DONNA PEBERDY
‘On the basis of his voice one might decide many things about a man’
– Edward Sapir (1927: 897)
About halfway through The Maltese Falcon (1941), Humphrey Bogart’s private investigator Sam Spade meets the effeminate Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo is annoyed at the performance Spade gave to two police detectives the evening before, which showed Cairo as deceptive and untrustworthy. ‘You always have a very smooth explanation ready’, Cairo observes. ‘What do you want me to do?’ Spade replies in deadpan fashion, ‘Learn to stutter?’ The ostensibly throw-away retort draws attention to the speech affectation as bearer of social and cultural stereotype and offers the stutter as the antithesis of Spade’s silver tongue. The stutter is presented as defective speech, the opposite of smooth-talking. It is implied that the ‘smooth’ voice is controlled, witty, and clever (Spade talks his way out of trouble and has an answer for everything) and refers to his fast, quick-fire flow of speech. The stutter is uncontrolled, ineffective speech, broken and disjointed dialogue that overflows rather than flows. At the same time as offering the stutter as a counterpoint to Spade’s smooth talking, the exchange is framed against Cairo’s drawn-out sibilants, calling attention to his own far from smooth voice. The presence of Bogart’s own lisp, which the actor had prior to his film career, is ignored as a result of the exchange; the smooth-talking, fast dialogue is taken over and above the actor’s lisp which is also overshadowed by Lorre’s more definite speech affectation. The cultural connotations of the smooth-talking private dick relayed in the exchange work to validate the incongruence of Bogart’s lisp and confirm his tough masculinity. The snippet of dialogue is clearly littered with meaning.
In this essay I want to focus less on what is said than on how words are spoken, and how such utterances construct or challenge the image of male identity fostered on screen. Specifically, in order to explore the relationship between the male voice and male identity, the essay examines the role of speech affectations in presenting and performing maleness.
While a number of studies have focused on male language – that is,
what men say – very little discussion has taken place regarding
how men sound and what constitutes a ‘male’ voice.
1 In Western culture, the task of describing a male voice would inevitably lead to key words such as deep or low, gravelly or hoarse, and the musical terms bass, tenor and baritone. Mary M. Talbot, for example, singles out the ‘hard, gravelly, and resonant’ voice heard in film trailers as the ‘epitome of masculinity’ (1998: 31). In his discussion of the folk song, Alan Lomax has noted that ‘in most cultures males perform in harsher, heavier, noisier voices than women’, going on to say that the rasp holds particularly masculine associations, suggestive of ‘the commanding masculine leader, the voice of authority, the tone of the chief or the military commander’ (1968: 192, 73; see also Smith 2008: 134–53). On the one hand, it has been suggested that the harsher, heavier, noisier male voice is biologically determined since, physiologically, men produce more heat than women and thus produce a deeper resonance, or that men are generally bigger than women and so have longer and thicker vocal chords (see Bloom 1998: 41–2; Talbot 1998: 32). Physiological explanations are problematic, however, since the rasp and the ‘hard, gravelly, and resonant’ voice can be exhibited by women as well as men.
