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Hi, it's Willa, and this episode is a first for Decoder Ring. It's a live show. At the end of May, we were invited to be part of the WBUR Festival in Boston. WBUR is one of Boston's public radio stations, and it's celebrating its 75th anniversary. We thought it'd be fun to take the opportunity to explore a Boston-specific mystery.
the result of which is this episode about Boston movies. Warning that many of these movies contain a ton of cursing, some of which you will be hearing very shortly. In other words, this episode contains explicit language. So please, enjoy. Here's Decoder Ring live from the WBUR Festival in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. ♪
Hi, thank you so much for being here on this sunny, rainy day. So Decoder Ring's whole thing is that we crack cultural mysteries. We take a cultural question, habit or idea, try to figure out what it means and why it matters. And given that we are here in Boston, we would thought we would take on a specifically Boston based mystery
Which is? We thought we would take on the mystery of the Boston movie. So when I say a Boston movie, I don't mean a movie that just happens to be set in Boston, a movie that could just as easily be set in New York or Chicago or Toronto. I'm talking about a movie drenched in Boston's particularities, its crimes, its cops, its
It's class conflicts. It's accents. When the cops gonna learn, huh? This town don't talk. Fucking families dogging in the salty projects like ticks. You, however, grew up on the North Shore, huh? Mr. Fucking Clean and Mr. Fucking Goddamn Hide and Mighty, right? Yeah, I'm better than anybody in this fucking project. You grew up right here. I grew up with him in salty.
And that is a bond that doesn't get broken. So there are a lot of Boston movies, Mystic River, The Departed, Gone Baby Gone, The Town, The Fighter, Black Mass, and more besides. They often feature an actor with the surname Damon, Affleck, or Wahlberg. There are two Afflecks, there are more Wahlbergs. And they have become such a staple that they may not seem strange to you. But I want you to give me a minute to rewild this kind of movie and to point out that it is in fact...
kind of weird that Boston has a cinematic subgenre all its own. And I want to start to make it weird by looking at the whole latter half of the 20th century, during which period Boston appeared in a totally unremarkable number of films.
Don't get me wrong. There were movies set in Boston in the 70s and 80s. You had, among others, The Caper, The Brinks Job, the Paul Newman courtroom drama, The Verdict, the sexy art heist film, The Thomas Crown Affair, and the love story, Love Story. Jenny, I'm sorry.
Love means never having to say you're sorry. What a weird movie. Anyway, okay. So this was a respectable number of films, but it was not a notably robust one. And with the possible exception of the crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a movie that film critics in particular love to mention, they're all pretty far from the Boston movie tropes of today.
These movies aren't dripping in misdeeds, the working class, or even accents. When Paul Newman played a Boston lawyer in The Verdict, he did not drop a single R. When they remade The Thomas Crown Affair, Boston was so incidental, they just changed the setting to New York. So this was the first era of Boston movies. It was pretty indistinct. But then, just before the end of the new millennium, a new era arrived. I want a way out of here for her. I mean, I'm going to fucking live here the rest of my life.
Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way, but in 20 years, if you're still living here, coming over to my house to watch the Patriots game, you're still working construction, I'll fucking kill you.
So when Good Will Hunting was released in 1997, it not only turned Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into cinematic stars, it turned Boston into one too. Now, Good Will Hunting is not a crime movie, but a charismatic working class guy from South Boston was its title character, its hero. And in the wake of its success came a spate of smaller movies that also highlighted the city's untapped potential for grit. Monument Avenue, Southie, Boondock Saints,
And if you'll permit me now to take a glance over at TV, this is when the producer David E. Kelly, the creator of the Boston-based series Ally McBeal and The Practice started putting the word Boston into the titles of his TV shows. This is when you get Boston Legal and Boston Public.
Boston had cachet. Soon Clint Eastwood was optioning Boston crime novelists, Martin Scorsese was setting his remake of a Hong Kong thriller in Boston, and the city's native movie star son seemed singularly focused on making as many films as they could here. Films that were, as I suggested previously, disproportionately now about crimes. 370 bank robberies in Boston last year.
