More revision materials. This time, it's the synopsis for Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, re-written about linguistic concept of Overt and Covert Prestige...
In the end of the Nineteenth Century, in London, Robert Angier, his beloved wife Julia McCullough and Alfred Borden are friends and users of an RP accept. When Julia accidentally dies during a performance, Robert blames Alfred for her death and they develops a strong regional accent. Both become famous and rival magicians, sabotaging the performance of the other on the stage by inserting flat /a/s and tricking them into monopthongising their vowels. When Alfred performs a successful trick, Robert becomes obsessed trying to disclose the secret of his competitor with tragic consequences.
As Michael Caine would explain it-
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician says something: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He repeats this phrase to you. Perhaps he asks you to say it, to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and produces the sound centrally in his mouth. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to make it the culturally dominant dialect. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Overt Prestige"."
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