On the other hand, it has been argued that voices are culturally constructed. Writing in 1927, for example, linguist Edward Sapir noted, ‘the voice is a social as well as individual phenomenon. … One finds people, for example, who have very pleasant voices, but it is society that has made them pleasant’ (1927: 897). Not only is meaning ascribed to the voice via culture but the voice itself is a performance; as Lomax’s choice of words attests, males perform in harsher, heavier, noisier voices than women. An example offered by Sapir to illustrate the performative nature of the voice is of a man with a rough voice who, having a softer voice to begin with, adapted his voice to fit in with the out-of-doors society in which he lives where swearing and coarse language are the norm. The implication is that the man’s voice has adapted as a response to the social context and ‘gradually toughened under the influence of social suggestion’ (1927: 895). The coarse voice, then, conforms to the male identity norm in the particular cultural context, replacing the soft voice which, Sapir notes, is ‘symptomatic of a delicate psychic organization’ that did not achieve the social norm (1927: 895). As Jacqueline Sachs states, ‘adult men and women may modify their articulators, lowering or raising their formant frequencies to produce voices that aim toward male/female archetypes’ (Sachs in Talbot 1998: 31–2). These statements demonstrate how the voice may be adapted to conform to the social norm, or what Sapir refers to as the ‘social standard of intonation’. However, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet emphasise the role of the voice in confirming but also undermining male identity:
tone and pitch of voice, patterns of intonations (or ‘tunes’), choice of vocabulary, even pronunciations and grammatical patterns can signal gendered aspects of the speaker’s self-presentation … the association of these linguistic devices with feminine or masculine ideals makes them potential material to reproduce – or challenge – a conservative discourse of femininity and masculinity. (2003: 60–1)
Not only do the sounds of the voice signify gender, in particular connoting gendered ideals and confirming traditional discourses of masculinity (or femininity), but the voice is also able to undermine such discourses. Elsewhere, I have discussed how language is used in David Mamet’s plays and films to assert male power, such as the excessive use of expletives and overlapping speech, but such attempts also undermine masculinity through their excess and demonstrating ‘loss of control through how the words are spoken: in broken, incomplete sentences with recurrent pauses and repetitions’ (Peberdy 2007). Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s statement points to the speaker’s self-awareness in how they choose to sound-constructed in accordance with the ‘speaker’s self-presentation’. The sounds of the voice are also ultimately read in accordance with social norms; the coarse language of ‘Mametspeak’ fits in with the predominantly male competitive environments of the office (Glengarry Glen Ross, 1984, 1992), police precinct (Homicide, 1991) and film industry (Speed-the-Plow, 1988; State and Main, 2000).
The modification of voice in order to ‘fit in’ with the norm can be seen in the way the voices of some film actors reflect the genre they appear in. Gill Branston, for example, suggests that the male voice in the western is ‘hard, parched, and strained’ to reflect the landscape of the film; the male voice in thrillers often has a kind of ‘mobility which allows a deadpan wit to be delivered’, and the tough males presented in genres such as the western and the thriller are generally portrayed with a deep and controlled voice with a limited vocal range (1995: 38, 39). The difficulty, however, lies in determining whether the actor’s voice is already ‘hard, parched, and strained’, instigating their casting in a particular film, or whether the voice is adapted for the performance. Examining how dialogue is reflective of genre, Sarah Kozloff offers examples that highlight the flexibility of the voice as an acting tool and how the voice can and has been manipulated by certain actors to convey a character – in The Godfather (1972), for example, Brando’s ‘Don Corleone speaks slowly, with quiet dignity, and yet the voice is flavoured by a raspy texture, a cracked quality, conveying a melange of ethnicity, earthiness, and naturalism’; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice, on the other hand, is naturally monotone and, Kozloff suggests, his voice makes him ‘fitting for machine men like the Terminator’ (2000: 225, 94). The implication from both studies is that actors can use their natural voice to convey a character, such as Schwarzenegger’s monotone, and they can manipulate the qualities of their voice such as with Brando; the voice, to borrow from Erving Goffman (1959), is a combination of ‘given’ (intentionally performed) and ‘given-off’ (unintentional).