It's more per capita than anywhere else in the world. I just mule. Occasionally not making a habit out of it. Jesus, Mary Angel. Lionel, what does that mean? It means she's a drug runner, B. It means she carries drugs. Isn't that right, Elaine? Oh my God, a few times. I don't want to overstate things. There absolutely have been very Boston movies in this era that are not crime movies. Romantic comedies about the Red Sox.
less romantic comedies about a giant foul-mouthed teddy bear, an Oscar-winning drama about investigative reporting into the Catholic Church. But these films goose and boost the overall effect. Boston is all over the movies.
And respectfully, as I stand here in your fair city, Boston is not that big. Population-wise, El Paso is bigger. So are Jacksonville, San Jose, and San Antonio. Even when you're taking into account the larger metropolitan area of Boston, Phoenix and Houston are much larger still. And these cities aren't the setting of many particularly memorable films. So how did Boston come to be home to a subgenre all its own?
So this is Decodering, live from WBR City Space in Boston. I'm Willa Paskin. In this episode, with the help of three guests, we're going to look closely at the history, heyday, and present of the Boston movie. We're going to talk about how race, ethnicity, and class have enabled its persistence just as much as Bafleck and Bulger and all those accents. So today on Decodering, what makes a Boston movie a Boston movie?
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The first guest we invited onto the stage at the WBUR Festival to help us make sense of the Boston movie was Ty Burr. Ty is a movie critic who's been writing and thinking about films for over 40 years. He currently writes and thinks about movies at Ty Burr's Watchlist and for the Washington Post. And he worked for decades at the Boston Globe. He is also a lifelong Bostonian by way of Brookline.
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to start by looking a little more closely at the earlier era of movies I was speaking of because I think it will help highlight what's changed. And one of the reasons that there were not more Boston movies before Good Will Hunting is because Boston was sort of a notoriously difficult place to shoot. And I was hoping you could tell me why. Yeah.
It was a terrible place to come and make films for a variety of reasons. The weather. I mean, Hollywood is invented because people wanted to get away from the East Coast weather. But it's not just that. The unions were particularly, notably bad in this town. And I'm talking about specifically the Teamsters.
would shake down any film crew that would come to town. And there's a story that I told you earlier about the Brinks job, which is one of my favorite stories of Boston filmmaking. And it really sums up the attitude of the Boston public toward movie makers. So when William Friedkin was shooting the Brinks job here in the early 70s in the North End, which is about the Brinks robbery in the 1940s,
He was shooting a scene on a north end street and he noticed there was an air conditioner in one of the windows in the film set in the 40s and can't have an air conditioner. So he sends a production assistant says, here, here's here's two hundred dollars. Go give those people some money and tell them to take the AC out of the window. And they did. And the next day, the crew comes back to shoot some more. And every window has an air conditioner in it.
And that is Boston. That is absolutely Boston's attitude toward, yeah, okay, fine, give us the money, we'll take out our air conditioners. But there really wasn't a reason to film in Boston until Good Will Hunting came along, and there was a lot of reasons not to film in Boston. And those movies, this sort of earlier period of the Boston movie, like, insofar as they are quintessentially Boston in any way, like...
My sense is it's sort of about blue bloodedness. Yes. Yes. I mean, you mentioned all those other cities that are bigger than us. They don't have the history and the place in the history books and the institutionalism that Boston has.
and the roots that go back to the Mayflower, etc. And that has a purchase in the American imagination. And that sort of dominated the popular idea of Boston really up until recent decades. Boston was certainly not about its working class, wasn't about its Irish population. It wasn't about South Boston. It was about Beacon Hill. It was about Harvard. You know, that's why you have...
Even though Love Story was not filmed in Harvard, it's set at Harvard. In fact, Harvard never allows any filming. So all those movies that are set at Harvard are all shot at like UCLA with a couple of Cambridge exteriors. Hey, I'm having coffee with the real Harvard building. You're Barry Hall. No, I'm not Barry.
