A Content Analysis of Directive Speech Act in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Movie

This study aims to analyze the types of directive speech acts and to determine the most dominant type used in the movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023). Directive speech acts are utterances intended to get the hearer to perform a specific action, and they are commonly found in dialogues that involve power relations, authority, and social control, as reflected in the dystopian setting of the movie. This research employed a qualitative content analysis method, using the movie's transcript as the primary data source. The data were analyzed through data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The findings reveal that all five types of directive speech acts are present in the movie, with a total of 284 directive utterances identified across the entire dialogue. The most dominant type is question, accounting for 49.3% of the total utterances, followed by command (24.3%), request (16.2%), prohibition (8.8%), and permission (1.4%). The dominance of questions and commands reflects the movie's dual emphasis on ideological interrogation and authoritarian control, both of which are shaped by the power hierarchies and thematic tensions within the dystopian world of Panem. This study is expected to serve as a useful reference for further research on speech acts in audiovisual media, particularly in exploring the relationship between language use and power dynamics in movie discourse.