kate Do you think I still have a chance with Charlie after what happened in the restaurant? Luc Yes of course. And erm tomorrow we will turn your mistake to our advantage. Kate We will? Luc Oui because he will still be wondering did he see you? You will be like a ghost, a phantom. And it will infect them, their rapport. (…) The conversation is preceded by a long silence and takes place in the slightly odd situation where two adults, whose mutual affection has been steadily growing, have got into two different beds in the same hotel room. Luc’s first oui can well be psycholinguistically motivated, in that he is simply surprised by the fact that Kate initiates a new conversation. However, in his second turn, he is clearly aware of who he is talking to, but still answers in French. His third turn is in monolingual English, but when Kate asks him to reaffirm his point, he utters oui yet again as a tag-initial code-switch. Crucially, while his motivation to do so remains vague within the reality of the scene, it is also rather unclear why indexical code-switching is used in French Kiss at all. Luc’s French background is obvious from the moment of his first appearance in the movie (see excerpt 43 above), and from the many monolingual French turns he utters throughout the movie. A possible explanation is that Luc’s indexical code-switching is due to the generic conventions of the comedy genre, where a certain amount of language mixing is used for humorous effect: Luc infringes the linguistic conventions of monolingual discourse just as he transgresses the law, trying to make money out of a stolen necklace. Even so, the humour is of a mild kind: Luc is not a French buffoon that is subjected to derision, but a good-hearted character who ends up as the American protagonist’s partner, and who is a preferable alternative to her arrogant Anglo one. This generic interpretation of the use of indexical code-switching is supported by the fact that 13 of the remaining 19 scenes with indexical code-switching are from comedies as well. On the basis of the movies analyzed, it can safely be concluded that indexical switching is neither a frequent pattern in representations of multilingual discourse, nor one used with obvious linguicist aims of negative representation. <?page no="225"?> 7.4 Code-switching 211 Edited code-switching The final category contains scenes where different conversations, at least one of which is partly or exclusively held in an OL, are shown as occurring simultaneously through editing. Within the same scene, the movie switches back and forth between two different settings, which can be as physically close as when people are seated at the same dinner table (but engaged in different conversations), or as far apart as when people are on different continents. Preferred contexts for different conversations are scenes where characters have an active interest in not talking to certain other ones because they are trying to escape their followers (for instance, Jason Bourne in Zurich, or Lt. Chris Burnett in Bosnia in Behind Enemy Lines), because the disclosure of their presence would cause embarrassment (Kate in French Kiss hiding from her ex-fiancé with his new girlfriend, in a scene referred to in the dialogue of excerpt 59 above), or because their mutual intention is to kill each other rather than to talk. The latter case is exemplified by a number of battlefield scenes in Saving Private Ryan, but also by a scene in Traffic, where three different conversations are going on simultaneously. In the car park outside a San Diego law court, Eddie Ruiz, the key witness against a major drug criminal, talks in English to the police officers responsible for his protection. Inside one of the parked cars, the Mexican hitman Francisco Flores talks on the phone to the imprisoned drug criminal’s wife, Helena Ayala, who urges Flores to walk up to the witness and “shoot him in the head”. Flores is well prepared to do so, but is prevented by yet another Mexican sniper, who shoots him from the window of a nearby building, uttering the words “pinche chingado” (‘fucking fucker’; 1 38 17) as he pulls the trigger. A less violent example in French Kiss shows two different conversations occurring in two bedrooms in the hotel, whereby in each bedroom, a same-language couple are about to have sex. The protagonist Kate has finally managed to divert her ex-fiancé Charlie’s attention away from his French girlfriend Juliette and towards herself, and the Frenchman Luc, who has acted as Kate’s advisor throughout most of the movie, has seized the opportunity to cater for Juliette’s sudden loneliness. In alternation, the scene shows us the two couples in action: Excerpt 60 (French Kiss, 1 30 20 - 1 31 15) Juliette Ça ne va pas? Is something wrong? Luc Non en fait ça va plutôt bien. No, in fact, everything is fine. (cut to Kate’s bedroom) <?page no="226"?