07: The Absurd Beauty of John Mahoney's American Accent
While there has been evidence that humans have inhabited the island of Ireland for many thousands of years, the dominant culture of the island since roughly 800 to 400 BCE has been that of the Celts, an ethnolinguistic group that at one time existed across all of western Europe but is now primarily known as the broad ethnic and (nearly extinct) linguistic category of the Scots, the Bretons, the Manx, the western Cornish and the aforementioned Irish, the biggest of the modern Celtic cultures, with about 5.5 million people on the island itself and a further 2 – 100 million people in the Irish diaspora depending on the precision of one’s definition. The idea of a Celtic Ireland however was potentially at risk in the 12th century CE as there was a massive invasion and migration of Vikings into Ireland, disrupting the island’s demographics to the point where the stereotype of red hair, pale skin, and freckles associated with the Irish are most likely in fact leftovers of the Viking migration. However when Ireland wanted to reestablish its own linguistic and cultural heritage after breaking away from England in the 1920s, it did so by elevating the old Celtic language Gaelic, as well as Celtic visual symbols such as the ringed cross, the harp, and the claddagh; rather than elevating old Norse, horned helmets, runes, and furs. While there was a considerable enough influx of Norsemen onto Ireland’s green shores to substantially change the demographics and culture, Ireland’s Celtic identity remained, due to the Viking immigrants incredibly strong tendency to assimilate, a tendency so strong that Irish historian and priest John Lynce described the Viking newcomers in his Latin history of Ireland as “Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis” or “More Irish than the Irish themselves”. On a certain level this very statement is absurd on its face. The idea of a cultural identity is defined by the actions of that culture. Irish identity can only be defined by the being and actions of Irish people. It is impossible to be more Irish than the Irish themselves because the most Irish one can be is by simply being an Irish person. Yet the statement somehow makes sense to me when I consider the fact that actor John Mahoney sounds more American than any American I have ever met despite the fact that he was born in Blackpool and raised in Manchester in the northwest of England.
John Mahoney is undoubtedly best known for playing working class fish-out-of-water Martin Crane in the 90s sitcom Frasier. A retired cop who has somehow sired a pair of upper crust snobs, Martin Crane’s entire comedic raison d’être is that he has an awful gauche easy chair that clashes with his son Frasier’s minimalist chic decor. He gets excited about five different meats in one big box. His idea of class isn’t uncorking an understated chablis and listening to some Vivaldi, but instead installing a device in the bathroom that dispenses heated shaving foam called a “Hot N Foamy”. Martin’s salt-of-the-earth demeanor is instantly apparent to even the most casual Frasier viewer, well communicated by Mahoney’s demeanor and costuming, but the biggest giveaway is his voice. Mahoney’s brusque manner of speaking is a clear contrast to Kelsey Grammar’s smooth polished cadence. What’s less clear though is how one would describe Mahoney’s manner of speaking. It’s definitely unique; he doesn’t sound like he’s speaking with a standard mid-American newscaster accent. It sounds like a specific kind of American accent and yet it doesn’t sound like any kind of American accent. When you hear Larry the Cable Guy, you know he’s from the southeast. When you hear Larry David, you know he’s from New York. When you hear Pauley Shore, you know he’s from Southern California. When you hear John Mahoney, you know that he’s… American?
In the early days of American filmmaking (which Hudsucker most definitely references regularly), actors would often affect a kind of accent designed to be easily understood by both American and UK audiences (in the days before American cultural hegemony meant that to exist in the world meant to understand American English). This accent is commonly called a “Mid-Atlantic” accent, as though Barbara Stanwick and Cary Grant were born somewhere in the waters between Newfoundland and Ireland, and they speak normally for someone raised in this particular stretch of ocean. Jennifer Jason Leigh, understanding what kind of movie she’s in performs Amy Archer in a pitch perfect Mid-Atlantic. It would be tempting to call Mahoney’s accent itself a kind of blue collar Mid-Atlantic, but this also isn’t quite the case. His “a”s are too long, and his “r”s too hard to be anything but true blue American.
The french philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his work Simulacra and Simulation describes the idea of a simulation as being an attempt to re-create an original work, while a simulacrum is a re-recreation of something which has no original. The thrust of his argument is that the simulation will always fall short of its original, while the simulacrum, by virtue of admitting it has no original is ultimately going to be the truer expression by being honest about the fact that it does not reflect reality. The simulacrum in art therefore can live up to Aristotle’s notion laid out in The Poetics that "poetry is more philosophic than history", commonly paraphrased as “truer than the truth”. John Mahoney’s entire acting career is built on the foundation of a simulacrum of American-ness. Actual Americans are too bound to the individual regions they come from and accents they speak with to represent the entirety of the country. Mahoney’s demeanor and accent somehow represents the entirety of the simulacrum of America. As the Chief of the Manhattan Argus, Mahoney’s broad, gruff pan-American blue collar accent perfectly fits into the simulacrum that is The Hudsucker Proxy.
There was no Manhattan Argus. To create its newsroom, Joel & Ethan Coen are not evoking their own experiences with newsroom, nor are they even evoking secondhand experiences via hard research of real newsrooms. They’re evoking imagery and ideas from films like Foreign Correspondent (1940) and His Girl Friday (1940), which themselves are created from Alfred Hitchcock’s and Howard Hawks’s ideas of what a newsroom might be like. It’s not so much that the Argus never existed, it itself is modeled on fiction, just as an 18 year old John Mahoney attempting to get his first American acting job took on a voice of what he imagined an American sounded like. His American accent is somehow because of its craft more American than any American I have ever known, and its presence makes the Manhattan Argus’s newsroom feel more like what a newsroom feels like in my heart than actually visiting a real one would do, which itself only underscores the very real complicated nature of the combined search for the truth and the almighty dollar that is the American news industry. John Mahoney’s accent therefore is truer than the truth.
for those curious, no we will not be discussing his “southern” accent in Barton Fink. We will instead continue to pretend that it never happened.