“We’re three old guys.” Ageist discourse in Hollywood movies – a case study.

World Population Prospects: 2017 Revision published by the UN (2017) shows that the population aged over 60 is expected to double by 2050 and triple by 2100. Besides, the older population is growing faster than the younger population. Ageing is clearly becoming one of the most relevant social changes of our century with implications for the social, labour and financial markets in relation to public systems for healthcare, pensions and social protection for a growing older population. Although it has been demonstrated that, from a medical perspective, all over the world many people over 60 people enjoy good health and lead active lives, ageing is associated with mental decline and physical impairment (Kalache 1999), and identified as a life phase treated as undesirable and unpleasant. In other words, as claimed by Zeman and Geiger Zeman (2015), getting old is perceived as a process filled with taboos, fears, prejudices and stereotypes. The discourse of ageism as portrayed in popular entertainment seems to support and perpetrate these fears, prejudices and stereotypes (Gatling 2013). Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and with a corpus linguistics approach, this study will investigate whether ageist discourse thus represented in the movie industry has changed over time. As claimed by van Dijk (2013), CDA investigation helps to uncover the implicit ideology in a text, with particular regard to the complexities of discourse production and comprehension. After investigating the issue of ageism in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Open American National Corpus (ANC), we will compare the results thus found with those emerging from a linguistic (and multimodal) analysis of two movie scripts, Going in style (1979 and its 2017 remake), to see the extent to which, if any, perceptions of ageing issues have been modified in the period between the 1979 and 2017 films. More specifically, in the first step of the analysis, we will focus on the detection of keywords (Scott 2012) in each script of the two movies, generated one against the other, to find any differences over time. Secondly, these will be analysed in comparison with the BNC and the ANC: the concordance lists these keywords collocate with in the scripts and in the two corpora will be useful to see the differences, if any, in ageist discourse in both movies and in real world. In this way, it will be possible to detect where stereotypical and biased discourse lies. Finally, the scripts of the two movies will be run in USAS, the tag suite of WMatrix (Rayson 2008), in order to detect possible semantic domains used in relation to ageism. The results seem to indicate a difference in the use of terms related to ageist issues when comparing the two keyword scripts with the BNC and the ANC. Furthermore, both the USAS investigation and the socio-semiotic study seem to underline the fact that the language used in these movies reinforces existing ageist stereotypes in real world.