> 212 Chapter 7: Language choice Charlie Please forgive me, please forgive me, I must have been insane. (cut to Juliette’s bedroom) Juliette Luc. Luc … Luc Oh Kate. Kate … Juliette Qu’est-ce que tu viens de dire? What did you just say? Luc I said Kate. (cut to Kate’s bedroom) Charlie Oh Kate. Kate Stop. Charlie Darling. Kate Oh Charlie oh I said stop. (…) The individual settings are both endolingual, and the discourse initially monolingual: Luc and Juliette start in French, their common L1, and Kate and Charlie use English. Thus, the scene becomes multilingual purely through editing. The reason why both conversations are edited into a single scene is to show how independently but simultaneously, Kate and Luc discover that they are in bed with the wrong partner. Luc realizes, while becoming intimate with Juliette, that it is Kate who is really on his mind - to the extent that he even diverges from Juliette’s and his common L1 to switch into English, Kate’s first language. Luc’s uttering of Kate’s name is then echoed by Charlie, shortly before Kate forces him to take his hands off her. The remainder of the scene takes place in Kate’s bedroom and there is no further code-switching as she explains to Charlie that since she prefers Luc, she does not want him back as a partner. In comparison with written texts or with plays on stage, the cinematic medium is clearly much better adapted to conjoin different settings into a single narrative entity. Therefore, it is not surprising that some of the scenes which contain edited code-switching depict the actual use of aural or visual media themselves. Examples include the replaying of tape-recorded messages (Frantic), or television programmes and satellite feeds (both in Behind Enemy Lines). The linguistically most complex instance of edited code-switching appears in The Sum of All Fears, where the two different settings are linked by a telex hotline. On one side, there is the command centre of the Russian government in Moscow, where President Nemerov is consulting with his military staff, and on the other, the US President Fowler doing the same aboard Air Force One. On either side, the president dictates the utterances <?page no="227"?> 7.4 Code-switching 213 addressed to his counterpart to a translator, who types the translated version which then appears on his counterpart’s computer screen. The mood of the interaction is extremely tense, because the Americans blame the Russians for a nuclear explosion in Baltimore, an accusation vehemently and unconvincingly, but justly refused by the Russians. Fowler’s team is unaware of the fact that neo-fascist terrorists (see excerpt 36 above) are behind the attack, and the protagonist Jack Ryan fails to contact his government to supply them with the relevant intelligence. Moreover, the neo-fascists bolster the Americans’ suspicion when fighter pilots of the Russian Air Force, under the command of a corrupt general who is part of the neo-fascist circle, bomb a US battleship. Excerpt 61 (The Sum of All Fears, 1 20 18 - 1 21 04) (…) Fowler (dictating) That the missiles came from Russian aircraft there is no question. Admiral Pollack Grennel thinks he can save the ship but flight ops are definitely out. (cut to Moscow) Nemerov’s aide (reading) -ssijskogo samolëta. (‘[Ru-] ssian aircraft’) Nemerov (dictating) Ja ne daval prikaza atakovat’. Vy ne dolžny predprinimat’ otvetnye dejstvija - I ordered no such attack. You must not respond to this action … (cut to Air Force One) Fowler’s aide (reading) Until we investigate all possibilities. Fowler (dictating) Like you did in Chechnya? Mr President, who is in control of your armed forces? (cut to Moscow) Nemerov (dictating) Vy sbrosili bombu na Xirosimu. Vy sbrosili bombu na Nagasaki. Ne vam čitat’ mne moral’ pro Čečnju. You dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. You dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Do not lecture me on Chechnya. Fowler’s aide (reading) - lecture me on Chechnya. Sec. of State Owens Mr President, we are now at a de facto state of war with the Russians. The short scene begins and ends aboard Air Force One, with two cuts to the Kremlin and back. The first cut poignantly illustrates the concept of edited <?page no="228"?