As the sounds of the voice have gendered implications, speech impediments are also gender related, offering a direct challenge to stereotypical notions of the masculine voice. Studies have shown that stuttering is at least four times as likely to appear in males as females. Marcel Wingate, for example, argues that stuttering is chromosomal rather than cultural since, physiologically, males are the more vulnerable sex (2002: 374). The classification of impediments as untraditional, abnormal speech is evident in the language used to describe them: speech
disfluency, speech
defect, speech
disorder. Even speech
impediment implies something which is obstructed or blocked, only appropriate in describing some vocalisations. This is speech defined as much by lack (lack of fluency, coherence, order) as it is by excess (speech that overflows, is uncontrollable and uncontainable). In examining the voice on-screen I would suggest speech
affectation is a more appropriate term. While affectation is extremely broad in what it refers to, its dual meaning – referring both to a particular behavioural mannerism and to the artificial or exaggerated adoption of a style or behaviour – enables the term to be applied not only to those instances where a person has a particular speech impediment but also when a speech impediment is ‘put on’ or performed. In
Acting in the Cinema, James Naremore uses the term ‘biological performance’ to describe those instances where ‘biology disrupts art’ such as
Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) and Andy Warhol’s
Sleep (1963) (1988: 20). A performer with an actual speech impediment could certainly be read in terms of his biological performance, yet the impediment may be accentuated, controlled, or even hidden. The impediment on-screen also exists within a wider performance frame, subject to the manipulations of the director, camera and other cinematic elements.
As the two case studies explored here indicate, the vocal affectation on-screen highlights the difficulties in considering the screen voice as given and given-off, simulated or ‘biological’. The remainder of this essay focuses on the speech affectations of two actors in particular in order to further explore the role of the voice in constructing and challenging male identity. First, a consideration of Humphrey Bogart’s lisp – a speech affectation that could be considered as ‘given-off’ – reveals the various techniques that have been employed in film to displace the challenge to male identity presented by the lisp in order to validate the actor’s ‘tough’ masculinity. Second, the significance of James Earl Jones’ stutter is examined, a speech affectation the actor disclosed in his autobiography in 1993. The focus here is on A Family Thing (1996), the only film where Jones has ‘allowed his stutter to happen’, which foregrounds the ambiguity of the speech affectation on screen and in performance.
VOCAL ANGST: BOGART’S LISP
Humphrey Bogart’s voice certainly conforms to cultural expectations of a male voice. It is a low voice, and gravelly; it is also a head voice and rather nasal, and he speaks through almost closed teeth. Added to this, his voice has a slight growl, or buzzing, that is accentuated in moments of anger or outburst and evident in films such as
In a Lonely Place (1950). Gilles Deleuze has poetically described his voice as ‘a metallic voice … a boring voice – it’s a kind of thread which sends out a sort of very very very special sonorous particles. It’s a metallic thread that unwinds, with a minimum of intonation’ (1998: 215). His voice also conforms to Branston’s description of the voice in the thriller: deep and controlled with a limited vocal range. Yet the actor’s lisp threatens to undermine his seemingly secure status as the quintessential hardboiled hero and icon of ‘tough’ masculinity and ‘supremely masculine’ private investigator (see Mellen 1977: 153).
The lisp has been described as ‘the most celebrated of effeminate characteristics’ (Rogoff and van Leer 1993: 746). It is, ultimately, defective speech or what Irit Rogoff and David van Leer call ‘non-traditional speech patterns’ (ibid.) most evident in the drawing out or mispronunciation of the sibilant ‘s’. Sapir has suggested that there are two types of lisp, the speech defect and the ‘symbolic lisp’ whereby the man is ‘unconsciously symbolizing certain traits which lead those who know him to speak of him as a “sissy”’ (1927: 902). He argues that rather than an inability to properly pronounce the ‘s’ sound, he is ‘driven to reveal himself’ by putting the lisp on, once again highlighting the connection between the voice that is given-off (speech defect) and the voice that is given (symbolic lisp), between ‘involuntary biological performance’ and associated connotations (ibid.). Numerous studies have been carried out since Sapir’s writings that have found little evidence to connect the lisp with homosexuality yet, despite this research, the speech impediment has become associated in popular culture with homosexuality and also sexual deviancy. As Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick note, with only a hint of sarcasm:
A lisp in a man … has for a long time been widely imagined to be, if not a dead giveaway, then at least a strong clue that he may not be heterosexual. If that lisping man should mention hair or flowers or poodles, then the game is all but up. And if he should happen to employ a qualifier like ‘lovely’, ‘adorable’, or ‘fabulous’ while chatting about a hairdo, a hyacinth, or Fifi, then the prosecution can rest its case. The man is a fag. (2003: 75–6)
The lisp, then, is suggestive of sexuality before the words are spoken; it is how it is said that indicates homosexuality rather than what is said. One only need think of a handful of screen villains who exemplify the sexually and socially deviant nature of the drawn out ‘s’: Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon and M (1931), Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films (2001–11), or Jeremy Irons as Scar in The Lion King (1994). However, for now I am more interested in those examples where the lisp goes against the performance of masculinity offered by the film rather than conforming to the construction of character.
