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Publicly Available Published by De Gruyter Mouton April 7, 2017

Constructing the antihero: Linguistic characterisation in current American television series

  • Christoph Schubert EMAIL logo

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which immoral villains in contemporary fictional television are linguistically constructed as antiheroes that are appealing and even likeable to a wide mainstream audience. The underlying dataset comprises the first thirteen episodes of each of the three American TV series Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Dexter. In order to highlight the equivocal status of the protagonists, this study adopts approaches from both cognitive semantics and register theory. The blending of mental spaces in utterances by the antiheroes underlines the fact that they oscillate between diverse social and cognitive domains. In addition, the protagonists are highly versatile in accommodating their linguistic registers to alternating situational contexts. As a result, they are framed as resourceful, multifaceted, and captivating individuals in a way that accounts for the tremendous pop-cultural impact and economic success of these TV shows.

1 Introduction

The past ten years have seen an increasing number of structurally complex and highly acclaimed American television series featuring villains as protagonists (cf. Mittell 2015: 13–14). A fictional villain is commonly defined as a “character in a play, novel, etc., important to the plot because of his or her evil motives or actions” (Trumble and Stevenson 2002: 3537). Accordingly, with regard to popular TV series since the turn of the millennium, Brett Martin diagnoses a pronounced “antihero trend” (2013: 266). By way of definition, Margrethe Bruun Vaage succinctly describes such antiheroes as “morally flawed main characters” (2016: xi). On the basis of these premises, this paper intends to investigate linguistic characterisation strategies that antithetically construct criminals as likeable figures appealing to a wide mainstream audience. In particular, it will be demonstrated that the ambivalent appearance of the characters on the screen is linguistically reflected by their utterances, which likewise underline their equivocal status.

In the framework of cognitive semantics, the focus will be on the blending of diverse mental spaces which represent the different societal spheres associated with the antiheroes (cf. Fauconnier 1994: 16–21; Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 39–50). As regards the strategic and context-dependent use of lexical and grammatical items that fulfil similar communicative functions, register theory offers helpful analytical tools (cf. Biber and Conrad 2009: 39–47; Schubert 2016). Accordingly, this study also examines the antiheroes’ strategies of register mixing as a signal of their affiliation with different social and contextual situations. With reference to the interplay between the internal and external communication systems in fictional television, these linguistic strategies will be integrated in Jonathan Culpeper’s (2001: 34–38) cognitive characterisation model, which combines bottom-up effects of implicit and explicit discursive cues with top-down inference processes based on the recipients’ prior world knowledge. In the process of designing likeable antiheroes, fictional television is able to manipulate the viewers’ rational and emotional response by evoking empathy, identification, and familiarity with the protagonists. Such perceptual patterns and the corresponding theoretical frameworks of cognitive film theory and moral psychology are outlined by Vaage (cf. 2016: 3–9).

The dataset underlying the study contains the first thirteen episodes of each of the three television series Breaking Bad (Gilligan 2008–2009), House of Cards (Willimon 2013), and Dexter (Manos 2006–2007). All of these can be categorized in the crime drama genre, feature prototypical antiheroes (cf. Däwes 2015: 18), and are listed and discussed in a major volume on the most influential TV series from 1989 to 2014 (cf. Müller 2015). Since the protagonists Walter White, Frank Underwood, and Dexter Morgan lead double lives as secret lawbreakers, their individual language use is heavily marked by the central issues of pretence and camouflage (cf. Schubert 2015: 335–344). Focusing on fictional television dialogue, the present analysis relies on a corpus of transcripts retrieved from authoritative DVDs and a relevant online database. Owing to the multimodal quality of televisual discourse (cf. Piazza et al. 2011: 9; Toolan 2014: 456), this paper also considers nonverbal communication and cinematographic techniques of filmic textuality such as specific shots (cf. Wildfeuer 2014: 22–31), whenever they visually support verbal characterisation strategies. In a qualitative and exemplificatory analysis, key scenes will be selected in order to illustrate the ways in which the antiheroes are framed as two-faced but at the same time surprisingly captivating individuals.

2 Approach and dataset

The three US series Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Dexter have been selected because they not only belong to the same televisual subgenre but also feature protagonists with numerous similarities. Walter White, Frank Underwood, and Dexter Morgan are all male, white, more or less middle-aged, and act as undercover criminals hiding behind a public facade of respectable professions. Walter is a high school chemistry teacher and crystal meth producer, Frank is the Democratic Majority Whip and a Machiavellian manipulator and murderer, and Dexter is a forensic scientist and vigilante serial killer, so that all of them resort not only to lies and treachery but also to physical violence. As a consequence, they conceal their double lives from their families, partners, and colleagues, as well as from journalists and the police by discursive camouflage, whereas the TV viewers are enabled to detect the antiheroes’ ambivalence through their verbal utterances.