> 214 Chapter 7: Language choice code-switching, because the cut takes place in the midst of the first audible Russian word. The words “Russian aircraft” are rendered as “rossijskogo samolëta”, but the first syllable of the adjective is clipped away by editing. Then, Nemerov dictates an answer, but before the viewer sees him formulating the subordinate clause of his second sentence, there is a cut back to Air Force One, and the clause is offered in its English translation, “until we investigate all possibilities”. Then, Fowler’s retort is given in its entirety, and so is Nemerov’s next turn with his angry reference to the US attacks on Japan in World War II. After the next cut back to Air Force One, the final part of Nemerov’s turn is repeated in translation, and the viewer has already read the identical phrasing in the subtitles. The overall picture is a complex alternation of code-switches followed by a partial repetition, in another language, of what has just been said, and code-switches with no such repetition. This alternation contributes to the hectic mood of the scene, and prepares the viewer for its final escalation, when the Secretary of State declares that Russia and the US are “at a de facto state at war”. Some time later in The Sum of All Fears, the protagonist Jack Ryan manages at least to contact Nemerov via the same hotline and urges him to desist from any further attacks, so as to avoid the nuclear war intended by the neo-fascists. Against all odds, Ryan succeeds in convincing Nemerov because the Russian President trusts the young CIA agent, and Nemerov writes back that on his orders, “Russian strategic forces are standing down” (1 45 56). Nemerov then adds that “we will maintain our defensive alert for the moment but our offensive forces are withdrawn” - a turn which, incidentally, the viewer sees Nemerov dictating in English. Thus, the price to pay for de-escalation is monolingualism: as fear gives way to more peaceful cooperation between the Russians and the Americans, the other language disappears. Likewise, a later scene shows Nemerov at a joint press conference with Fowler on the lawn in front of the White House, where the Russian president quotes John F. Kennedy and talks in English only. Again, as the two presidents’ mutual fear disappears, so does the multilingualism in their discourse. 7.5 Summary and conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to determine in what ways the depiction of language choice in mainstream movies containing other languages makes use of linguicist stereotyping. Specifically, three hypotheses, based on the semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation proposed by Irvine and Gal (2000), were tested in three main areas: global patterns of language choice, comprehensibility strategies, and code-switching. <?page no="229"?> 7.5 Summary and conclusion 215 An analysis of global patterns of language choice shows clear discrepancies between the nature of the communicative situations in which different languages are used in the dialogues. English is used more often in situations with more prestigious settings and social activities, and in scenes characterized by a positive mood. Other languages are associated with less prestigious settings and activities, and they also index more scenes with negative moods. This means that while the distribution of English and other languages mirror the pattern of diglossia presented in chapter 2, there is a strong tendency for other languages not even to be associated with the notions of closeness and intimacy that characterize the L variety in most diglossic speech communities. Clearly, there are cross-genre differences: in narratives of political conflict, scenes set in the command centres of countries such as Russia, Serbia or Mexico do result in the use of other languages in more prestigious settings. The Peacemaker is a case in point here, in that the Serbian language is used in contexts as diverse as a parliament session, a piano lesson, and a worried phone call between two brothers. However, there is an almost complete absence of scenes in any movies where other languages are used for romantic purposes. Thus, in general patterns of iconization hold true. The second hypothesis could not be corroborated. While the amount and importance of dialogue in other languages varies greatly within and across different movies, this dialogue is only rarely as irrelevant as the background murmurs and shouts in the replacement movies discussed in chapter 5. Subtitles are the preferred option to convey the content to the viewer, especially in endolingual and monolingual OL scenes, but also in cases of mixed-language dialogue. A special aspect of subtitles is the extent to which they constitute a fundamental narrative intervention and therefore, strictly speaking, run counter to the principles of realistic representation. However, as I have argued in my analysis of a scene from Braveheart, they need not necessarily entail a simplification of the linguistic complexity of the original spoken dialogue. In cases where filmmakers aim for an especially high degree of realism, they may choose not to use subtitles at all. In these movies, the viewer is invited to empathize with the characters’ experience of miscommunication, which constitutes a powerful but potentially frustrating strategy. Other options, such as characters who interpret or the reliance on cognates and well-known words, are used more rarely due to their being less efficient. In sum, the problem of incomprehensibility is solved in manifold ways that both convey the content of OL dialogue and also fulfil further narrative aims. Thus there is no way in which any comprehensibility strategy can be unequivocally mapped onto linguicist practices. The third hypothesis is partly confirmed. A simple count of speaker turns has shown that it is not just the amount of dialogue in other languages <?page no="230"?