Accents And Other Pretentious Affectations

I was never a huge Giada De Laurentiis fan. Her almost unreal, almost solar smile, which stretches about three feet across her delicate face, seems forced. Her presentation style is: instruction, SMILE, instruction, SMILE, instruction, SMILE. And when a couple of friends told me years ago that her show, Everyday Italian, was "food porn," I realized that another unsettling element was the style in which her show was filmed, heavy on the fuzzy filters and slow camera pushes into extreme close-ups. Something just was not right about it.

But as I sit her watching Giada at Home, De Laurentiis's follow up series, I suddenly realize that she has grown on me. It must have been nerves or discomfort in front of the camera--or maybe she just got better direction from the Food Network--but her smiles are far less contrived on this series and, while a large part of me resents that her home (if it's not a set?) is perched right over the Pacific ocean, I find her utterly likable and down-to-earth. Which brings me to the subject of this post.

When De Laurentiis has come up in conversation with friends, colleagues, et al.--which has happens inordinately often--most people I talk to tell me they can't stand the pretentious way she pronounces the names of Italian and French foods and preparation techniques. "Yes," commonly goes the other person's rant, "we know you went to French cooking school. Get over it."

Yes, De Laurentiis studied at Le Cordon Blue in Paris. She is the granddaughter of legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, and was born in Rome and raised in Los Angeles. In a sense, she's an heiress with a creative pedigree; in other words, by Hilton standards, she has every reason to have turned out to be pretentious and despicable.

But she's not. At all. In fact, De Laurentiis's presentation is casual, friendly, informal, and welcoming, and her food shows her training, but she's happy to use sharp cheddar and frozen orange juice from concentrate when her husband asks for them.

So why do people think De Laurentiis is affected? Because, mainly, of the way she pronounces Italian words. It is difficult to adapt to hearing someone speak in a perfect American accent and then, without a hiccup, say parrmeegeeyanno raygeeanno instead of par-muh-john cheese, and keep on moving. But the fact is, De Laurentiis was born in Italy and, even though she was raised in California, cooking appears to have been the focus of her life, and she was surrounded by Italian-speaking family.

What is pretense and affectation? It's when a person puts premeditated effort into coming across as socially "better" than they are, mindfully changing their way of speaking, body language, etc. See My Fair Lady for a lesson in pretense. De Laurentiis is even more real because of the way she pronounces Italian words; if she were to consciously change the way she speaks to sound less pretentious, she would become more so.

For a lesson in pretense, let's take a look at the most obvious example:

Yes, Madonna. Even before she picked up and moved to London, she took up an awkwardly artificial faux-English accent. If she had better acting chops like, say, Gwyneth Paltrow (more on her later), she may have gotten some leeway from the public, but when a really bad false dialect meets this:

...then you're really asking to be criticized. It's not that Madonna took up riding as a hobby--there's nothing wrong with that--it's that she decked herself out in high-society English riding attire and flanked her designer horse in ornate decorations. This is a person to whom public perception means everything.

This is not:

That's just someone being real, even if she is plugging her TV show and book.

The point is, European accents aren't necessarily the best indicators for pretension.

For example, Gwyneth Paltrow--a true master of English dialects and a tremendously talented actress and more than capable singer--was raised in New York City as Hollywood royalty, and she lives up to those expectations, unironically and probably unwittingly proclaiming herself to be not only more special, but actually better, than most of us. When she, like Madonna, moved to the U.K., she proselytized a macrobiotic diet (which she later said was responsible for early bone degeneration), high-society fitness regiment (introduced to her by friend Madonna), and started a website called Goop, on which she decreed herself an expert on...well, anything she wanted to be an expert on. It began as a Martha Stewart-ish cooking and lifestyle site and morphed into Gwyneth doling out advice on whatever she wanted, without any real concern for a lack of expertise or training. People dared to call her and her project pretentious.

Behold her response:

Not only is Gwyneth redeemed by the support of her many ardent followers, but she is forging ahead in her noble pursuit of telling people how to do things! I, for one, am heading over to Goop immediately after this commentary to learn how to manage my finances from someone who has always been a multimillionaire and who, I am certain, does all her own accounting and investing. Because she's just that good.

At everything.

Maybe or maybe not, but Paltrow is definitely a good actress. For her movie roles, she can believably play aristocratic or everyday English and even, sometimes, a pretty normal American, as she did in probably my favorite Paltrow film, Proof, as well more recently in Glee.

Paltrow saves her dialect for the camera and can even act unaffected, which is a pretty amazing acting talent.

Now, normally, I'd work on summarizing my commentary with a little nugget of wisdom, but I'm having some financial challenges, so I think I'm going to head over to Goop and get some learnin' done. Meanwhile, enjoy this Goop-y coming together of high and low culture: