Emotional Dynamics of Christopher Nolan Movie Scripts Using Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Christopher Nolan has long been regarded as a pioneer of 21st-century filmmaking and cinematography. With gripping plots and emotive characters, Nolan’s movies exemplify storytelling and have earned high box-office ratings. Nolan also institutes a particular focus on scriptwriting, which forms the basis of effective storytelling through contextualisation and dialogue, as a foundation for the development of emotional progression. As one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, Nolan’s artistic choices, particularly in his movie scripts, warrant study. An in-depth analysis of the emotional patterns that cultivate feelings prominent in his films through the lens of scriptwriting remains to be explored. Thus, in this narrative-based content analysis study, I use sentiment analysis, a code-based method of mapping words and phrases to complex emotions, to quantitatively assess the emotional dynamics of the films Memento, The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. I then incorporated a qualitative analysis of trends across these Nolan films with regard to the three metrics: emotional progression, emotion density, and utterance emotion dynamics. Initially, I expected there to be a fixed pattern, with some of psychologist Robert Plutchik’s eight core emotions, such as anticipation and anger, peaking at climactic moments. Ultimately, my analysis yielded many disparities. Each film presented a different combination of emotions and demonstrated varied…