In order to investigate this communicative double strategy, adjacent utterances by the protagonists and other characters were analysed, with a specific focus on contributions and key scenes in which the antiheroes cope with the collision of diverse social situations. In particular, special attention was paid to the introduction of the main characters at the very beginning of the three series, since here fundamental character traits are established, as shown by Examples (1), (4), and (7). Furthermore, passages were chosen which feature the culmination of interpersonal conflicts (Examples 5, 6, 10 and 11), since in these contexts the antiheroes’ hybrid personalities surface most prominently. As regards narrative techniques, extracts were selected which contain revealing addressing of the audience (Examples 1, 2 and 8) and enlightening voice-over comments (Examples 4 and 9). In addition, the goal was to cover communicative situations with varying conversational participants, such as superiors (Example 2), journalists (Example 3), victims (Examples 4 and 5), family members (Example 6), students (Example 7), churchgoers (Example 8), the antihero’s wife (Example 10), as well as accomplices (Example 11). Thus, since the selection process took into account diverse manifestations of social variables, the examples are representative of the various types of communicative interaction in the shows. Accordingly, the extracts contain prototypical situations that highlight the antiheroes’ characteristic behavioural patterns based on clashes of cognitive and/or social domains.

As the most convenient and authoritative source, DVDs of the respective series were used to retrieve dialogue. The preparation of the verbal transcripts was further supported by the British online portal Springfield! Springfield! TV show episode scripts <www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk>, which provides complete sets of transcripts of numerous classic and current television series. The individual transcript providers are anonymous, so that it can only be assumed that both the producers and the readers are devoted television series enthusiasts. The reliability and accuracy of the transcripts in this archive was verified by comparing the dialogue on the DVDs with the online texts on a sample basis. This juxtaposition showed that there are only minor and occasional deviations, such as missing interjections or deleted paralinguistic phenomena such as coughing or sighing. In contrast to conventional film scripts, the online transcripts hardly contain any punctuation, do not indicate the speaker of individual contributions, and do not provide any information on the setting, camera movement, or prosodic details, so that the use of the DVDs was indispensable for the contextual embedding of the dialogues. The online transcripts were mainly used as a digital tool to determine the word count, to gain quick access to specific passages of speech through a keyword search, and to find relevant conversational exchanges containing inconsistencies in register or conceptual blending processes. For instance, by using character names as keywords, it was possible to identify communicative situations with specific conversational interactants, whenever they are addressed through vocatives. More specifically, some characters are marked by typical lexical choices, such as drug dealer Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, whose favourite expletive is bitch, so that verbal conflicts could be located in the data by a search for such lexemes.

The dataset concentrates on the first season of each of the three television series, since here the antiheroes set their agendas and develop their discursive strategies in different sociocultural and professional environments. While the first season of Breaking Bad consists of only seven episodes owing to a strike of the Writers Guild of America in 2007, Dexter contains twelve episodes and House of Cards thirteen chapters. Thus, in order to include an equal number of episodes from each series, the first six episodes of Breaking Bad’s season two and the first episode of Dexter’s season two were added, as indicated by the episode numbers in Table 1. All in all, the dataset contains 39 episodes, amounting to 31 hours, 40 minutes, and 20 seconds of televisual discourse and 179,159 spoken words. The words in the flashbacks at the beginnings of episodes, which are introduced by the phrase “previously on …” in House of Cards and Dexter, were not counted, for they merely contain literal repetitions from previous chapters that have a mnemonic function and support the audience in constructing coherence across the episodes. Therefore, the running time of these flashbacks, usually about 1:10 to 1:35 minutes, was subtracted from the episode length, whereas the opening credits were considered as an integral part of the individual chapters.

Table 1:

Duration and word count of all 39 episodes in the dataset.

House of CardsDexterBreaking Bad
EpisodeMinutesWordsEpisodeMinutesWordsEpisodeMinutesWords
1.0153:415,5971.0150:514,4341.0155:443,639
1.0246:515,5721.0250:244,5881.0246:152,850
1.0348:406,1751.0347:054,8621.0346:143,112
1.0446:175,4181.0453:534,8891.0446:173,364
1.0549:505,5141.0552:054,2771.0546:143,577
1.0647:505,8231.0649:024,9341.0646:093,017
1.0751:205,6101.0749:595,3281.0745:494,161
1.0844:324,5311.0850:045,0892.0145:202,800
1.0949:017,3271.0952:144,6392.0246:002,986
1.1049:554,9371.1052:455,6092.0345:053,651
1.1151:254,3901.1150:205,7502.0445:293,255
1.1250:256,1141.1252:304,9202.0545:263,289
1.1347:135,2542.0146:404,2082.0645:263,669
Total637:0072,262657:5263,527605:2843,370
Average49:005,55950:364,88746:343,336

Table 1 demonstrates that the episode length varies between 44:32 and 55:44 minutes on the DVDs, with averages of 49:00 (House of Cards), 50:36 (Dexter), and 46:34 minutes (Breaking Bad). The corresponding word count, which was retrieved from the online transcripts, can be statistically correlated with the average length of the episodes, yielding the following results: while House of Cards shows an average of 113.4 words per minute, the respective ratio in Dexter is 96.7 and in Breaking Bad only 71.7. This comparison shows that House of Cards has the strongest focus on verbal dialogue, while Dexter and particularly Breaking Bad place more emphasis on nonverbal communication, physical action, and cinematographic peculiarities such as lengthy establishing shots. Correspondingly, Frank Underwood’s characterisation relies most strongly on verbal exchange, while for Walter White’s portrayal the role of linguistic strategies appears to be somewhat less decisive.