In their ‘dossier on masculinities’, Rogoff and van Leer argue that ‘apart from the homosexuality it is thought to signify, the lisp has no meaning’ (1993: 746). Yet Bogart’s lisp presented another way for the studio system to package and promote the actor, creating meaning through his speech affectation. A great deal of mythology surrounds Bogart’s lisp, with numerous stories circulating as to how the actor obtained it. One story has it that Bogart got a splinter in his lip as a child; another notes a failed operation; another cites partial facial paralysis after being wounded by shelling when Bogart was in the Navy. It is significant that in each story Bogart
obtained the lisp rather than simply
having a speech impediment; his lisp is a physical injury, not a defect. Such stories can be seen as a strategy by the studio system to protect, and enhance, the image of tough masculinity presented by Bogart at a time when homosexuality was considered a pathology and post-war American audiences, according to Steven Cohan, already ‘viewed the tough movie hero’s virility with decided ambivalence’ (1997: 121). Yet the lisp, as a result of its social connotations, still offers a challenge to the tough persona and means the rest of the body, and voice, need to work twice as hard to protect it.
The Big Sleep (1946) offers a clear instance of where the challenge presented by Bogart’s lisp is dealt with via the actor’s self-conscious parody of his speech affectation. Bogart as Philip Marlowe is investigating a blackmail case, and his search takes him to Geiger’s Rare Bookstore. In an attempt to reveal the bookstore is a front, Bogart enters the store disguised as a customer trying to locate ‘a Ben Hur 1860, third edition with an erratum on page 116’, knowing full well that no such book exists. His physical masquerade sees him put on a pair of sunglasses and turn up the brim of his hat, except it is his vocal performance that has the biggest effect in the creation of his new character. Bogart’s voice softens, the pace of his line delivery quickens, and he pulls his top lip down so the sounds reverberate through his bottom set of teeth, accentuating his lisp so that each word collides with the next. His usually nasal voice becomes even more nasal, his pitch becomes higher with more fluctuations, and fricatives are lengthened.
2 Bogart takes the characteristics of his natural voice and plays on them, resulting in a queerness that the actor is not usually associated with.
Bogart draws attention to the voice as the bearer of queerness in the scene by pressing his finger to his teeth, pushing back his top lip, encouraging the viewer to concentrate on the movement of his bottom lip. This contrasts his use of lips and voice in the next scene in Acme Books where the actor returns to his usual method of speaking through his teeth and barely moving his jaw. By way of these two scenes alone, Bogart the private detective is defined through his stiff jaw, impassive mouth and almost monotone voice, in comparison to the more animated caricature in the preceding scene. The scene in Geiger’s Bookstore accentuates Bogart’s tough masculinity by directly calling attention to the actor’s lisp. The lisp in this scene is aligned with queerness, yet does not undermine Bogart’s tough masculinity precisely because of this self-conscious play: Bogart performs a character performing effeminacy.
Humphrey Bogart draws attention to the voice in The Big Sleep.
It was a typical Hollywood casting strategy to have secondary characters enhance and complement a star’s performance, such as the repeated ‘coupling’ of Rock Hudson and Tony Randall.