> 216 Chapter 7: Language choice that is greatly inferior to English dialogue; characters whose L1 is not English also utter significantly fewer turns in total. The largest part of the scenes analyzed are exolingual settings where EL1 characters interact with OL1 characters, and because the former are much less multilingual than the latter, English emerges as the undisputed and unmarked language of interaction. Therefore, the burden of convergence is on the side of the OL1 characters: if EL1 characters switch into other languages, there is usually a special motivation, which is not the case when English is chosen as an L2 by an OL1 character. Then, it is not only the above-mentioned prestigious settings and activities that remain closed to other languages in most cases. Moreover, other languages are only rarely used inside English-speaking countries, in instances of international communication, and never as a lingua franca. Furthermore, multilingual discourse in the movies analyzed is synonymous with discourse in English and other languages, in that there is not a single instance of codeswitching between two or more different non-English languages. With respect to the local patterns of language choice, a generalized process of erasure could not be pinpointed. The patterns of code-switching are generally of the linguistically more simple, inter-sentential type, so that students of very intensive code-switching (code-mixing) are unlikely to find much interesting material in Hollywood dialogues. The psycholinguistic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic motivations are, however, intact in most scenes, where the basic patterns of situational and metaphorical or marked codeswitching are well imitated in representation. Code-switches that merely serve the purpose of stereotypical characterization are not frequent, nor do they necessarily result in discriminatory depictions of the characters who perform them. The diversity of movie code-switching is completed by the pattern of edited code-switching, where the potential of the media itself is fully exploited. How do these results relate to those obtained in the preceding chapter on characterization? To compare the representations of characterization on the one hand, and language choice on the other, it is useful to compare the classification of movies from table 13 (in chapter 6 above) with the results obtained in section 7.2 on the amount of dialogue in other languages. To what extent do movies which portray L1 speakers of other languages more favourably also contain a larger amount of dialogue in these languages? Table 27 below compares the ranking of table 13 with a ranking of the 16 movies by the average number of OL turns (irrespective of the L1 of the speaker) per scene. <?page no="231"?> 7.5 Summary and conclusion 217 Table 27: Compared ranking of movies by positive characterization and amount of OL turns Rank Movies ordered by decreasing difference of positive minus negative characters Movies ordered by decreasing average number of OL turns per scene Rank 1. 3 Green Card Traffic 4.6 1. 3 Fools Rush In The Sum of All Fears 4.2 2. 2. 2 Braveheart Saving Private Ryan 2.9 3. 3. 1 Sabrina Frantic 2.9 4. 4. 0 The Bourne Identity French Kiss 2.8 5. 0 Frantic The Peacemaker 2.7 6. 0 The Jackal Behind Enemy Lines 2.6 7. 0 Saving Private Ryan Just Married 1.5 8. 5. -1 French Kiss Braveheart 1.4 9. -1 Just Married The Bourne Identity 1.2 10. 6. -3 Elizabeth Fools Rush In 1.1 11. 7. -4 Behind Enemy Lines Red Heat 0.9 12. -4 The Peacemaker Elizabeth 0.8 13. 8. -6 Red Heat Green Card 0.8 14. -6 Traffic Sabrina 0.6 15. 9. -7 The Sum of All Fears The Jackal 0.5 16. The picture offered by this comparison is a surprising one, because there is an overall absence of overlap between the two rankings, although on either list, the movies closer to the top can be seen to escape the charge of linguicist representations more clearly. If one draws a line across the middle of the table, and considers the top eight and bottom eight movies of either ranking, only two movies remain within the same half on both sides. Only Frantic and Saving Private Ryan appear among the top eight movies on both sides of the ranking, while both Elizabeth and Red Heat have relatively little OL dialogue and a surplus of negative OL1 characters. The low rank of Elizabeth in this ranking appears straightforward, because the movie’s narrative focuses on the young queen’s struggle for independence from and power over her male <?page no="232"?