A Critical Discourse Analysis of Women’s Disempowerment in a Movie: A Case Study of Changeling

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to identify women’s disempowerment factors found in a movie dialogue investigated at discourse and sentence levels and to identify how each factor is reflected through a movie discourse. The dialogues are from the movie “Changeling” and there were a total of eight dialogues in the movie script that reflected some characteristics of the disempowerment. Thus, with the implementation of critical discourse analysis, the researcher further analyzed those eight dialogues as the main samples to reveal the occurrence frequency of women’s disempowerment factors such as gender roles, powerlessness, violence against women as well as how those factors were presented in the characters’ discourses. According to the findings, the highest percentage of occurrence frequency fell into the violence against women factor, yet the gender roles factor is found at the lowest percentage. Furthermore, this research also reflected the cultural problems regarding the hierarchical inequality between female and male through their social status and roles. However, the findings of this research interestingly triggers the need for further investigation on both scripts and scenes of a movie to understand the in-depth views on how cultural issues are presented via those channels; especially the issues related to verbal and non-verbal communication.