3 Conceptual blending and register theory in televisual discourse

Although popular television series have a global reach and exert influence on both sociocultural perceptions and linguistic habits, Bednarek (cf. 2014: 51–52) suggests that fictional TV dialogue is under-researched in linguistics and discourse analysis, despite sporadic monographs on individual series such as Friends (Quaglio 2009) or Gilmore Girls (Bednarek 2010). In contrast to everyday face-to-face communication, televisual conversation is marked by the distinction between the inter-character level and the producer-recipient level (cf. Dynel 2011: 312). Correspondingly, character utterances are processed by both other fictional figures and external audience members, who formally act as “overhearers” (Bubel 2008: 62) of the dialogues but ultimately represent the consumers of TV series as an art form. Along these lines, the audience of the three television series is made aware of the clandestine agendas and activities in different ways: Dexter Morgan informs the “implied” audience (Stockwell 2002: 42) through pervasive voice-over comments and Frank Underwood occasionally addresses the viewers directly, breaking the fourth wall of televisual discourse, while Walter White’s different social spheres manifest themselves exclusively in inter-character communication.

Culpeper (cf. 2001: 34) developed a cognitive model of characterisation in fiction which considers comprehension as a combination of two routines. On the one hand, viewers employ top-down inference processes based on their prior world knowledge from both real life and fiction. On the other hand, characterisation relies on bottom-up effects of clues in the film discourse, including (non-)verbal communication of the characters and cinematographic techniques. The two sides dynamically and constantly affect and correct each other, for “what you see influences what you know, and what you know influences what you see” (Culpeper 2001: 36). Hence, cognitive preconceptualizations of viewers may include evaluative stereotypes about teachers, scientists, or politicians, stored in their long-term memory. These may be complemented by prototypical conceptions of fiendish villains, as they are known to audiences from conventional entertainment such as James Bond movies. On this basis, the ambivalent portrayal of likeable villains on the screen results in innovative entertainment which undermines stereotypical categorizations.

The construction of multifaceted fictional characters is strongly supported by the blending of mental spaces, which are defined as “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 40; see also Fauconnier 1994: xxxv–xl). Along these lines, two or more input spaces, which represent domains of human experience, undergo the process of mapping, thereby yielding a generic space that contains similarities in the form of semantic roles such as agents, instruments, goals, and the like (cf. Croft and Cruse 2004: 208). Most importantly, this procedure results in a blended space, which combines selected items from the input spaces in a new and original way, as in the case of surprisingly likeable antiheroes in fictional television. The operation of blending relies on the three cognitive techniques of “composition”, “completion”, and “elaboration” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 48), which contribute to the development of a fully-fledged blended space.

As Peter Stockwell argues, conceptual blending can account for a number of cognitive processes that involve the combination of two ideas or beliefs, such as “metaphorical or allegorical thinking, scientific or political analogy, comparisons and imaginary domains involving characters from disparate areas (like Hamlet and George Bush)” (2002: 97–98). The present study utilizes blending theory rather than conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) (cf. Lakoff 2006: 209) for four reasons: first, blending does not presuppose a specific direction of meaning exchange but variably allows for two equally important domains without considering one idea more fundamental. Second, conceptual metaphor theory conventionally concentrated on individual sentences, phrases, or lexemes, while the blending approach is better suited to cover longer passages of discourse, as they are necessary for the characterisation of protagonists. Third, blending theory has a strong preference for the “decoding of creative examples” (Handl and Schmid 2011: 7), which are a typical feature of complex TV series. Finally, Fauconnier and Turner’s “network model” (2002: 40) comprises not only two cognitive domains but four mental spaces, so that a highly detailed account of blending procedures is possible.

From the perspective of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) à la Halliday (1978), the term register refers to functional varieties which are dependent on language use in specific situational contexts. This concept of register is the result of a blend of the two domains of language and music, since linguistic usage is here regarded as an instrument tuned by its user like an organ (cf. Dittmar 2010: 223). The situational parameters can be described in more detail by the well-known terms “field”, “mode”, and “tenor”, which pertain to the discursive topic, the communicative medium, and the social relationship between the interactants, respectively (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976: 22).

More recently, research on register has been advanced predominantly by Douglas Biber, who analogously defines the term register as “a variety associated with a particular situation of use (including particular communicative purposes)” (Biber and Conrad 2009: 6). Therefore, a specific register is marked by the occurrence of characteristic lexical and grammatical items that serve a common communicative function. Instead of Halliday’s three parameters, Biber and Conrad (cf. 2009: 40–47) suggest seven situational criteria for the description of registers: (1) “participants”, including individual or institutional roles of addressor and addressee(s), (2) “relations among participants”, referring to social roles and degrees of closeness or distance, (3) “channel”, such as spoken, written, electronic or televisual modes, (4) “production circumstances”, including spontaneous or strategic processes, (5) “setting”, pertaining to public or private places and temporal contexts, (6) “communicative purposes”, such as informing or persuading, as well as (7) “topic” under discussion. Owing to their dependence on varying situations, Neumann (2013: 16) defines registers as “sub-systems of the language system”, covering functional areas of communication. Along these lines, as the antiheroes move through divergent social spheres, including contact with antisocial outlaws, their linguistic choices also undergo significant stylistic and register-related accommodation.

4 The blending of mental spaces in the TV series

In the beginning of the first episode of House of Cards, Frank Underwood introduces himself to the viewers with the help of conceptual blending. As is characteristic of this series, Frank looks directly into the camera whenever he addresses the audience by breaking the fourth wall of fictional discourse. This self-referential technique typically reveals Frank’s mischievous persona and strongly contributes to the narrative’s satirical effect. In Example (1), he blends the political space with the craftsman space over a sequence of three sentences.