There was this one movie from 1973 called The Friends of Eddie Coyle that honestly, Robert Mitchum stars in it. It's not like a nothing movie, but you really only encounter when you're talking to people about like, where do these Boston movies come from? Everyone's like, have you seen, have you ever heard about The Friends of Eddie Coyle? Right.
That ain't right. You set me up. Look, Eddie, the only one fucking Eddie Coyle is Eddie Coyle.
Friends of Eddie Coyle is based on a novel by George V. Higgins, like a crime novel. But can you just tell me about that film? Because it's sort of like the ancestor of these movies. Yes, it is. And it would not exist without George V. Higgins, who was the antecedent to Dennis Lehane. And Dennis Lehane goes out of his way to name check as much as possible. George V. Higgins was a Boston lawyer who turned to novel writing. Friends of Eddie Coyle was his first novel. But he was very prolific until his early death. You should read his stuff. But Friends of Eddie Coyle is based on a novel by George V. Higgins.
Friends of Eddie Coyle was the only one that was turned into a movie while he was alive. And it's an antecedent to the Boston wave of movies that we got after Good Will Hunting in that it's the first one to really address not just Beacon Hill, but every place else in Boston. And in fact, if you read any of Higgins' novels, they travel all over Boston and are very geographically neighborhood specific.
So he really knew the city deep, deep, deep in its bones. And that comes across in its books, but also in The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the screenplay and the film itself. So when Good Will Hunting arrives, it's like this pivot point. Do you like apples? Yeah. Well, I got a number.
How do you like them, man? What is the thing that it is doing? Like, how does it inaugurate this new era? What is it introducing to the movies they didn't have before? Dramatic class conflict.
that's there in this fundamental idea of a kid from the wrong side of the tracks from South Boston who is a prodigy and comes to Harvard, comes to the city's institutions, a kid from outside the institution coming to deal with the city's institutions. And it's right there in that scene that you showed, how you like them apples, because he's showing to some snobby guy that he got the girl. And that attitude is very much appreciated
boiled into, I would say, the popular personality and certainly the public perception of working class Boston, working class Irish Boston, those neighborhoods that it's very much up yours. We're going to show you Richies what it's all about. And then there's just inherent dramatic conflict there. And also just like because Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were so young and handsome and won the Oscar so charmingly for the screenplay, I think it just sort of seems like it was like, oh, there's this whole world
Yes. It's untapped. And then you start to see people sort of tapping it and then it kind of reaches this imperial phase like a couple years later when Clint Eastwood makes Mystic River. That feels like it's when the genre sort of like steps into the big time.
And none of which would have happened without Dennis Lehane, I would say. Lehane's novels are imbued in Southie and Dorchester. And Mystic River takes place in a fictional neighborhood called The Flats that's basically every working class neighborhood in Boston sort of boiled into one. But without those novels, you would not have Mystic River. You would not have The Departed, which is not based on Lehane, but feeds off of that same thing. You wouldn't have Gone Baby Gone. You wouldn't have The Town. You wouldn't have any of those movies. To my mind,
He, standing on the shoulders of Higgins, created this genre that then Hollywood immediately jumped on for obvious reasons. If you had to define what makes a Boston movie a Boston movie, what is the animating thing for you? I have a certain frustration in that I think there are many Boston movies and people have been fixated mostly on one. Sorry. Which is the Boston... No, but it...
It's hard not to be that way when, for one thing, we have one of the most charismatic gangsters on the planet running around, you know, running the city pretty much. Few mobsters have ever been as infamous in the city as Whitey Bulger was in Boston. Besides extortion and flooding the city with cocaine, Bulger routinely performed or ordered executions. No.
Not only was he a charismatic gangster, he had a charismatic brother who was in the state government. I mean, you can't come up with a, you know, a screenplay or a story that's more outrageous than that. That's one of the things I think Black Mask got right. I don't think that's a great movie, but it does get that weird Bulger-brother duality right. Southie kids, we went straight from playing cops and robbers on the playground to doing it for real in the streets. Just like on the playground, it wasn't always easy to tell who's who.
And that speaks to this sort of bifurcated nature of Boston as well-behaved and not well-behaved at all, as murderous and very respectable. We are just getting started. After the break, another guest comes onto the stage and we get into the city of Boston and Boston movies' thorny relationship with race.