> 218 Chapter 7: Language choice companions as well as the different European nations represented by some of these men. The success of Elizabeth’s feminist endeavours results, in the movie, in a rather conservative assertion of a monolingual English nation, with a fair amount of negative stereotyping against Frenchand Spanishspeaking characters. Conversely, the low rank of Red Heat is somewhat less straightforward, in that the Russian protagonist is the true hero of the story (see chapter 6, subsection Who uses interlanguage? above), and the large amount of OL dialogue appears smaller only in comparison with the many scenes with monolingual English dialogue. Apart from these two movies, the discrepancies are obvious. Movies with more positive OL1 characters, such as Green Card, Fools Rush In, or Braveheart, have less OL dialogue. Conversely, the two movies at the bottom of the characterization list, Traffic and The Sum of All Fears, appear at the top when it comes to the amount of OL dialogue. The conclusion that can be drawn from these seemingly paradoxical results is a pattern of compensation. In the movies, there is no way of having one’s cake and eating it: a favourable depiction of OL1 characters is accompanied by a reduced use of their languages. Much like multilingual discourse in US advertising has been found to function as an “indexing of heterogeneity” whereby the “brands rely upon homogeneous consumption” (Piller 2003: 177), the Hollywood movies analyzed use other languages in a myriad of complex functions whereas their quantity is kept very small, and the predominance of the English language is never called into question. <?page no="233"?> Chapter 8: Conclusions In this study, I have analyzed different ways in which Hollywood movies portray forms of multilingual discourse, and tested accusations that these portrayals are mainly informed by negative and linguicist stereotyping. My application of Irvine and Gal’s (2000) semiotic processes of linguistic differentiation has enabled me to assess in what way movie dialogues convey language ideologies that are similar to non-fictional and less obviously stylized instances of public metalinguistic discourse. In a fairly strict way, I have insisted on the dichotomy between reality on the one hand, and fictional representation on the other. This distinction has enabled me to judge many representations as more realistic and complex than previous commentators have assumed, but to pinpoint others as misleading and questionable nevertheless. My analysis of replacement strategies (chapter 6) showed the advantages and dangers of different sub-strategies available to filmmakers who decide to have their characters speak in English, even if in reality they would have used other languages. The strategies of elimination and signalization are less obtrusive than that of evocation, but also more likely to lead to misinterpretations of the depicted reality. Evocation points to the replaced language in a more obvious or even ‘honest’ manner, but it often involves an association of second language use with specific and potentially unfavourable aims of characterization. An interesting observation is that there has been a clear trend away from the replacement of other languages towards the strategy of presenting them whenever their use would seem plausible, especially in movies where the English language is also used realistically. Both in the series of James Bond and Jack Ryan movies, all instances of replacement predate the new millennium, and the strategy of presence (however limited) has been used throughout the three most recent movies, The Sum of All Fears (2002), Die Another Day (2002) and Casino Royale (2006). Likewise, the two most recent movies by Mel Gibson (the director of Braveheart) constitute the first cases of successful mainstream movies not only without any English dialogue whatsoever, but with subtitled dialogue in languages unknown to a much larger part of the audience than in the case of French, Spanish, or the other languages treated in this study. The first movie is The Passion of the Christ (2004) with dialogue in Aramaic and (to a smaller extent) Latin and Hebrew, and the second is Apocalypto (2006), set in pre-Columbian Central America with dialogue exclusively in Mayan. Gibson’s example shows that while the way is certainly paved for more cinematic multilingualism, the political ideologies conveyed by the movies in <?page no="234"?