(1)

Frank. As for me, I’m just a lowly House Majority Whip. I keep things moving in a Congress choked by pettiness and lassitude. My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving. But I won’t have to be a plumber much longer. (Episode 1.01, minute 0:02:59)

The generic space here contains the semantic roles of an agent, an action, an instrument, and a patient. In the political input space, the Whip motivates party members to act according to party politics by persuading or gently threatening them. In the craftsman input space, the plumber makes room in the pipes for the sewage to flow by using the necessary tools. The respective instrument, which is not explicitly mentioned in Example (1), needs to be added through the cognitive procedure of completion. The process of composition yields a blended space which conceptualizes the political position figuratively entitled “Whip” as an undesirable job that includes unpleasant and unsavoury activities with the aim of keeping the system running. Obstructions in politics or sewage disposal by means of narrowed passages are particularly foregrounded by the verbs “moving” and “choked” as well as by the noun “pipes”. Thus, the highly intellectual profession of a leading politician is compared with the physical job of a craftsman, which already hints at Frank’s hidden criminal agenda. In order to achieve his political goals, he will not refrain from getting his hands metaphorically dirty like a manual worker, as by poisoning his former mentee Peter Russo with carbon monoxide in episode 1.11. Nevertheless, his sarcastic view on political practices will be attractive to those viewers who have a general feeling of political alienation.

In order to express his disdain for his colleagues and fellow party members, Frank fuses some even more drastic mental spaces with the domain of politics. In Example (2), he again addresses the implied audience directly after Linda Vasquez, the White House Chief of Staff, has informed him about a disappointing personnel decision and tried to pacify him with free tickets for the Jefferson Ball, which accompanies the President’s formal inauguration.

(2)

Frank. Did you smell that? The smugness? The false deference? She thinks I can be bought with a pair of tickets. What am I? A whore in post-war Berlin, salivating over free stockings and chocolate? What she’s asking will cost far more than that. (Episode 1.01, minute 0:27:29)

Political manoeuvring and strategic appeasement are here blended with the realm of prostitution after World War II. In the sexuality space, the agent is a prostitute who will carry out the activity of sexual services for a small compensation through basic goods. By blending this image with his own political moves, Frank points out to the audience that he does not accept condescending treatment by his superiors. However, in his final utterance he qualifies this rejection by conceding that he is open to bribery at a more elevated level. In this way, he cynically conceptualizes the political establishment as corrupt and capable of morally improper or even offensive courses of action. Simultaneously, this concession presents him in a somewhat appealing light, since he reveals his true motivations and objectives to the implied television audience, establishing rapport with the viewers. In addition, his disarming self-ironic assessment greatly contributes to the show’s satirical humour.

The domain of sexuality is resumed by Frank when he is approached by the ambitious journalist Zoe Barnes, who asks him for classified information on current political developments. In contrast to Examples (1) and (2), Frank here does not address the viewers but engages in a conversation with the reporter. As Example (3) shows, Frank draws analogies between the structural progress of a dialogue and the act of sexual intercourse.

(3)

Frank. Well, you certainly have my undivided attention.

Zoe. Good. The reason I’m here …

Frank. Oh, is foreplay over?

Zoe. I read somewhere that JFK never lasted more than three minutes.

Frank. The point being?

Zoe. Time is precious. Powerful people don’t have the luxury of foreplay.

Frank. Okay, so why are you here, Ms Barnes? (Episode 1.01, minute 0:30:49)

When Zoe starts to reveal the reason for her nightly visit at Frank’s home, he labels the previous verbal exchange as “foreplay”, which she reiterates in a later conversational turn. The sexuality input space comprises two agents, the lovers, who please each other with the goal of sexual arousal. In the political discussion input space, there are two conversational partners who interact verbally in order to achieve a specific understanding. The blended space, which again relies on the combination of an intellectual and a physical domain, indicates that Frank and Zoe are about to start a close relationship and implies rough and immediate action, since Zoe deems foreplay a “luxury” that they cannot afford. Thus, blending theory is more efficient here than conceptual metaphor theory, since the blended space highlights specific results of the cognitive overlap. In addition, sexuality is not instrumentalized as a mere source domain but appears as a significant mental space on its own. The blending of sexuality and politics is further reinforced by including the iconic US-President John F. Kennedy, who is anchored in the collective memory, among other things, for extramarital relationships. Thus, while the political input space entails Frank’s energetic and determined public appearance, the sexuality space involves physically violent practices and thus foreshadows Frank’s murder of Zoe early in season two.

Somewhat in contrast to Frank’s political conceptualizations, Dexter Morgan blends the serial murderer space with selected other input spaces. This becomes obvious already in the series’ opening sequence, in which Dexter’s morning routine and the preparation of a full breakfast is blended with physical violence (cf. Gregoriou 2011: 115; Karpovich 2010: 27–42). Among other activities, Dexter smashes a mosquito, fries and devours a steak, breaks an egg, drips red sauce on a fried egg, grinds coffee beans, and cuts up and squeezes a blood orange. Since all of this is shown in extreme close-up, the physical force applied to the food items appears overly aggressive and brutal. For instance, the drastically enlarged texture of the orange peel resembles human skin, while the squirting juice and the squeezed flesh of the orange are to some extent reminiscent of blood and human flesh. The opening theme of Dexter further supports this perception through suspenseful music, which is aptly characterised as “dark yet chirpy” (Gregoriou 2011: 114) and is supported by menacing sound effects. In the beginning of episode 1.01, Dexter appears as a mere silhouette behind the steering wheel of his car, driving through Miami’s entertainment district at night. Eerie music is heard and shady characters appear on the streets when the protagonist verbally perpetuates the blend of the killing and eating spaces (cf. Example 4).