3 This method of coupling not only applies to characterisations but also operates on a vocal level. With Bogart, the lisp is both called attention to and its excessiveness displaced through the layering or bracketing of voices in his films. In
The Maltese Falcon, for example, Bogart’s voice is buffered against Peter Lorre’s effeminate and sinister Joel Cairo. Lorre’s higher-pitch, elongated vowels, and pronounced hiss offer a stark contrast to Bogart’s deep and terse diction, his lisp is hidden in the film’s soundscape as a result of Lorre’s unnatural and exaggerated intonation, a tactic that was repeated in the pairing of Bogart and Lorre in
Casablanca (1942),
Passage to Marseilles (1944) and
Beat the Devil (1954). The method of bracketing can be heard in the exchanges between Bogart’s voice and actresses with low-pitched voices, particularly the huskiness of Lauren Bacall’s voice in
The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not (1944),
Dark Passage (1947) and
Key Largo (1948).
Dark Passage is particularly intriguing for its foregrounding of the actor’s lisp via the voice-over. Bogart plays the character of Vincent Parry, a prison escapee wrongly convicted for murdering his wife. In a desperate attempt to change his identity, Parry undergoes a face lift so that he is no longer recognisable to the police. In an inventive twist on the star vehicle, Bogart’s face is not revealed until an hour into the film; Bogart is heard but his face is not seen. Dark Passage offers a variation on a familiar generic signifier so that the voice-over is both embodied – we know the identity of the voice – but also disembodied at the same time. For the first hour, the viewer is teased with fragments of his body until the final reveal takes place. We see his arms, his suspicious wet feet, a full rear shot when he discards his conspicuous prison shirt, and his face in the back of a taxi but in heavy shadow. When we finally see his face after forty minutes it is covered in bandages, which are not removed for a further twenty minutes.
For one hour, Bogart’s voice is dominant; it is what Michel Chion terms the complete
acousmêtre: ‘the one who is not-yet-seen, but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any moment’ (1999: 22). For Chion, the acousmatic voice inscribes the person with ‘acousmatic powers’ until ‘unveiling his body and face has the effect of breaking the spell, re-assigning the character to an ordinary fate, taking away his mythic aura and putative powers’ (1999: 100). Disembodying the voice also has the effect of centring attention on its vocal properties since the viewer has nothing to do but listen. In the opening scene, after Bogart has escaped from prison, miraculously unscathed after throwing himself down a hillside in the metal barrel he was hiding in, he launches into a speech that showcases the peculiarities of his voice:
They’ll catch the truck.
Question the driver, search the barrels.
Inside five minutes they’ll be starting back this way, slow.
Combing the road, looking sharp.
Take maybe ten minutes.
See, that gives me fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes.
I gotta start taking chances.
What I wouldn’t give for some ice water or a smoke.
Gotta get out of here.
Hope I buried my shirt deep enough. S’a dead give away.
Here comes something.
Gotta take that chance, now.
Ordinarily, the voice-over in film noir functions to enhance audience identification, to tell us about a character’s motivations or create sympathy on the part of the protagonist. However, Bogart’s interior voice in the opening sequence does not add anything to the visual sequence that preceded the speech. The theatrical, if not poetic, delivery functions to draw our attention to the sounds of the voice. Every sentence has a word that draws attention to Bogart’s lisp: ‘They’ll catch the truck’, ‘search the barrels’ and a collision of sibilants and fricatives in the repetition of ‘fifteen minutes’.
While the dialogue draws attention to Bogart’s lisp, highlighting the fact that the actor has difficulty forming ‘s’ sounds, the voice-over functions to deflect the challenge offered by the lisp, restoring Bogart to the privileged position of narrator. In contrast to the layering of voices in
The Maltese Falcon or the self-conscious play in
The Big Sleep, the singling out of Bogart’s voice at the start of
Dark Passage has the effect of implying this is an ‘authentic’ voice, even more so because it is a subjective voice. As a basic noir convention, the voice-over provides subjectivity, literally giving a voice to the thoughts and anxieties of the male protagonist. As J. P. Telotte notes, the voice-over creates an ‘I’ ‘whose most basic purpose is to provide us with a privileged and personal “eye” on the world’ (1989:16). The subjective narration in
Dark Passage validates Bogart’s male identity by positioning him as controlling and commanding since the voice-over, as Kaja Silverman notes, aligns the male subject with ‘potency, authoritative knowledge, and the law – in short, with the symbolic father’ (1988: 164).
