Multimodal Stylistics Study Of "Stinger" At The End Of Movies

The Marvel Cinematic Universe(MCU)is a series of superhero-centric films independently produced by Marvel Studios based on the characters in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.The MCU uses the same elements as the comic books do and common settings to set up a virtual world.Each movie in this series is inextricably linked.It is through the perspectives of the protagonists and the storyline in different films that Marvel's own world view is constructed.The MCU superhero films have achieved great success both in terms of industry commentary and in business revenue.Since the release of the first film Iron Man in 2008,up to June 2018,the MCU had released a total of 19 independent films.What's more,as of the release of the 19 th film,The Avengers 3: Infinite War,in 2018,the MCU superhero series of films had achieved global box office takings of up to 16.9 billion US dollars(Box Office Mojo,2018).The carefully designed ‘stinger'(also known as post-credits scene)at the end of the MCU series of films has played an important role in the films' marketing.The ‘stinger' of the MCU films is a big selling-point of this superhero series of films,which assists the arc of the storyline and connects the Marvel universe to a logical fictional world.Marvel Studios has become more and more clear about the functionality and directionality of its ‘stinger' at the end of each film in each series.In general,there are two kinds of patterns: the first kind of ‘stinger' is used to supplement the story of the film itself,and the second kind of ‘stinger' is used to further advance the story into potential sequels or spinoffs(Vulture,2014).The reason why the ‘stinger' in the films can be noticed by the audience and allows people to have relevant subjective association is because the films use a lot of skillful techniques in the design process so that the audience can pay attention to the highlights of some elements,which help to achieve a foregrounding effect.This thesis takes the MCU superhero series of films as the research subject,from the perspective of multimodal stylistics,and takes the systemic functional grammar of functional linguistics as the theoretical basis to analyze the ‘stingers' at the end of the MCU films released before June 2018.Through analysis and comparison,the paper explores how Marvel Studios chose proper modes to design the ‘stingers' at the end of the films,and how the meaning of various modes are constructed to form the stylistic effect with foregrounding feature.The research is of great theoretical and practical significance.First of all,this research enriches the scope for discourse analysis of movies through the in-depth analysis of the realization of different modal functions in the ‘stingers' and breaks through the limitations of the traditional field of verbal analysis.Secondly,it broadens the field of multimodal stylistics analysis by combining Visual Grammar with the audio analysis theory in films.Finally,this research provides a more comprehensive perspective of appreciating ‘stingers' by analyzing the integrated effects of foregrounding,created through the cooperation between different modalities,and which accordingly generates a positive influence thus improving audiences' overall comprehension and identification of the multimodal discourse of movies.