ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between media and capital punishment through a critical analysis of the construction of death penalty discourses in popular film. It demonstrates the usefulness of linguistic methodologies in analyzing death penalty films. Based on critical discourse analysis of execution scenes from Manhattan Melodrama, A Place in the Sun, I Want to Live!, In Cold Blood, and Dead Man Walking—five Oscar-winning films of the twentieth century—the chapter argues that American death penalty films use strategic avoidance or emphasis of execution to reaffirm or contest the death penalty. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), originating within the fields of linguistics and anthropology, offers direct insight into the ways that capital punishment and execution are explicitly discussed, strategically implied, or outright avoided in death penalty films. In addition to CDA, the chapter relies heavily on three linguistics concepts—deixis, metaphor, and temporality—to analyze and frame the representation of execution within the context of death penalty films.