(4)

Dexter. Nice night. Miami is a great town. I love the Cuban food. Pork sandwiches – my favourite. But I’m hungry for something different now. There he is – Mike Donovan. He’s the one. (To Donovan:) You’re mine now, so do exactly as I say. (Episode 1.01, minute 0:00:56)

Dexter initially establishes the input space of a tourist praising the Hispanic cuisine of south Florida. Through the cognitive process of completion, the generic space is complemented by additional semantic roles (cf. Croft and Cruse 2004: 208): the eating space involves an agent that affects a patient, in this case food, through the physical action of consumption, with the instrument of cutlery, and with the goal of repletion. In the killing input space, the agent is a murderer who uses sharp instruments in order to put a victim to death and who intends to achieve pathological satisfaction. The blend of the two input spaces is here chiefly triggered by the metaphorical adjective “hungry” (cf. Figure 1). When Dexter’s desire to kill is compared to something as basic and ordinary as hunger, it is framed as an unavoidable natural need that has to be fulfilled. Thus, Dexter’s vigilante murders are presented to the audience as regular, commonplace behaviour, so that his status as an outsider is mitigated. In addition, Dexter’s preference for pork sandwiches portrays his victim as a figurative pig by way of human-animal blending.

Figure 1: The conceptual blend of killing and eating in Example (4) (Dexter).
Figure 1:

The conceptual blend of killing and eating in Example (4) (Dexter).

As regards coherence created by an extended blend, Dexter’s first season comes full circle when the protagonist at the end of episode 1.12 murders his own brother Brian Moser. Brian is a ruthless serial killer, as opposed to Dexter, who exclusively murders other felons, according to a moral code that his foster father taught him as a child. As Brian is strapped motionless to a table and Dexter speaks of the “dinner flatware” that he will apply to him, the victim is conceptualized as a meal (cf. Example 5).

(5)

Dexter. Police recorded all your knives as evidence. Took a while to find your dinner flatware.

Brian. Sterling. I keep it for special occasions.

Dexter. Which you are. I can give you more tranquilizer if you want. It’s a service I don’t usually offer. (Episode 1.12, minute 0:45:35)

After Brian has introduced the phraseologism of the “special occasion” in the sense of a public holiday like Thanksgiving, Dexter applies this notion to the physical and mental appearance of his brother, who is about to be cut up like a turkey. At the producer-recipient level of televisual discourse, two further mental spaces support the notion of the rightfulness of Dexter’s murderous activities – besides his very name, which alludes to the adjective dexterous. First, as Brian Moser is killed with tools made of silver (“[s]terling”), the viewers can infer that he is situated in the same category as supernatural fiends such as werewolves. Second, when Dexter offers his brother “more tranquilizer”, which he commonly uses to sedate his victims, he appears as a doctor performing merciful euthanasia in a hopeless case. As regards such metaphorical conceptualizations, Gregoriou (2012: 279–280) also points out that internet forum posts by viewers of Dexter model the protagonist in various figurative ways, comparing him to “Robin Hood”, the comic book hero “Batman”, or a personified “college/business”, serving as a role model for other vigilante killers.

Conceptual blending in the TV series often occurs in utterances addressed to the implied viewers, so that it is much less frequent in Breaking Bad, since Walter White never adopts that self-referential narrative position but exclusively interacts with other characters. Still, a few scenes foreground Walter’s position between reckless crime and average middle-class life. In the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’” (1.06), Walter plays poker with his family, using a risky bluff to defeat his brother-in-law Hank Schrader, who is an agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) (cf. Example 6).

(6)

Walter. I’m all in.

Hank. Dude. You bad, bad, bad, horrible liar. What are you smoking there, huh? You got a heart? You got the flush, don’t you? (Pause.) Nope. Not falling for it, buddy. I fold.

Marie. Talk about anti-climactic. Your cards couldn’t have been that bad. [Looks at Hank’s cards.] Oh, my God. You threw away an ace …

Hank. What are you doing? Don’t.

Marie. … and a cowboy, for a handful of nothin’. (Episode 1.06, minute 0:33:09)

In the input space of this familial card game, the agents are the family members as participants, who have the goal of winning the game by tricking each other with the instrument of playing cards. The other input space comprises the criminal drug dealer and the DEA agent, so that here the villain manages to outsmart the law enforcer through pretence and make-believe. At the inter-character level, Hank’s wife Marie mocks her husband for giving up, while at the producer-recipient level she represents the broad public that does not understand why the authorities may fail to arrest offenders. In the blended space, Walter emerges as a cunning player who triumphs over his adversaries by maintaining camouflage through an impenetrable poker face. In addition, Hank’s challenging utterances also unfold their meaning in both mental spaces when he ambiguously calls Walter a “bad, horrible liar”, since viewers can infer that Walter is either humorously considered as unsuccessful in lying, or he is called a liar who is additionally horrible. The action of “smoking” can be decoded as a jocular reference to Walt’s hubris or may pertain to the crystal meth he produces, and the “heart” possibly refers to the playing card or to Walter’s lack of empathy and compassion. Finally, “the flush” also has a secondary metaphorical meaning, potentially referring to Walter’s criminal ambitions during his midlife crisis. Owing to their knowledge of plot details, television viewers are enabled to draw these inferences, while the fictional characters lack these insights; this disjunction amounts to the televisual equivalent of dramatic irony.