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so lisa simmons is the artistic and executive director of the roxbury international film festival which has been running for 25 years and is the largest festival in new england celebrating the filmmaking of people of color she is also a fourth generation bostonian but does not have a boston accent as she just told me many times thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me thank you also seem to know each other we have known each other for a very long time i want to now turn to sort of thinking about
Why Boston? We were starting to get there with Whitey and the history. But I mean, what do you think is, it's a big question, but like if you have to think about why Boston, what do you think? I mean, I think Boston has this, as Ty was saying, it's this history. It's this gritty history. It's perfect for screenwriting.
You have the bad, like Ty said, against the good. You know, you have the gritty neighborhoods, you have the accent that gives a character, you have the architecture that gives a character. So I think that when you have someone like a Dennis Lehane, you know, who's writing about what he knows also, you know, from here, from Bostonian,
that you're getting sort of an authenticity and there are sort of like real people that you can connect to that. And everybody knew Whitey Bulger. And if you're from Boston and if you knew Boston back in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, it was a very gritty city all over the city, whether you were in Charlestown, whether you were in Southview, whether you were in Dorchester, whether you were in Roxbury. I mean, it was a city that was trying to find itself and it had these different neighborhoods that all of these things were happening
and all of them had their own characters that you're like,
wow, that is like you want to know more about because we're fascinated with crime and these things. And if I can speak to one thing, I think because the Boston blue blood aspect is so repressive, emotionally repressive, and that's rooted in Puritanism and all of that history, that it causes a heightened reaction among the people who came here later. And I think in that there's inherent dramatic conflict as well.
So you run the Roxbury Film Festival. I do. Which highlights not just crime Boston movies, but the work of filmmakers of color. And one of the things that has been observed about Boston movies is how white they can be.
But particularly sort of in the moment right after Good Will Hunting, so sort of before the imperial phase, there actually are a number of movies by and about people of color. And I was hoping you could tell me about them. Absolutely. So it's really funny because when Good Will Hunting came out in 1997, I believe it was, it was the same time that Squeeze came out, which was written and directed by Robert Patton Spruill, who is a Roxbury native who basically wrote a film about his life, about being a young thug
in Roxbury and really wanted to talk about, you know, sort of his life and how he turned his life around. And what's interesting is, is the film is really about how a mentor turned his life around. - Hang on the street and you bring that madness back up here, you can get us all killed. Life isn't a music video, so don't be fronting around here. We see you buckwilding on the corner and you and me gotta talk.
So they sort of have the same storyline, right? But go in two different directions. Although Rob did get a three picture deal with Miramax after he did Squeeze, but he did not get an Academy Award. It's actually a really great film if you can catch it somewhere. And then after that, you have, you know, another film that comes out in 2001 called Lift.
which was done by Domaine Davis and Carrie Streeter, also from Boston, you know, about a young girl who works at the Prudential Center and starts boosting stuff. Played by Carrie Washington. Yeah, played by Carrie Washington, like her second film that she did. How'd you swing that? I was wearing Christina Perrin yesterday.
They rarely suspect you when you're wearing their shit. I had everybody on the floor talking and laughing. Girl, I could have written that check in crayon. And at the same time, that movie was made. Blue Hell Ave was being made. We set up crack houses all over the South End. Blue Hell and Interval was where we made the bulk of our money. If you wanted cocaine, you didn't come to us. You just phoned it in and we came to you.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that we can't sleep on that, that there were also these movies that were being made in different neighborhoods of Boston that were telling sort of the same sort of crime stories and these coming of age stories. A lot of them were young kids who were trying to figure out how to deal with gangs and get out of the gang culture that was actually happening and rampant in Roxbury at that time, just like the same thing with Good Will Hunting and The Departed, like all of these other things where you had in another section of town, there's violence in a different way.
