¿Cómo te llamas?

Training Day with Denzel Washington was on TV a few nights ago and it got me thinking. How do movie writers use a character's accent or ethnicity to establish who that character is in a short amount of time? For example, we needed to know Denzel was bad so he had his Brooklyn accent (Brooklyn=Bad). Ethan Hawk was young and naive and had something of a southern accent (southern=idiot). The drug dealing gang bangers therefore they were Hispanic and male because that's what all Hispanic males are in movies.

On a side note, I'm sure if I ever went to Hollywood I would be cast and a drug dealer, gang banger, or priest. This in spite of the fact that I have been mistaken for French, half Asian, German, and Middle Eastern. Nope, the casting director would say, we can't have this guy play the toll booth operator, that's always played by a middle aged black woman. Why isn’t there any middle ground? The best use of hispanic actors will have the leader of the gang who has a brother who is a priest. You can count on the line "what would momma think of you?"

So how does the average person working in a white collar job know who the good guys, bad guys, simpletons, and drug dealers are? The easy answer for drug dealers would be to look at the names on the cubicle and find the names Ramirez, Sanchez, Lopez; basically anything ending in the letter "Z." Beyond that, corporate America has developed its own version of accents and you may not even realize it.

For example, do you work in cubicles? If so, how close are you to a window? Usually the less junior members of a team sit furthest from the windows. Lucky enough to have an office? How far are you from the conveniences like bathrooms and coffee stations? The further you are the more junior you are. Even the mechanic who fixed my car this week explained to me that their bays are set up in order of seniority. The closer you are to the manager's office the more junior the mechanic.

Hollywood movies have a short amount of time establish a caste system so they rely on social paradigms to move the plot along. Real life is a little different and you have to look for the nuances to know where you stand but they are there if you read the signs. Of course, when in doubt and you need someone to fix your car, rob a liquor store, sell pot, or set up a drive-by look for the guy named Ramirez.