The Portrayal of the ‘Other’; A Multimodal Analysis of Transitivity Patterns in the movie The Dictator

Abstract

The ongoing islamophobia in the world is much propagated through cinematic visuals. The western perspective of Orientalizing the ‘other’ in representing the ‘others’ deploys the stereotypical maintained images of the Arabs in the Hollywood movies. These depictions raise an issue regarding the portrayal of the arabs equated with the east, specifically the arab world. The immoral humour and barbaric depiction associated with the Arabs in the movies is an Orientalist creation. It is the cultural, linguistic, religious and political ‘other’ that makes epistemological concerns in postcolonial theory as it endeavours the self to be translated into ‘us’ and the other into ‘them’. The otherness is constructed by a dominant group, inevitably ‘ us’ to stigmatize the other dominated out-groups, ‘ them’, potentially presented as negation of the self, identity and logically discriminated. The Dictator (2012), a comedy genre, depicts the story of an Arab dictator and controversial tendencies of orientalist origin are associated with him. The generic amoral comedy explores hypocritical political issues, terrorism, freedom and ethical issues. The visuals of the movie are taken and analyzed through Kress and Lueewan multimodality and the transitivity patterns of the images are segregated into metafunctions for analysis. The images related to the depiction of the ruler of an Islamic state are narrowed down for analysis. The transitivity patterns in the images chosen for analysis and their signification in terms of metafunctions are investigated to explore the cinematic prospects of constructing identities of the Self and the Other, where Us is to be associated with the West and Them with the East.