You know, when you, if you were to Google or to look into research into this, like why the Boston movie yourselves, you would find actually a number of pieces that are sort of like flippantly like, duh, it's about race because you get to have white criminals in Boston. Like A.O. Scott actually gave a quote about it. The fact is Hollywood always prefers to make movies about white people and it is more comfortable making films about white criminals than black criminals. If you wanted to find a white underclass, you can find it in Boston, Southie, Charleston. So I'm curious, like how much do you guys think
race or its absence is like
one of the big whys of the Boston movies, popularity. I think that's interesting what you just said about how people are like, what? White crime? I'm going to, like, you know, it's, I don't know. It's like has this difference to it. It's almost like people are like, well, of course we know black people do crime, but white people do crime? It's like, you know, yeah, let's watch that. That's like, you know, these criminals, they're getting away with everything. And so, I mean, I don't know. Is it a race thing? Is it a...
Yes, it is. And I think that it is a race thing by the fact that Boston's black population is invisible in mainstream Boston movies. The ones you talk about are wonderful movies, but they are little known, really outside of even the black filmmaking community or Boston filmmaking community, even in Boston and virtually unknown around the rest of the country. Why is this? Well, I think...
as in many American cities, but especially in Boston, the black population has been redlined and just absolutely marginalized. And it's not part of the story in the public imagination of what Boston is, the wider American public imagination. And that I think absolutely is
due to their exclusion from Boston's history and Boston's government until recent years. I've always felt that the ultimate Boston movie, the one that really would be truly and totally about Boston, would be about the busing crisis, and nobody here would want to see it.
Right, and we've certainly seen a number of those films in the documentary version, but not necessarily in the narrative version. At least twice, stones and bottles began to fly in the police charge, led by policemen on horseback. The police charges cleared the way for the buses to pick up the black students at the end of the day. I think it is a little bit part of Boston's reputation today.
that like Boston is infamously very racist. I do think it's an elephant in the room, but I think that as Ty's saying, it's sort of like been erased. It's like doesn't want to be part of Boston's history. Boston's an immigrant city of Irish and Italians and...
Are black people part of that immigration story? Oh, no, no, I don't know. You know what I mean? So it's sort of like, let's tell this story because it's an easier story to tell. The story of Boston's black history isn't as easy to tell, right? You know, I've been running the film festival for 27 years and I still have filmmakers that come to Boston and say, there are black people in Boston?
And I'm like, yeah, like a lot of Black people. And because the history doesn't tell it. The history on television doesn't tell it. The history in movies doesn't tell it. The history in books doesn't tell it. Whereas in New York, it does. In other cities, it does.
Because I think it's a much more, they're more transient cities maybe. I'm thinking, you know, Boston has that deep history of being like, this is who we are. You know, the Mayflower, Paul Revere, you know, the Native American community is completely washed away too, is also erased. And maybe it's because it's a history where people have stayed here. So you can stick to one group of people and keep telling that story. So we've talked about, what have we talked about? We talked about the history. We've talked about class conflict a little bit. We've talked about
Crime, Whitey Bulger, we've talked about race. Are there any other whys of Boston you think that we haven't hit on? You know, you do have the Ben Affleck and you do have the Mark Wahlberg. They're the, you know, we're telling their stories, right? So they're the ones that are making things happen here. I think that that's why a lot of those movies get made here. And then you have the Boston accent. And nobody gets it right. Nobody gets it right. But it also marks us as exotic. Yeah.
It's unusual. I mean, everybody knows a New York accent. It's Bugs Bunny, you know? It's Bugs Bunny? What do you mean? Yes. It's Brooklyn. Okay, okay. Yeah, it's Brooklyn. We have a variety of accents as well. So do we. And I remember interviewing Laura Linney for the Boston Globe around the time of Mystic River, and she says there are two accents that when an actor hears they have to do it sends a chill down their spine. One is South Africa. The other is Boston. Ty and Lisa just gave me a wicked setup.
When we come back, we're going to speak with a linguist all about the Boston accent. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game, shifting a little money here, a little there, just hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help you find options within your budget.
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Our final guest was the sociolinguist Dr. Danny Erker. Danny is a professor at Boston University, and his own research is largely about Spanish-speaking Bostonians. But he also knows a lot of things about Boston accents, as you're going to hear. Thank you.
