Prototypical Characteristics of Blockbuster Movie Dialogue: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis

1. Introduction

As a cultural artifact, the blockbuster movie is often accorded the same literary value as airport fiction. As Stringer ("Introduction" 1) notes, "Films labeled as blockbusters are frequently positioned as examples of the culturally retrograde, beneath serious consideration or analysis." While this may be the mainstream view, it is also the case that academic interest in the blockbuster appears to be on the rise. Stringer's own edited volume, Movie Blockbusters, is among recent publications on the topic, alongside work by, for example, Buckland, King (Spectacular Narratives, New Hollywood) and Lavik. What characterizes much work in this area is an acknowledgement that the blockbuster as a cultural phenomenon is an amorphous construct, lacking a single definition. Hills, for instance, argues that the blockbuster movie is "an extra-textual, discursive construction. Texts do not present definitive attributes that can allow them to be classified as blockbusters, as if blockbuster status were akin to a textually identifiable film genre" (179). Stringer ("Introduction") concurs, noting also that "the movie blockbuster is a multifaceted phenomenon whose meanings are contingent upon the presence of a range of discourses both internal and external to Hollywood" (2). Nonetheless, Stringer does claim genre status for the blockbuster, suggesting implicitly that there must be some identifiable constitutive features of such films. While there appears to be some degree of disagreement here, I would argue that this arises from an implicit approach to classification that is Aristotelian in nature, and that taking a view that is informed by prototype theory offers a way around this seeming impasse. I will elaborate on this below.

My aim in this article is thus to contribute to our understanding of what the blockbuster movie actually is by considering character dialogue, an aspect of film that is often neglected by film theorists. To do this, I analyze a corpus of around 300,000 words of blockbuster movie screenplays, using techniques drawn from corpus linguistics (I will deal with the apparent circularity of having to define the blockbuster movie in order to study it below). I suggest that while a full understanding of the blockbuster must of necessity take into account the extra-textual aspects alluded to by Matt Hills, there do appear to be some dialogic aspects of blockbuster screenplays that seem to be indicative of genre features. In this respect, corpus linguistics can offer quantitative support to the arguments about blockbusters that literary and film theorists may want to make.

2. Prototypes, Language, and Dialogue

As mentioned above, there is an apparent inconsistency to the views expressed by Hills and Stringer ("Introduction"), with the former claiming no definitive attributes for blockbusters and the latter arguing for viewing the blockbuster as a genre in its own right. I agree with Hills that classifying a film as a blockbuster is not a simple matter of identifying the presence of a number of constitutive features, though I would not go so far as to claim that blockbusters exhibit no component characteristics. Clearly there is something about such films beyond their capacity for revenue generation that allows critics to agree that, say, Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark is a blockbuster while Nanni Moretti's Caro Diario is not. If this were not the case, critical discussion of blockbusters would be all but impossible. How, then, do we reconcile the views of Hills and Stringer ("Introduction")? One possible solution (the one I adopt here) is to approach the issue from the perspective of prototype theory, Rosch's influential cognitive approach to classification. According to Rosch, for any given category there are central examples (particularly good examples of members of that category), secondary examples (less good examples), and peripheral examples (generally not very good examples). The classic exemplar of the theory concerns the category of birds. While, for British people, robins and blackbirds constitute central examples of birds (since we are likely to identify the ability to fly and the possession of feathers as characteristics central to defining a creature as a bird), ostriches and emus are secondary examples (they have feathers but are unable to fly). Still more removed, penguins...