This study aims at examining the purpose of face threatening act and the politeness strategy used by the characters in the movie entitled The Dark Knight Rises.
This research is descriptive qualitative. The method to do this research is purposive sampling technique. The data are taken from the movie entitled The Dark Knight Rises.
The result of this study shows that there are three main purposes of doing face threatening act by the characters; want to be understand (fourteen data), exposes power (four data) and social distance (four data). It indicates that characters mostly do face threatening act to make hearer understand what the speaker wants. In relation to politeness strategy, there are four strategies which are used to do face threatening act; bald on record (eight data), positive politeness (ten data), negative politeness (three data) and off record (two data). It indicates that characters tend to directly state their want, or less directly by showing close social relationship.
The findings of this research show the correlation between purpose of face threatening act and strategy to do face threatening act. The characters tend to make hearers understand and do what they want by showing social closeness. Second strategy is used to make the hearers understand the speakers’ intention by directly stating their intention.