When Walter White acts in the institutional role of a chemistry teacher, his academic elaborations show blends of science and his own private and social life. Example (7), extracted from the first few minutes of episode 1.01, shows Walter in the classroom for the first time, so that it has a pivotal function in the characterisation process. Since his students hardly react to his words, his utterances almost resemble a Shakespearean soliloquy in which hidden truths are revealed to the audience. Along these lines, Walter here defines the term “chemistry” to his pupils, while to the audience he metaphorically foreshadows the fundamental changes that he is about to undergo throughout the series.

(7)

Walter. Chemistry. It is the study of what? (Pause.) Anyone? (Pause.) Ben.

Ben. Chemicals.

Walter. Chemicals! No! Chemistry is, well, technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change. Now just – just think about this. Electrons. They change their energy levels. Molecules. Molecules change their bonds. Elements. They combine and change into compounds. Well, that’s – that’s all of life. Right? (Episode 1.01, minute 0:07:01)

The literal input space here comprises small units of matter which function in the semantic roles of patients, since they are subject to chemical processes. Under the central heading of “change”, Walter subsumes the reactions of electrons, molecules, and chemical elements, likening their behaviour to “life” itself. Thus, the second input space is Walter’s future way of life, in which he both suffers from cancer and starts a career in the drug business. Just as chemical items change their partners, Walter will change his social bonds, will make new acquaintances in the world of organized crime, and will reach new levels of criminal energy. In the blended space, the television viewers perceive Walter as an individual that does not have a choice but merely acts according to the rules forced upon him by the natural laws of chemistry. Hence, as in Dexter’s case (cf. Example 4), this blend strongly contributes to the justification of the antihero’s immoral future actions.

5 Register mixing in the TV series

The equivocal situation of the protagonists between their public appearance and their clandestine activities manifests itself not only in the blending of conceptual domains but also in the situation-dependent use of varying linguistic registers. From a sociolinguistic vantage point, registers mainly correspond with social and professional groups, but “one person may control a variety of registers: you can be a stockbroker and an archeologist, or a mountain climber and an economist. A register helps you to construct an identity at a specific time or place” (Wardhaugh and Fuller 2015: 53). Along these lines, different registers are indicative of diverse social parameters, which in turn refer to various social roles of the protagonists as fathers, husbands, accomplices, or murderers. Register mixing is here regarded as the rapid juxtaposition of situational language choices either in utterances of one single speaker or across different speakers. By analogy with the “linguistic wardrobe” that Crystal (2011: minute 11:58) figuratively introduces in his lecture on discourse variability, Dexter Morgan celebrates Halloween with the diagnosis: “brother, friend, boyfriend: all part of my costume collection” (episode 1.04, minute 0:14:28). Accordingly, this metaphorical disguise includes not only appropriate social behaviour but also versatility in linguistic and discursive accommodation.

After Frank Underwood has been made politically responsible for the car accident of a teenage driver, he gives a sermon at a church service attended by the deceased girl’s parents. In order to underscore his empathy with the mourners, he expresses indignation about God, who also took away Frank’s own father. During the sermon, however, he suddenly stops and directly addresses the viewers in order to reveal his real attitude (cf. Example 8), in a way already known from Examples (1) and (2).

(8)

Frank. (To the parish:) I hate you, God. I hate you! Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t said those words before. […] My father dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 43, 43 years old. And when he died, I looked up to God and I said those words, because my father was so young, so full of life, so full of dreams. Why would God take him from us?

(To the viewers:) Truth be told, I never really knew him or what his dreams were. He was quiet, timid, almost invisible. […] The man never scratched the surface of life. Maybe it’s best he died so young, he wasn’t doing much but taking up space. But that doesn’t make for a very powerful eulogy, now, does it? (Episode 1.03, minute 0:29:28)

As regards communicative participants, the addressees change from the fictional characters in the church to the implied television audience (cf. Figure 2). The social role of the speaker is altered from the preaching politician to the cynical hypocrite who manipulates people for his own purposes. Ironically, however, by sharing classified knowledge with the viewers and framing them as confidant(e)s, the relationship between speaker and addressees becomes much closer. Cinematographically, this is supported by a cut from a full shot of the church interior to a close-up of Frank’s countenance. When facing the camera, he lowers his voice to a conspiratorial intonation and accelerates his speaking rate, creating a sense of intimacy with the viewers. Linguistically, his choice of lexical items changes from a stylistically elevated register marked by the emphatic repetitions in “so young, so full of life, so full of dreams” and the affective rhetorical question “[w]hy would God take him from us?” to a common and informal level. Accordingly, Frank then uses the denigrating metaphor “never scratched the surface of life”, the colloquial phraseologism “wasn’t doing much”, and the discourse marker “now” in collocation with the tag question “does it?”. At the same time, Frank appears highly appealing due to his disarming honesty and sardonic humour, especially when he meta-referentially satirizes the genre of “eulogy”.

Figure 2: Register mixing in Example (8) (House of Cards).
Figure 2:

Register mixing in Example (8) (House of Cards).

