Speech in movies growing violent with time, even in non-crime ones: Analysis

Dialogues in English-language movies have become more “murderous”, with characters using more of ‘murder’ and ‘kill’ words—and not just in crime movies, a new analysis of lines spoken in more than 1.5 lakh movies has found.

Female characters too make more references to killing and murder, even though they did not have as many violent dialogues as men, the study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatry found.

Researchers, including those at The Ohio State University, US, analysed subtitles from the open platform ‘opensubtitles.org’, extracting dialogues involving actions committed by characters in 1,66,534 English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2000.

Using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, the team calculated the number of dialogues using variations of the words ‘murder’ or ‘kill’ in each of the films.

The results suggested that “speech about committing murder in movies is increasing over time, even in non-crime movies, regardless of character gender.” “This is more evidence that violence is a bigger part of the movies we watch than ever before,” lead author Babak Fotouhi, an adjunct assistant research professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, US, said.

While the use of “murderous verbs” varied widely on a yearly basis, there was a clear increasing trend over the five-decade period, said corresponding author Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

And not just in crime movies, where violence might be expected, the researchers said.

“Characters in non-crime movies are also talking more about killing and murdering today than they did 50 years ago,” Bushman said.

“Not as much as characters in crime movies, and the increase hasn’t been as steep. But it is still happening. We found increases in violence cross all genres,” Bushman said.

For the analysis, the researchers defined murderous verbs as verbs derived from the roots ‘kill’ and ‘murder’. The number of such words used was divided by total number of verbs used in a dialogue to compute the percentage of murderous verbs.

Overall, about seven per cent of the movies were found to have murderous verbs in dialogues over the period studied.

Further, the estimate is a conservative one, owing to the “narrow focus of the study”, co-author Amir Tohidi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“We focused exclusively on murderous verbs in our analysis to establish a lower bound in our reporting. Including less extreme forms of violence would result in a higher overall count of violence,” Tohidi said.

Fotouhi said, “We designed this to be a conservative estimate. It is likely there was more violence in the movies than what we calculated in terms of the dialogue.” Given that movies are competing for  the audience’s attention, with research showing violence being an effective means for doing so, the authors called for promoting a “mindful consumption and media literacy to protect vulnerable populations, especially children”.