Hollywood Cinema’s Strategies for Monitoring the Audience Culture: Discourse Analysis of the Lorax Animation Based on the Juxtaposition Idea

This paper is concerned with analyzing the tricks of the Hollywood Cinema’s discourse formation when introducing the environmental problems and their proposed solutions in the Lorax animation. Descriptive-analytical research method was employed and by using the idea of juxtaposition and critical reading of the discourse of capitalist global system, the mechanisms of stabilization and consolidation of the Western semantic discourse system was decoded or deciphered. The Lorax animation, which is a representation of this discourse, tries to present a new profile of widespread environmental problems, culprits, responsibilities and solutions to the audience. But, the findings of this research show that environmental problems, like cutting the trees and air pollution, are just an excuse for legitimization of consumerist discourse, marketing for multinational corporations, and more importantly, promotion of humanism. Believers and theists in this animation are represented as impotent and helpless beings. But, through a clearer, more powerful, and deeper expression of thoughts and abilities of independent human being, humanism uplifts its hero to the etheric domain of gods until he/she becomes the subject of observational reflection of the audience. At the end of this animation, the audience will find out that for the first time in the world history, the Western discourse has appeared in the form of a just global system that is the output of “the profound orientations and tendencies of the social world,” and, without any need to the divine guidance, can provide man with various options of semanticization of a happy life.