While Frank Underwood switches between public oratory and private confessions, Dexter Morgan’s language frequently reveals his intermediate position between forensic science and serial murdering. In his public social role Dexter adopts a neutral, objective, and matter-of-fact stance, whereas his private self enjoys and revels in bloody acts of violence. In Example (9), Dexter shortly relates the background of juvenile offender Jeremy Downs in voice-over, displaying both the professional persona and the secret vigilante perspective. While researching the felon’s biography on his computer, Dexter greedily chews popcorn, so that the blend of eating and killing once again surfaces (cf. Examples 4 and 5).

(9)

Dexter. I search for the ones who think they’ve beat the system. They’re not hard to find, like Jeremy Downs. Jeremy got off easy: four years in a juvenile facility for manslaughter. To the coroner, the knife strokes looked random, impulsive, but I saw the work of a young virtuoso. Too many major arteries were severed – femoral, brachial, carotid. (Grabs popcorn.) Today Jeremy is just another piece of trash on the street, but four years ago, he was the toast of Miami. (Episode 1.03, minute 0:05:10)

As a blood spatter analyst working for law enforcement, Dexter demonstrates his knowledge of the legal system through technical terminology, as exemplified by the nouns “juvenile facility”, “manslaughter”, and “coroner”. His profound expertise in human anatomy manifests itself in the adjectives “femoral, brachial, carotid”, which designate the main arteries of the human body. Through these linguistic means, Dexter is constructed as a trustworthy specialist in an institutional role, who provides the police with indispensable information in his scientific discipline. By way of contrast, the hidden vigilante killer identity admires the felon, as indicated by the appreciative noun “virtuoso”. This social role is furthermore reflected by the colloquial phrasal verb “got off”, the derogatory metaphor “piece of trash”, and the idiomatic slang expression “toast of Miami”, which points out that Jeremy used to be admired by other delinquents. Through this stylistic coalescence, the viewers perceive the protagonist as a competent scientist who simultaneously shows disturbing street credibility. As Gregoriou shows (cf. 2011: 97–98), the first-person narrative perspective makes it easy for recipients to identify and sympathize with the protagonist. While in Example (8) registers are changed in a clearly sequential form, Example (9) displays concurrent register mixing, since the two registers are closely merged. Conclusively, the latter procedure suggests a personality in which the two social roles are more intricately interwoven and potentially more difficult to control by the respective character.

Similarly, in another scene, the register of weather forecasts is mixed with Dexter’s serial killer vocabulary in the utterance “another beautiful Miami day: mutilated corpses with the chance of afternoon showers” (episode 1.02, minute 0:20:37). As the mention of dead bodies is linguistically intermingled with the typical Florida climate, the presence of homicide appears utterly commonplace. Since such register incongruity has a strong potential to evoke comic effects (cf. Venour et al. 2011: 126), Dexter’s grim sense of dark humour makes him appear all the more appealing. As he appears “constantly sarcastic and witty” (Gregoriou 2011: 98), he displays a wide range of character traits that may trigger various emotional responses in the audience.

A similar amalgamation of common vocabulary and technical terminology can be found in the contrast between Walter White’s scientific approach to the drug business and the juvenile slang of his accomplice Jesse Pinkman. For instance, when Walter and Jesse need to dispose of a dead body, Walter comes to the conclusion “that our best course of action would be chemical disincorporation (pause) – dissolving in strong acid”, to which Jesse responds with the words “oh man, that’s messed up” (episode 1.02, minute 0:19:59). Through the euphemistic Latin-origin term “disincorporation”, Walter adopts the detached position of a scientist who conducts a chemical experiment, thereby dissociating himself from the unsavoury procedure and the homicidal drug business. This becomes all the more obvious in light of Jesse’s colloquial and informal reply, which demonstrates that he is not capable of register mixing but is firmly situated in the domain of youth language. Thus, by contrast with Examples (8) and (9), in which registers were mixed within the utterances of a single character, this is an instance of cross-character register mixing. In this way, the antihero is characterised not only individually, but also in contrast to other fictional figures that represent various facets of the protagonist’s personality.

As Walter is increasingly entangled in his criminal activities, he runs into trouble hiding his double life from his inquisitive wife Skyler. When she complains about his connection to drug dealer Jesse Pinkman, Walter’s response is indicative of his split personality, as demonstrated by Example (10).

(10)

Walter. I haven’t been myself lately, but I love you. Nothing about that has changed. Nothing ever will. So right now, what I need is for you to climb down out of my ass. Can you do that? Will you do that for me, honey? Will you, please, just once, get off my ass? You know, I’d appreciate it. I really would. (Episode 1.02, minute 0:35:17)

On the one hand, Walter tenderly assures his wife of his enduring love, addresses her with the term of endearment “honey”, and uses the cooperative discourse marker “you know”, the polite formula “please”, the modal auxiliaries “will” and “would”, as well as the hedging expression “just once”. On the other hand, this register of marital harmony and understanding is intermingled with the two vulgar and offensive idioms “climb down out of my ass” and “get off my ass”, which aggressively tell Skyler to mind her own business. In this way, Walter’s social role oscillates between the affectionate spouse and the unscrupulous gangster who may resort to verbal as well as physical violence. In the present communicative situation, his verbal strategy, which is accompanied by a fake smile on the screen, will be decoded as belligerent sarcasm by his wife. Like Example (9), this extract shows concurrent rather than sequential register mixing, since the vulgar lexemes are firmly embedded in the affectionate discourse. However, in Example (10) the immediate addressee is not the television audience but another character, so that this verbal strategy has a greater impact on the plot development and social relations within the fictional world.