So just like to start with, what is a Boston accent? I guess I would say the phrase Boston accent is an informal way of referring to the ways of speaking English.
of people, certain people, who were born and raised in New England. And it's a variety of American English. Linguists tend to refer to it as New England English. The reason why I say New England and not just Boston is that there are people who have the so-called Boston accent throughout the greater New England area. Okay, like why is a Boston accent so
Why does Laura Linney have blood, like her blood runs cold to hear she has to do it? Oh, the actors don't like it. Well, the actors don't like it because they haven't had it explained to them by a linguist. All right, let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. Sure. Well, when it comes to a regional variety of a language, what you have to identify are its key ingredients.
So what are the key ingredients of a Boston accent? Sure. Well, you don't even like the word accent. What's the right word? I don't like the word accent because it's judgy. Linguists are not judgy. If you find a judgy linguist, they should have their license revoked. We don't actually have licenses. Okay.
But as I have said to my family for years and years, linguists are not the grammar police. We are more like biologists who are interested in observing language in the wild, right? So when it comes to the constituent features of New England English...
There are words that people use and there are structures that people put together and sounds that people produce. Now, both Ty and Lisa claimed that they don't have a Boston accent. Oh, no. Here it comes. Here it comes. So we're going to put them on the spot just a little bit. So, Ty, and don't overthink this. Okay. On the count of three, what do you call the little rainbow candies that go on top of ice cream?
- Jimmy's. - Good boy. All right, so most people who are not speakers of New England English call them? - Sprinkles. - Sprinkles, good, okay.
If you are a person who says jimmies, you probably are a speaker of New England English. If you are a person who uses the word wicked to mean very, you're probably a speaker of New England. Well, you are. But those types of features, these words, these vocabulary items, they are interesting and easy to point out, but it's really the sounds that give...
Boston English, New England English, its distinctive flavor. And there are several of them. If you ask folks to impersonate a Bostonian, right, the stereotypical phrase that you'll hear from some people is, and I'm going to say it like me, which I'm from St. Louis, Missouri originally, so I would say, park the car in Harvard Yard, right? But
Let's put Lisa on the spot again. Can you do it for me as a good old-fashioned local? Park the car in Harvard Yard. Good work. So there's a couple things to point out here, right? So when we were in the green room chatting before, Ty mentioned this word that will be useful for us, and that is rhotic or rhoticity. It's a word that linguists use to describe R-like sounds.
So there's a whole lot going on with R's in New England English. There's two main things to understand. It seems like sometimes speakers of New England English don't produce their R's, and then it seems like they put them where they shouldn't be.
So it seems like they're deleting them and adding them. And this phrase, park the car in Harvard Yard, is a great example to zero in on this. There's also something else happening with that phrase. So the vowel in park, the a, is
is actually of a different quality. So maybe, can I get the audience to do something? Yeah. Is this okay? All right, so everybody just say "paw" for me. Paw. I heard some fronted "ahs" already. Keep them back like this. Paw. Now move your tongue forward so it becomes "pah." Good.
So instead of park, we have to move our vowel front, pa, and then don't produce the R. So say pack. Pack. You got it. Okay. And we can do that to the vowel in pack, the ca. Okay. But here's the tricky bit.
The R at the end of car in this phrase is special because the sound that comes after it is a vowel. Car in. Okay? If you are someone who deletes their R's and you have to bring it to the auto mechanic because you need a new carburetor,
you will very likely delete the R at the end of car because the sound that comes after the R is a B. It's a consonant. Cabaretta. Perfect. But if you have a vowel that comes after the R, you're not allowed to delete that R. You have to link the two vowels. So it's pack the car in Harvard Yard.
So it's not deleting all of your R's, right? It's deleting those R's that are syllable final that have consonants after them. If you have two vowels, you're not allowed to delete that R. In fact, you even put one in sometimes. Good. Nice setup. Thank you. So there is R deletion. There's R linking. And then this last one is what's sometimes called interlinking.
intrusive R. So if you have two vowels together, so in fact, Matt Damon was on the James Corden show and James Corden said something like, "Do me a little Boston whatever." And Damon said, "Okay, here's the deal." - You would say like, like the word ma, right? - Ma. - For your mother, yeah. - Ma. - So you'd say, "Is ma downstairs?" - Is ma downstairs? - But if that word was followed by a vowel, you'd have to add an R. So you'd say, "Is ma upstairs?"
