Intonation Of Voice In Sicario

Recently in modern cinema, the dialogue of movies is ripe with text waiting to be analyzed through a linguistic lens. This can be looked at through the intonation of one’s voice, the “sharpness” of the voice, accent, and the lexical markers that they use. All of these metrics can be used to learn a significant amount of information about the character. The fine balance between using horrendous stereotypes and leaving too much up for interpretation is one often walked too far on either side in Hollywood. When walking this fine line, one can often make characters seem like borderline offensive representations of cultures. These movies, either knowingly or not, play with the idea of language ideologies. When trying to portray a culture through a language, the writer will often …show more content…
On the other hand, for an American audience, the writers might give the character an exaggerated accent and have him use a more expressive intonation, while using Italian mannerisms. In the movie Sicario (2015), directed by Denis Villeneuve, the characters are built around Standard American English and Chicano English. When breaking down the intonation and use of language to draw barriers in Sicario (2015), one can learn on a much deeper level about the characters on the screen. Throughout the movie, intonation of voice plays a massive role in setting each scene. Language is used in films to show the nature of the characters in a variety of different situations (Soares). For instance, in the opening three minutes of Sicario, there is not much dialogue until the latter half of the opening scene. After the FBI raid team finds the hostages and are standing around outside, the intonation of the main character’s voice, Kate Macer, projects that she is shaken from the incident. Throughout the opening sequence, the audience sees that while she appears to be a cold-cut, tough