A multimodal approach to the investigation of the representation of character alienation in Todd Phillips’ film Joker (2019)

Dina Taymour, Nevine Mohamed Sarwat, Abeer M. Refky Seddeek

Abstract


Alienation is known to be the state of one’s estrangement from their world or the society they live in, and it is usually reflected in how characters behave in and how they interact with their surroundings. In films, one of the ways it is conveyed to the interactive participants is the non-verbal techniques. Moreover, film discourse is considered to be a rich epitome for the field of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) as it is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on multiple modes of communication. The corpus used in the following research is the film Joker (2019) by the director Todd Phillips. The focus of the research falls on the eccentric mind style (Fowler 1989) of the anti-hero, Arthur Fleck, who is later identified as the Joker. The emphasis of the study falls on the non-verbal plane of the American feature film. Accordingly, Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) grammar of visual design is used to analyse how the character’s mind style is portrayed and communicated via Phillips’ use of cinematic techniques. The analysis has revealed that the representation of Arthur’s character alienation is seen through certain camera techniques such as oblique angle, demand and offer gaze, and framing elements which have been used consistently to alienate the anti-hero from both the represented and interactive participants in addition to heighten his odd behaviour. Keywords: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), Alienation, Mind style.

Received: 10 October 2023

Accepted: 03 January 2024

Published: 14 March 2024


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21622/ILCC.2024.04.1.732

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Insights into Language, Culture and Communication
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