Reality Bypass

Use of Language April 24, 2009

My husband and I are big fans of the reality show Hell’s Kitchen.  We don’t watch many other reality shows, well…I guess Iron Chef counts, but still…not much in the way of reality TV, however, last night we noticed something interesting.  Just for brief background information the premise of Hell’s Kitchen is a dozen chefs brought together and put through the wringer of restaurant services, challenges and craziness in order to win a job as an executive chef for Gordon Ramsay.  It’s the job interview from hell.  The contestants are usually interesting little people who go through all the reality show tropes and at least one or two tends to have a nervous breakdown before the end of the show.  Interesting to me, though, is the way Gordon Ramsay is portrayed.

Now, you have to keep in mind that this is a television show so, of course, he’s playing to the camera and is much more reactionary than he likely is under normal circumstances.  However, he’s played up as an arrogant, demanding, foul mouthed taskmaster with the foul mouthed being emphasized by said mouth being blurred and beeped out every time he curses which he does a lot.  The interesting thing to me is that this tendency is used to build up this fictional caricature which I don’t believe is totally accurate.  Chef Ramsay is a native of Scotland where the term ‘f***’ (I’m a family friendly blog, but you know what I’m getting at), is part of common speech in a lot of areas of the country.  I remember wandering around Glasgow when I visited the city and it was as common as hells and damns in the United States and got about as much reaction.  This is why when he calmly tells the contestants ‘f’ off all of you’ he’s so calm.  There isn’t a huge emotional push behind the words because to his ear and speaking patterns it’s just another word, unlike for many of the listeners where such speaking brings up memories of getting your mouth washed out with bar soap.

As a writer I find this method of creating a character through language interesting.  Using something so inherent to one culture to cause a big reaction in another.  How many customs in speaking cause a huge barrier in communication and gut reactions in the listener which paint immediate impressions of who and what the speaker is?

For another example:  I was in WalMart the other day and greeted the cashier.  He stopped what he was doing and looked at me then asked “Where’s the accent from?”  I blinked and looked confused.  Then he looked confused and went on to explain that I sounded like I was from England or Australia and carried myself well, so he’d assumed I matched what he heard.  Truthfully, I’m from a small town in the middle of Utah where we have a tendency to drawl out words and turn o’s into a’s, but a few years of speech therapy as a child, good friends who are English and Australian, voice training and choir and a LOT of reading has skewed the way I generally speak to be much more precise and enunciated.  The truth breaks the stereotype formed by initial impression.

So now I’m left thinking about the books I read, the books I write and the people around me.  How does the use of language create or destroy initial impression and what happens when the impression is far from the reality?  I think that ground is covered all the time, but maybe it’s worth a closer look.

~Jana