Is my R upstairs? Is that all right? Is my R upstairs? So you have to put that R in there to resolve what linguists call hiatus. We love terminology. So you have to resolve the hiatus by putting an R in. So it seems like New England English speakers are chaotically deleting and inserting R's, but they're not. It's highly rule governed, highly systematic. And
And unless you have someone explain this to you, it's going to be an absolute disaster to try to. And that's why we're wicked smart. There you go.
Wait, there's honestly, there's many, you used the word salience. Yes. My sense is that there's actually like a lot of ingredients, but there's certain ones that are more important. Yeah. The R is really important, but there's others as well. Absolutely. And words like wicked and roticity, they're at the top of the mountain. But then there are some more modest features that are just as important to the overall sauce, if we want to beat this food metaphor to death, right? There are, for a lot of folks in India,
New England, three ways of saying Mary. You have the name Mary. I'm going to say them all the same because that's natural to my phonology, my sound system. So the name Mary, then wishing someone a happy Christmas, and then nuptials. Okay? So in New England, do you have this three-way distinction? So Ty, you do? Yes. You give it to me, man who doesn't have a Boston accent. Yes.
I want to hear this. There's Mary, my friend. Yep. There's Mary. Uh-huh. That's when you go out and you wed somebody. And the one in the middle. And there's Mary. Good job. You absolutely have New England phonology, my friend. I am never going to speak again in my entire life. No, it's just...
So the three-way Mary distinction, a phrase you probably didn't think you'd hear today. The three-way Mary distinction is another feature. There's two just like quick things I want to know about accent. One is that I think there's a stereotype that it only belongs to white working class Bostonians, but that's not the case at all, right? It is not the case at all.
So there's a very famous politician named Mel King. His folks were from Guyana and Barbados. So he's Caribbean in ancestry. But he, you know, in the Boston milieu, would certainly be recognized as a black Bostonian. And he has a number of these characteristic features. And they began to see that the young people who were white, gay,
in other parts of the city were going to schools where there were 15 and 20 youngsters in a class as opposed to their youngsters being 45 and sometimes 50 in a class. And they said, of course, we're as deserving, our youngsters are as deserving of that good environment as the youngsters in other parts of the city. And they began to move.
These features characteristic of New England English speakers are not restricted to white folks. Okay, what is happening to the Boston accent? Do you think it's less prevalent now? Is the Boston accent going away? One of the major trends with respect to
global languages is that their regionalness is starting to erode. We don't exactly know why this is the case. We have some ideas, but it is undoubtedly the case that regional vernaculars, as linguists like to describe them, are endangered species for sure.
So Boston is actually becoming our full again. This happened in New York City starting in their 50s and 60s. What used to be an Arliss city is now in our full city. And that's happening in Boston such that people like our former mayor, Marty Walsh, is a card carrying New England English speaker. But other famous Bostonians born later, like Chris Evans, sounds very much not like a Boston native.
I will also point out, I think that it's interesting that as the Boston accent is getting diluted and phased out, it's getting enshrined in movies. And I don't think there's a coincidence in that. I think we like to hold on to this idea of this exotic enclave. And I also just want to point out everybody in this room has their own idea of what the worst Boston accent in a movie they've ever heard.
Yeah, because we're very, we know when it's wrong. And for me, that's Rob Morrow in a quiz show. Just unbelievably bad. You haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary about the quiz show you're on? You mean besides its popularity? What I'm hoping is you might be able to give me some kind of roadmap here. I feel like we speak the same language. The other worst one, Blake Lively in the town. Oh, yeah. Oh, ouch. Yeah, that was bad. Why isn't she here then? She's going away with you. Why isn't she here?