> 220 Chapter 8: Conclusions question do not necessarily coincide with those of many critical sociolinguists. Moreover, I have not been able to find a general diachronic trend towards more and longer dialogues in other languages in my corpus, nor a necessarily more sympathetic depiction of speakers of other languages. In the chapter on characterization, I was able to replicate Lippi-Green’s (1997) finding that movie characters whose first language is not English (standard English in her case, any L1 variety of English in mine) are more likely to be negative characters. L1 speakers of other languages are also less important and have less prestigious occupations, and if their linguistic repertoires include English as a second language, this appears to be taken for granted rather than to be a specific and noteworthy asset. At the same time, I have discussed the limits of this quantitative approach by showing how the genre of the movies and the nature of the stories that are narrated are of higher importance than the simple dichotomy between English and other first languages. In fact, it is very tricky - if not impossible - to make generalizations about how Hollywood depicts members of specific linguistic communities, because there are important exceptions to every perceived ethnolinguistic stereotype. Characters such as Monsieur Monceau in The Sum of All Fears, Marie Kreutz in The Bourne Identity, or Javier Rodriguez in Traffic are prominent counterexamples - too prominent to make a case for a universal pattern of iconization, whereby all French characters are depicted as refined, Germans as despicable, or Spanish speakers as ridiculous and powerless. Moreover, a pattern of fractal recursivity which maps these social and narrative contrasts onto the level of linguistic performance could not be discerned. Marked interlanguage phenomena in the use of English as a second language are quite rare, and in general, the characters speak too fluently, rather than not well enough. More realistic patterns of representation would show how the L2 performance of many more characters, including highly important, prestigious, and positive ones, is also characterized by interlanguage phenomena. Some viewers might be comforted to see the good guys on the screen struggling with second languages just as they do, and achieving interactional goals with partial but functional levels of proficiency, despite their accents, grammatical mistakes, or lexical confusions. Viewers might take pride in their achievements rather than feel frustrated at what separates them from the L1 speakers, and in time, the language mavens in the audience might even stop laughing at the actors’ unconvincing accents, and watch the movie instead of playing the old game of spotting-the-bad-translation-in-the-subtitles. But this already sounds like science fiction. The analysis of language choice in movie dialogues (chapter 7) showed an overall tendency of movies to reduce the quantity of dialogue in other <?page no="235"?> Chapter 8: Conclusions 221 languages, but also to employ what is left for diverse and meaningful narrative functions. On the whole, other languages are still used in an all too limited set of social situations. Notable exceptions to these patterns, which again prevent the process of iconization from having a general validity, are found among the more violent movies such as The Peacemaker or The Sum of All Fears, rather than among the comedies. Cases where L1 speakers of other languages are ridiculed for comic effect are rare (though not inexistent), but so are humorous dialogues that are exclusively in other languages; in the movies, humor is a largely monolingual English affair. Another striking finding is that there is not a single instance of multilingual dialogue where the English language is not present at all, nor is any modern language other than English ever used in a lingua franca context. Furthermore, intimate code-switching (code-mixing) is hardly ever portrayed in any of the movies analyzed, not even - ironically - in the more recent comedy entitled Spanglish (2004). In contrast, the depiction of code-switching in exolingual interactions is highly plausible and well crafted in an overwhelming majority of all scenes analyzed. Characters who stereotypically switch into their L1 even if no interlocutor understands them are much rarer than most commentators have so far claimed. In general, the results beg the question of whether Hollywood merely simplifies multilingual realities and imposes a monolingual bias by means of its representations, or whether it does not simply reflect the fact that for many people, monolingualism may still be considered more normal and less problematic than many linguists would prefer. At any rate, the evidence of Hollywood movies as an important part of the mass media shows that an uninhibited preference for multilingualism is far from being a universal and mainstream phenomenon, at least in the Western world. Crucially, it is not the English L1 speakers and their institutions alone that can be held responsible for this fact, as can be seen even from a superficial comparison of language choice in the original English versions of the movies analyzed, and the versions dubbed into other languages. In the Czech version of The Hunt for Red October, for instance, there is no unrealistic switch from Russian into Czech (see chapter 5, excerpt 11) simply because the Russian characters speak Czech from the beginning. Likewise, the French-dubbed versions of both The Peacemaker and Traffic contain none of the extended dialogues in Russian, Serbian, or Spanish that the viewer gets in the original version, but a fair amount of Slavicand Spanish-accented French with no subtitles to read instead. Clearly, linguicism speaks in a large number of different first languages. Therefore, I hope that future researchers can make use of my methods and formal distinctions to compare my findings with novel ones obtained from the analysis of movies and similar texts with a broader diachronic, social, <?page no="236"?