Viewers’ emotional responses can be elicited in TV dialogue through the expression of character emotion, conflict, drama, tension, and so on. For instance, in the final episode of season three of the political drama Homeland (!!spoiler alert!!), one of the main characters (Brody) is publicly hanged, his death watched by another main character (Carrie), who is in love with him. In a highly emotional scene, viewers are exposed to both Brody’s dying and Carrie’s reaction, including her repeated shouting of his name. While Claire Danes’s performance of Carrie’s grief is multimodal and the graphic footage of Brody’s death is also crucial, her shouts clearly contribute to eliciting viewers’ emotional response to this scene.
The Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV)
www.syd-tv.com