Such a trashy little fuck pad. Take it easy. After a Tiffany necklace, I got a room at the Ritz. And we're very impressed when somebody gets it right, which for me... Jeremy Renner. Jeremy Renner, Amy Ryan, and Gone Baby Gone, who has these... I don't know if I could... She has one line of dialogue that to me is the...
best spoken bit of Boston dialogue from an outsider. I don't know if I can say it in your podcast. We already cursed. Okay, she comes into a room, she says, it smells like cock in here. Yeah, exactly. I love that. We went back to raise mothers, whatever. I don't know where that mother went, but she left all her fucking cats in there and it smells like cock.
We have one more question, and I was curious, do you guys have a favorite Boston movie? Friends of Eddie Coyle, I think, is sort of the Rosetta Stone of Boston movies. It's where it starts. One movie I love is Manchester by the Sea. Paddy, I swear to God, I'm going to knock your fucking block off. Great parenting. What?
What did you say? It's a great parenting. Fuck you. Mind your fucking business, you fucking asshole. It's not set in Boston, but it is very much attuned to the differences between the North Shore and the South Shore.
That was good. Thank you. I can put it on when I need to. You have a Boston accent. You repress it. You know, it's about townies in Manchester, and you can argue that there are no townies in Manchester, but I still think that it gets something about the repression and the way people in these parts can beat up on themselves. I think it's a really good movie, and I also love the verdict.
I just think that's an almost perfect movie.
You couldn't hack it as a lawyer. You were a bag man for the boys downtown, and you still are. I know about you. Are you done? You're damn right I'm done. I'm going to ask for a mistrial. That is probably, the verdict is probably mine, but I am a huge rom-com, so I'm going to have to say fever pitch, as ridiculous as it was. Sorry. This is exactly what you liked about me, that I was capable of having a passionate commitment with something, a devotion. Yes, but you feel it for the Red Sox, and I was hoping that someday...
You might redirect that. All those things that you feel for that team, I feel them too for you. And who doesn't love a Drew Barrymore movie? I don't know. Jimmy Fallon? Yeah, Jimmy Fallon. Come on. Yeah, not great Boston accents, but, you know, it is a rom-com. Danny?
I know this is not your area. This is not my wheelhouse. This is probably a cliché. I'm off the clock for a minute, I guess, linguistically. You know, I really do love Good Will Hunting. I think it's one of the most beautiful performances by Robin Williams in a movie ever. Although his accent is terrible. It's not great, but he's still Robin Williams. You're an orphan, right?
Do you think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been? How you feel? Who you are? Because I read all of the twist. Does that encapsulate you?
When I spoke with Danny before this, he said that he does watch movies with his family and they have to be like, stop talking about that since it's an occupation. So that really speaks to Robin Williams' performance, if you could look past it. Indeed. Thank you guys so, so, so much for chatting with us. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. That was fun. Thank you very much. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Thanks again to Ty Burr, Lisa Simmons, and Danny Erker for joining me on stage at the WBUR Festival.
You can find Ty's thinking and writing about movies at tyburrswatchlist.com. And if you want to hear even more about the Boston accent from Danny, this week we have a bonus episode of exactly that exclusively for Slate Plus members. There was a change that occurred to our culture.
in the southeast of England. So some of the folks in around the area of London, they contributed arlessness to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. If you want to hear the rest and you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or you can visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.
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That includes another show that recorded live at the WBUR festival, the Great Slate legal podcast, Amicus. Co-host Mark Joseph Stern sat down with a law professor to discuss what exactly went into the Roberts Court's embrace of something called the unitary executive theory, which has become carte blanche for some of the Trump administration's most outrageous actions.
Check out that live episode of Amicus on all your podcast apps. This episode was produced by me and Max Friedman. We make Decoder Ring with Katie Shepard and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. Special thanks to Katie Rayford, Henry Grabar, Ian Koss, Sophie Summergrad, Sarah Vinson, Adrian Walker, and Stephen Davey, senior producer and director at WBUR City Space.
You can find a list of every movie we talked about in this episode on our show page at Slate.com. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing at Slate.com. And you can also call us on our new Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We'd love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. We'll see you in two weeks.
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