While the lisp has often been considered as a defect, an impediment that carries with it a host of connotations including effeminacy, homosexuality and deviance, studying Bogart’s lisp reveals the strategies adopted to contain and disavow such ‘threats’ to the actor’s masculinity. Moreover, scenes such as Geiger’s Bookstore in The Big Sleep and the opening of Dark Passage imply a self-conscious awareness of the allegorical properties of the lisp whereby the impediment is purposefully highlighted and even embellished. Rather than undermine Bogart’s masculinity, his toughness is bolstered by the singling out and emphasising of the lisp: in the first example, the lisp is over-exaggerated, presenting Bogart’s ‘authentic’ lisp as normal in comparison; in the second, the authority of the noir voice-over calls attention to and, at the same time, suppresses the connotative qualities of the impediment. Yet Bogart’s lisp is ultimately ever-present in his films, accentuated in some roles and scenes more than others. James Earl Jones’ speech impediment, on the other hand, only features in one film role to date and, for the rest of his roles, his speech affectation remains ‘controlled’ and hidden. Jones’ stutter complicates the relationship between performance and speech impediment, further blurring the line between ‘authentic’ impediment and performance.
VOICES AND SILENCES: JAMES EARL JONES PERFORMING STUTTERING
On stage and screen, Jones’ burly physique and commanding presence have seen him cast as authoritative characters with power and stature, for which he has been awarded two Tony awards, a Golden Globe, an Emmy and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Yet it is for his voice work rather than stage and screen acting that Jones is most famous, particularly as the voice of Hollywood’s ultimate ‘bad’ and ‘good’ fathers – Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83) and Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King (1994) – as well as the commanding voice of CNN and Verizon. If a masculine voice is ‘hard, gravelly, and resonant’ as Mary Talbot suggested, Jones’ extremely deep, baritone voice is surely the epitome of masculinity. When Jones was awarded the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2009, SAG President Alan Rosenberg called Jones ‘a vocal presence without peer’.
James Earl Jones offers a particularly thought-provoking case study. An actor most famous for his impediment-free deep baritone voice, which has reinforced his dominating stage and screen presence as respected figures of authority, Jones’ voice becomes all the more intriguing, considering the actor spent much of his childhood with a debilitating stutter and was virtually mute for eight years. While the actor’s on-screen voice and physique confirm his associations with traditional masculinity, his masculine status and powerful voice are perpetually threatened by the stutter that the actor still possesses, a speech impediment that Jones notes ‘always threatened to sabotage me’ (Jones and Niven 1993: 146).
While the lisp, as suggested above, holds sinister and deviant associations in popular culture, the stutterer is often visually and aurally aligned with weakness, vulnerability and sexual immaturity, particularly, though not limited to, comedic representation and stereotype. It is often erroneously presented as something which can be ‘cured’ by solving some psychological insecurity affecting the individual. For example, Billy Bibbit’s stutter in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is cured once Billy has sex with a prostitute, suggesting his stutter stems from his abnormal adult virginity; in
A Fish Called Wanda (1988), an act of violence cures Ken Pile’s (Michael Palin) stuttering, aligning his stutter with physical weakness and vulnerability; more recently, in
The King’s Speech (2010), King George VI (Colin Firth) works with speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) to overcome his stutter that is blamed on a traumatic childhood.