> 222 Chapter 8: Conclusions and cultural range of settings - especially African or Asian ones, as well as more narratives depicting instances of lower-class migration. As an especially intriguing focus of attention, I have mentioned the domain of (im-)politeness in intercultural communication, where the patterns of representation are, overall, perhaps the least realistic. It is fitting to conclude this book with another anecdote, which offers a contrasting picture to the one mentioned at the beginning of chapter 1. Some time ago, I observed my niece Lila, then aged three, on her first visit to the zoo. Towards the end of our visit, Lila noticed a male reindeer grazing right behind the fence, and with great joy, she ran towards it, shouting “Rudo! Rudo! ” at the top of her voice. Rudolf is not an uncommon name where Lila lives, but this hardly informed the child’s naming of the reindeer, an animal which she had never seen before in real life. Rather, the small girl must have learnt the animal’s name from its fictional counterpart in a cartoon movie she had many times watched on television. Lila speaks no English (apart from the odd macaronic nursery rhyme learnt at playschool), but the medial depiction of a Scandinavian animal that plays a central part in the Englishspeaking Christmas tradition prompted her to conflate the fictional character with a real-life ‘interlocutor’ - and encouraged her to approach it with a friendly, even enthusiastic attitude. This anecdote underlines, once again, how “[t]he media’s words intersect with our own” (Cotter 2001: 430), and blur the boundary between fiction and reality, however necessary and important this distinction proves for the aims of media discourse analysis. More importantly still, the anecdote suggests that language choice is not everything that matters. 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(1993) Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of “Outsiders” and “Enemies” in American Movies (Westport: Greenwood Press). Traube, E. G. (1992) Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press). Ulff-Møller, J. (2001) Hollywood’s Film Wars with France: Film-Trade Diplomacy and the Emergence of the French Film Quota Policy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press). Wei, L. (2000a) ‘Dimensions of bilingualism’, in Wei (2000b), 3-25. Wei, L. (ed.) (2000b) The Bilingualism Reader (London: Routledge). Whitman-Linsen, C. (1992) Through the Dubbing Glass: The Synchronization of American Motion Pictures into German, French and Spanish (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). Wood, R. (2003, 2 nd ed.) Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press). <?page no="248"?> 234 Works cited Woll, A.W. (1993) ‘Hollywood views the Mexican-American: from The Greaser’s Revenge to The Milagro Beanfield War’, in Toplin (1993), 41-52. Zentella, A. C. (ed.) (2005) Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities (New York: Teachers College Press). Filmography Corpus movies Amadeus (1984), dir. M. Forman, screenplay by P. Shaffer (The Saul Zaentz Company). Behind Enemy Lines (2001), dir. J. Moore, screenplay by D. Veloz and Z. Penn (Davis Entertainment). The Bourne Identity (2002), dir. D. Liman, screenplay by T. Gilroy and W. B. Herron (Hypnotic et al.). Braveheart (1995), dir. M. Gibson, screenplay by R. Wallace (Icon Productions). Clear and Present Danger (1994), dir. Phillip Noyce, screenplay by D. Stewart et al. (Paramount Pictures). Elizabeth (1998), dir. S. Kapur, screenplay by M. Hirst (Channel Four Films et al.). Fools Rush In (1997), dir. A. Tennant, screenplay by K. Reback (Columbia Pictures). Frantic (1988), dir. R. Polanski, screenplay by R. Polanski and G. Brach (Mount and Warner Bros.). French Kiss (1995), dir. L. Kasdan, screenplay by A. Brooks (20 th Century Fox et al.). Goldeneye (1995), dir. M. Campbell, screenplay by J. Caine and B. Feirstein (United Artists). Green Card (1990), dir. P. Weir, screenplay by P. Weir (Touchstone Pictures et al.). Hannibal (2001), dir. R. Scott, screenplay by D. Mamet and S. Zaillian (Dino de Laurentiis Productions et al.). The Hunt for Red October (1990), dir. J. McTiernan, screenplay by L. Ferguson and D. Stewart (Nina Saxon Film Design and Paramount Pictures). The Jackal (1997), dir. M. Caton-Jones, screenplay by C. Pfarrer (Alphaville Films et al.). Just Married (2003), dir. S. Levy, screenplay by S. Harper (20 th Century Fox et al.). Licence to Kill (1989), dir. J. Glen, screenplay by M. G. Wilson and R. Maibaum (United Artists et al.). The Living Daylights (1987), dir. J. Glen, screenplay by R. Maibaum and M. G. Wilson (United Artists et al.). The Peacemaker (1997), dir. M. Leder, screenplay by M. Schiffer (DreamWorks SKG). The Pianist (2002), dir. R. Polanski, screenplay by R. Harwood (Studio Canal + et al.). Red Heat (1988), dir. W. Hill, screenplay by H. Kleiner et al. (Carolco Pictures et al.). Sabrina (1995), dir. S. Pollack, screenplay by B. Benedek and D. Rayfiel (Paramount Pictures et al.). <?page no="249"?> Filmography 235 Saving Private Ryan (1998), dir. S. Spielberg, screenplay by R. Rodat (Amblin Entertainment et al.). Schindler’s List (1993), dir. S. Spielberg, screenplay by S. Zaillian (Amblin Entertainment et al.). The Sum of All Fears (2002), dir. P. A. Robinson, screenplay by P. Attanasio and D. Pyne (Paramount Pictures). Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), dir. R. Spottiswoode, screenplay by B. Feirstein (United Artists et al.). Traffic (2000), dir. S. Soderbergh, screenplay by S. Gaghan (Initial Entertainment Group et al.). A View to a Kill (1985), dir. J. Glen, screenplay by R. Maibaum and M. G. Wilson (United Artists et al.). The World Is Not Enough (1999), dir. M. Apted, screenplay by N. Purvis et al. (United Artists et al.). Other movies cited Air Force One (1997), dir. W. Petersen, screenplay by A.W. Marlowe (Columbia Pictures et al.). Alexander (2004), dir. O. Stone, screenplay by O. Stone et al. (Warner Bros. et al.). Apocalypto (2006), dir. M. Gibson, screenplay by M. Gibson and F. Safinia (Icon Productions et al.). Birthday Girl (2001), dir. J. Butterworth, screenplay by T. Butterworth and J. Butterworth (FilmFour et al.). Casino Royale (2006), dir. M. Campbell, screenplay by N. Purvis et al. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer et al.). Dark Blue World (2001), dir. J. Svěrák, screenplay by Z. Svěrák (Biograf Jan Svěrák et al.). Die Another Day (2002), dir. L. Tamahori, screenplay by N. Purvis and R. Wade (Eon Productions et al.). European Vacation (1985), dir. A. Heckerling, screenplay by R. Klane (Warner Bros.). Euro Pudding (2002), dir. C. Klapisch, screenplay by C. Klapisch (Bac Films et al.). Falling Down (1993), dir. J. Schumacher, screenplay by E. Roe Smith (Alcor Films et al.). First Knight (1995), dir. J. Zucker, screenplay by W. Nicholson (Columbia Pictures Corporation and First Knight Productions). Hombres Armados = Men with Guns (1997), dir. J. Sayles, screenplay by J. Sayles (Anarchist’s Convention Films et al.). Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), dir. S. Kramer, screenplay by A. Mann (Roxlom Films). The Lion King (1994), dir. R. Allers and R. Minkoff, screenplay by I. Mecchi et al. (Walt Disney Pictures). The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), dir. P. Jackson, screenplay by F. Walsh et al. (New Line Cinema et al.). <?page no="250"?> 236 Works cited Maid in Manhattan (2002), dir. W. Wang, screenplay by K. Wade (Revolution Studios et al.). The Passion of the Christ (2004), dir. M. Gibson, screenplay by B. Fitzgerald and M. Gibson (Icon Productions). Patriot Games (1992), dir. P. Noyce, screenplay by W. P. Iliff and D. Stewart (Paramount Pictures). A Perfect Murder (1998), dir. A. David, screenplay by P. Smith Kelly (Warner Bros. et al.). Proof of Life (2000), dir. T. Hackford, screenplay by T. Gilroy (Castle Rock Entertainment et al.). Savior (1998), dir. P. Antonijevic, screenplay by R. Orr (Initial Entertainment Group). The Silence of the Lambs (1991), dir. J. Demme, screenplay by T. Tally (Orion Pictures and Strong Heart/ Demme Production). Spanglish (2004), dir. J. L. Brooks, screenplay by J. L. Brooks (Columbia Pictures Corporation and Gracie Films). Stargate (1994), dir. R. Emmerich, screenplay by D. Devlin and R. Emmerich (Canal + et al.). S.W.A.T. (2003), dir C. Johnson, screenplay by D. Ayer and D. McKenna (Columbia Pictures et al.). Taking Lives (2004), dir. D. J. Caruso, screenplay by J. Bokenkamp (Warner Bros. et al.). Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), dir. J. Cameron, screenplay by J. Cameron and W. Wisher Jr. (Canal + et al.). The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), dir. J. McTiernan, screenplay by L. Dixon and K. Wimmer (United Artists et al.). The Three Musketeers (1993), dir. S. Herek, screenplay by D. Loughery (Walt Disney Pictures et al.). To Be or Not To Be (1983), dir. A. Johnson, screenplay by R. Graham and T. Meehan (20 th Century Fox and Brooksfilms). Unfaithful (2002), dir. A. Lyne, screenplay by A. Sargent and W. Broyles Jr. (Fox 2000 Pictures). The Whole Nine Yards (2000), dir. J. Lynn, screenplay by M. Kapner (Franchise Pictures et al.).