Rhetoric Movie Review

Sample

Outline of the RIP Project Rhetorical Situation

Audience: 18-24 year-olds who attend music festivals regularly; enough disposable income to support such attendance and other luxury purchases; personality type: heavy social media user, rave bum (lol), and naïve/prone to believing without questioning

Message: Stop trusting online appearances and question aggressively; also secondary message about caring about the social justice issue surrounding the labor exploitation underpinning the festival

Genre: Film review

Ethos: Veteran Film Critic P.T. Branham

Historical Context: 1/18/19

Cultural Context: Social Media Saturation, Festival circuit dominating disposable income of this age group,

RIP Project Draft

Just Stop Believing

If you believe this Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud, Billy McFarland is to blame. The promotion company is to blame. The social media influencers are to blame. Kendall Jenner in particular is to blame because she represents all that is bad and despicable and unforgivable about mindless American consumerism. Well maybe she's not to blame how could she have known. But she’s for sure to blame for that Pepsi cringefest. So maybe strike two.

Billy McFarland, the founder and CEO of Fyre, is running this ship of fools according to the directors of this documentary, Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, who villainize him even in their lighting choice which he mocks under his breath. Billy is in fact so foolish that he literally becomes fixated on buying a pirate ship for the festival as a novelty piece even when there were still no bathrooms or lodging for guests. As the resident ring leader of the festival circus, Furst and Nason make sure Billy fits the role; he is characterized as a quick talking, slow witted, buffoonish scumbag who has no idea what he is doing.

But he is not the only fool. All the way down to the hapless guests, who themselves take on two-dimensional qualities as idiot targets who got what was coming to them, everyone comes across as absurdly dumb and equally unsympathetic. One festival goer dramatically bursts into tears when she sees the festival grounds for the first time. It is hard to feel sorry for anyone in this circus. Except the laborers who worked around the clock and got little screen time, even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard.

The documentary misses the entire point. Human nature is to blame more so than anything else, not a particular person; the entire disaster was a bizarre intersection among many players in a crooked game who were all mindlessly wanting more. Billy has always been “thinking big,” and the attendees wanted a big experience. Or rather it was not even a big experience, but a bigger one. Bigger than Coachella, or Rolling Loud, or EDC. Bigger than what their friends were doing. Bigger than what they had done last year.

The Fyre Festival documentary is aggressively finger pointing and mocking all the way through; the scam seems obvious in retrospect. But all great scams have a way of camouflaging themselves, and the directors should have explored the camouflage with less judgment and universalized it. The Fyre Festival is one of countless scams big and small that share a set of patterns.

By leaving the viewer in a confident position, laughing at everyone involved, the director has done nothing except hurt the viewer even more. By sitting in the audience laughing at and not identifying with anyone, they are even more vulnerable. Your ego is reinforced. That could never be me. Perhaps not; you may never pay exorbitant sums for a music event that goes up in smoke. But you will likely buy into an idea, a hope, a person, a job, or something that turns out to be less than what was promised in the advertisement. It is human nature to hope for the best, and sometimes, as they say, hope against hope.

Even when the writing is on the wall. Even when the jig is up, sometimes we just keep believing. Fyre Fraud provided no context for this tendency, and only worsened all of our ego ridden tendencies to assume that what happens to others will never happen to me.

Apparently Ja Rule is organizing Fyre Fest 2 right now- I heard it’s going to be amazing.

RIP Essay Body Paragraph Example: Pathos

Note the same RA Mechanics:

Yellow= TS Claim

Blue: Quote Integration

Purple= Analysis

Green= Internal Transition

Gray= Structure technique to improve rhetorical unity- key words in predictable sequence

In my Fyre Festival film review I used pathos by engaging my audience’s love and hate for a popular and divisive media figure, and I also created sympathy for the laborers to show them how the scam portrayed had more significant consequences such as labor exploitation than those associated with the disgruntled concert attendees. In my opening paragraph, I hyperbolically blamed Kendall Jenner for the Fyre fiasco, writing that “Kendall Jenner in particular is to blame because she represents all that is bad and despicable and unforgivable about mindless American consumerism.” I used the phrase “all that is bad and despicable” to effectively exaggerate to an absurd degree so that my audience would detect sarcasm and glean that such a position is absurd. Those in my audience who like, love, or even idolize this public figure would be alienated by a scathing critique of her. So by mocking an extreme critique of her and making it seem unreasonable, I am keeping them on my argumentative side, and ensuring they remain open to my message about the problematic nature of superficial appearances camouflaging more nefarious motives like greed. In contrast to appealing to the positive affection some of the audience has for Jenner, I also appealed to those who dislike her and see her as a problematic representation of a cultural trend toward superficiality. I reinforce their animus toward her by using the phrase “she’s for sure to blame for that Pepsi cringe-fest.” By using this reference to the Pepsi ad Jenner starred in, I am stoking this type of reader’s judgment toward her as a cultural figure who reinforces superficiality and a distorted image of reality, the same way the Pepsi ad distorted a complex social problem like police brutality. My emotional appeals were not limited to the love and hate attached to a popular public figure, as I also created sympathy for the unfortunately anonymous workers who were cheated out of their wages. I wanted to ensure that my audience was able to sympathize with those who faced some of the most dire consequences associated with the festival, writing that everyone was to blame “except the laborers who worked around the clock and never got paid, [and] who got little screen time, even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard.” By using rhetorical parallelism in this sentence, I linked the lack of “screen time” with having no voice, and so shifted the sentiment from just an opportunity to be in the film to the film acting as a part of the problem these workers faced. By implicating the film itself in the workers’ suffering, I am creating sympathy in my own audience and they are more likely to believe my message that the film was unsuccessful and instead be persuaded by my own message. By using multiple forms of pathos, including the affection and animus toward Jenner as well as the empathy toward the workers, I am moving my audience to accept the message that the Fyre Festival was not simply about one unethical incident but a facet of human nature that fuels all scams.