4In the very little that has been written about representations of stuttering, there is a concern with differentiating between instances where stuttering is performed or ‘put on’ and instances where the stutter is true or authentic. Such readings go little further than categorising representations into positive and negative, authentic and artificial. Even acting and voice coaching manuals that mention the performance of speech impediments (which is very rarely) reinforce this dichotomy. ‘To imitate speech defects is not so easy as it looks’, wrote Rollo Anson Talcott; ‘many readers attempt it and fondly imagine that they are succeeding when in reality they are overdoing it’ (1922: 120). Indeed, writing eighty years later voice coach Patsy Rodenburg pleads, ‘With all these extreme vocal characterizations, please try to make them real. I’ve watched too many actors create a sound and leave it there; a cosmetic and possibly insulting re-creation of someone’s battle with their voice. The work must always move into the organic and be compassionate’ (2002: 160). What is particularly intriguing about such statements is the emphasis on making the speech affectation real. Jeffrey Johnson, for example, although focusing in the main on negative representations of stuttering, singles out James Earl Jones’ ‘realistic’ stutter in A Family Thing (1996) and implies that being a ‘real life’ stutterer validates his performance (2008: 258 n.7). By this reasoning, the only authentic stutter is one that is real and not performed, biological not enacted. A number of news stories following the release of The King’s Speech reported Firth’s difficulty in losing the stutter he acquired for the role: ‘There are moments when it’s quite infectious’, the actor commented, ‘I’ve got myself to a place where I was really trying to speak and sometimes it felt that way’ (Firth in Carbone 2011 and Ward 2011). The stutter was not something put on and taken off but ‘developed’ and ‘struggled against’ thus adding to the sense of authenticity.
A Family Thing is a significant case study not because it does or does not present an authentic stutter but because Jones’ stutter works with and against the image of masculinity presented in the film, and by the actor more generally. In describing his performance here, Jones noted how the stutter slipped out by accident during a take; director Richard Pearce suggested he add the stutter to give the character more depth. ‘It was the first time I was ever asked to allow the stuttering to happen’, the actor has commented (Jones in Ratliff 1996: W22). That the stutter ‘happened’ reinforces associations of the speech affectation with weakness and lack of control; the stutter is an uncontrolled vocal malfunction that undermines normal speech. Not only was the stutter allowed to happen, but the director encouraged this defective speech in order to make the character more vulnerable: ‘The person this character is based on’, Jones points out, ‘is real Chicago, real slick, real tough, [the director] wanted him to be less slick and less tough than that’ (ibid.). While the sound of Jones’ stutter may be more believable, more authentic, as Johnson suggests, it seems the motivations behind allowing the stutter reinforce the stereotype of the stutterer as vulnerable or weak.
Stuttering, then, differentiates itself from the lisp in its emphasis on control. The stutter is something that can be hidden, can be controlled through techniques such as vocal training to achieve a measured, well-paced, even tone, breathing techniques, avoidance of certain words, singing or reading poetry. Indeed, the relationship between stuttering, control and the voice as muscle is foregrounded in James Earl Jones’ commentary on his affectation. In his autobiography, he refers to his voice as ‘the lost muscle … the weak muscle of speech’ going on to note:
The weak muscle can become the dominant muscle, either out of obsession with the weakness or a genuine endeavour to correct it. […] I had often frozen or stammered or turned mute when problems confronted me in real life, and sometimes it seemed that the harder I worked, the murkier my speech would become. … As I probed the emotions of a character in a scene, my voice would betray me, bogging down as if swamped in the sounds. Sometimes my speech would accelerate with emotion, and my words would race with each other; rapid as heartbeats in a footrace. (Jones and Nivens 1993: 91; 101–2)
A Family Thing is the only film where Jones has ‘played’ a stutterer. The film centres on Earl Pilcher (Robert Duvall) from smalltown Arkansas who discovers that his birth mother was a black maid and that he has an older brother living in Chicago. Earl travels to Chicago to meet his brother Ray Murdoch, played by Jones, and the remainder of the film charts the two men’s struggle to come to terms with this new revelation. At no point is Ray’s stutter performed to comic effect; he is a widower and father (not sexually immature), a respected policeman (not deviant), assertive and authoritative (not weak and vulnerable). His stutter is so slight in the film that it is barely noticeable with only a handful of occurrences for the entire duration. Rather than present Ray as a stereotypical stutterer, he is a three-dimensional character with a stutter. In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s words, the ‘unpredictable occurrences of his stutter conjure up the complexities of a living, breathing individual’ (1996: 27).