Concealing his illegal agenda is particularly tricky for Walter whenever his wife overhears his telephone conversations with an accomplice. In Example (11), Walter is called by Jesse for assistance during family breakfast time because one of their victims is not dead, as they had falsely assumed. Consequently, the situational parameters here are more complex than in the previous examples, since the antihero is forced to meet the discursive expectations of recipients from different social spheres simultaneously.

(11)

Walter. (Picking up the phone.) Hello, this is Walter White speaking.

Jesse. (On the phone.) You said he was practically dead, okay? You said he would die any minute!

Walter. Listen, I am having breakfast with my family right now, and I really don’t appreciate these sales calls.

Jesse. (On the phone.) Well, too bad, man, ‘cause guess what. He’s still not dead! […]

Walter. (Whispering.) Calm down! I will be there after school.

Jesse. (On the phone.) After school? Are you shitting me? Ditch it, man, call in sick!

Walter. Listen, that is just not going to work for me. I’m not interested in that at all. And I would appreciate if you don’t call here anymore. (Episode 1.02, minute 0:07:33)

The situational presence of conflicting addressees caused by telephone versus face-to-face communication leads to equally diverse stylistic choices. With his wife as overhearer, Walter assumes the pose of the family father who is interrupted by a salesman from a telecommunications company, so that a detached social relationship is implied. Accordingly, he employs formulaic phrases such as “don’t appreciate” and “would appreciate if”, speaking in a loud voice clearly comprehensible to his wife in the room. When he changes the topic from the sales talk to the consequences of murder and starts to address his accomplice Jesse with the imperative “[c]alm down!”, he changes his prosody, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. The effect of register mixing here is particularly salient across characters, as Jesse’s utterances again show the distinctly colloquial register of youth language. His contributions are marked by the vulgar verb “shitting”, the vocative “man”, the ironic pre-announcement “guess what”, the informal imperative “[d]itch it”, and an aggressive prosody. Ironically, despite the different communicative roles ascribed to the caller on the phone, Walter’s communicative intention in both cases is to end the conversation as soon as possible. In sum, Walter is framed as a two-faced individual whose borderline existence strongly depends on the appropriate verbal accommodation to ambivalent situational contexts. At the same time, the viewers are invited to sympathize with Walter, since his discursive dilemma appears as the result of a series of unfortunate circumstances.

6 Conclusion

As the above examples have demonstrated, antihero identities in contemporary television series are constructed by means of various linguistic techniques. In particular, the protagonists’ equivocal state encompassing a public facade and criminal agenda can be unveiled in all three shows through cognitive-semantic and register-based analyses. The blending of mental spaces locates the protagonists in diverse conceptual domains and portrays them as individuals that literally live their secret lives by metaphors. While Frank Underwood tends to blend the world of politics with physical activities such as plumbing or sexuality, Dexter Morgan commonly conceptualizes his serial killer career by means of the input space of eating. Walter White’s clandestine ambitions are construed through suitable input spaces such as a poker game or chemical reactions. Hence, the protagonists typically make use of domains that belong to natural laws or to the bare necessities of life in order to foreground the inevitability of their hybrid existence.

Moreover, rapid register mixing underlines the antiheroes’ versatility in accommodating to variable situational and contextual parameters. For instance, Frank Underwood typically switches to a familiar register in order to create closeness with his implied confidant(e)s, while both Dexter Morgan and Walter White verbally mingle scientific terminology with colloquial vocabulary and criminal slang. Thus, in accordance with their hybrid use of language in context, the protagonists’ very identities are blends of conflicting social and situational spheres. In addition, the extracts have shown that register mixing manifests itself on the basis of a few central parameters which determine its various functions for characterisation: (a) sequential versus concurrent mixing, (b) character-internal versus cross-character mixing, and (c) register mixing addressed to other characters, the television audience, or conflicting recipients.

As regards characterisation, the verbal strategies used by the protagonists are discursive bottom-up devices mainly from the linguistic levels of lexicology, semantics, and grammar. While Breaking Bad constructs the antihero exclusively on the inter-character plane of televisual discourse, House of Cards additionally frames the protagonist through direct audience addresses and Dexter strongly relies on explanatory voice-over comments. As far as the recipients’ top-down inferencing is concerned, the protagonists do not match clear-cut categories of conventional villains and heroes, which results in an enjoyable cognitive challenge for mainstream audiences. Hence, from a functional viewpoint, the multifaceted construction of antiheroes from diverse social angles not only makes their motives comprehensible and their actions to some extent justifiable but also enhances the dramaturgic allure of the crime drama series: on the one hand, the incongruity of situations and linguistic registers is likely to result in occasional humour and satire that serve the purpose of comic relief. On the other hand, the oscillation between social roles leads to tensions between characters that need to be resolved in innovative ways by the protagonists, frequently triggering cliffhangers at the end of episodes. In conclusion, these narrative strategies tremendously contribute to the suspense in the plotlines and thus account for the great economic success and pop-cultural impact of morally and structurally complex television.

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Published Online: 2017-4-7
Published in Print: 2017-4-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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