THE STUDY OF IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION OF MUSLIMS IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The current study aims at finding out how Hollywood presents the image of Muslims in a negative way through the source of media. The study exposes the way film directors and writers set their aim to propagate against Muslims with the presentation of language in forms of dialogues. Critical Discourse Analysis as a research tool has been used to analyze the corpus of two Hollywood movies: The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2011) which were produced after 9/11 Twin Tower attack. Both Hollywood movies are based on the terrorism genre in which Muslims are depicted as terrorist. Fairclough’s three dimensional model (1989) has been used to explore linguistics features and discourse structures. Three levels of Fairclough’s (1989) model (descriptive, discursive and social practices) analyze the text on each level separately. The findings reveal that discourse of terrorism is embedded in the text which represents Muslims with the tag of terrorists. It has been examined that through hidden ideology and manipulated language, Muslims are labeled as terrorists and biased picture is shown in Hollywood movies. The findings indicate that Muslims received negative coverage and an exaggerated picture of being shown as terrorists is drawn on a big scale of media and it is very difficult to perceive the true side of the picture.