Each occurrence, however, is inscribed with meaning. Twice, Ray stutters when saying the words ‘r-r-respect’, ‘r-r-responsibility’ and then ‘r-r-rush off’. Each time it is the ‘r’ that causes a block, but more significantly these are words which involve Ray at his most vulnerable: talking about his son’s respect for him as a patriarch, taking responsibility for his family and his family taking responsibility for him, and suggesting that his brother who he has spent the whole film trying to hurry back to Arkansas need not rush off immediately (as he is now aware of the link the two have formed). Far from being ‘allowed to happen’, stuttering is performed at poignant moments in the film narrative, telling moments that reveal character development and complexity – a stutter that reveals Ray’s authentic masculinity hidden behind his policeman bravado and stubborn arrogance that stops him from accepting Earl as his brother. Rather than a random blockage of certain words and sounds – a stutter that is involuntary and ‘given-off’ – Jones’ stutter in
A Family Thing is utter performance, deliberately used to emphasise certain words in the dialogue to highlight his character’s vulnerability. Instead of undermining Ray’s masculinity, his stutter humanises his character and provides an insight into his struggle with accepting Earl as his brother.
Crucially, this is only achieved because of the image of masculinity presented in addition to the speech affectation: the large burly frame, the deep baritone voice, the position of authority offered by his profession. The stutter may go against the image of masculinity presented but the hypermasculinity offered by the exceptionally deep, resonant voice and sturdy physique counterbalances the occasional stutter. Not only are these hypermasculine characteristics presented in the wider film, but are evident in Jones’ previous roles. He has repeatedly been cast as characters with power and stature, including the first black President of the United States (The Man, 1972), a King (Coming to America, 1988), an Admiral (The Hunt for Red October, 1990; Patriot Games, 1992; Clear and Present Danger, 1994), a Judge (Sommersby, 1993), and a minister (The Vernon Johns Story, 1994; Cry, the Beloved Country, 1995). The sound and image of masculinity presented in the film, but also in Jones’ wider acting repertoire, protect the actor from the connotative ‘threats’ of the speech impediment.
For too long, the voice has been blocked in discussions of gender on-screen. It is time to release the voice, to give due attention to the performative properties of the voice and acknowledge the part it plays in constructing identity. Considering the speech affectations of Bogart and Jones demonstrates not just the centrality of the voice to the construction of persona, character and gender, but also how a voice can undermine that construction, its very vocal tenets starkly opposing the characteristics of a gendered identity. Bogart’s voice, while conforming to the vocal identifiers of tough masculinity in some respects – the deep voice, gravelly hoarseness, terseness and abruptness – also challenges tough masculinity through the vocal affectation of the lisp. James Earl Jones’ strong and authoritative masculinity is persistently at risk by the threat of his stutter, or what he calls his ‘weak muscle’. With Bogart, methods such as vocal bracketing or self-conscious play are foregrounded in order to help disavow or displace this challenge. With Jones the stutter is contained for the majority of his roles and, when uncovered, is controlled and used intentionally to highlight character and emotion. Ultimately, the affectation may threaten to emasculate, to negatively affect the image of male identity; but when it is heard on screen, whether ‘biological’ or simulated, it is a performance, and therefore subject to control and manipulation along with any other part of the body.
1 See Johnson and Meinhof 1997. The numerous studies examining the male singing voice are an exception; see, for example, McCracken 2001; Lehman 2003; Lusted 2003: 111-117; Smith 2008: 226–32.
2 For more on the ‘phonetic characteristics of “The Voice” for gay men’, see Zwicky 1997: 26–31.
3 For more on the relationship between stars and supporting characters see McClure and Twomey 1999. For a discussion of the pairing of Hudson and Randall in particular, see Glitre 2006: 159-180.
4 For further examples of media representations of stuttering, see Johnson 2008.
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