Blue Jeans and Rhetoric

I'll admit that I love television commercials.

Correction: I love well made television commercials. Every time I see Ronnie Lamarque standing in front of a computer generated image of St. Louis Cathedral singing a terrible rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In" I die a bit on the inside.

For those of you who've never witnessed the horror, here is the textbook definition of a bad commerical:

Now what should a good commercial do? It should make some sort of appeal to someone so they want to use the product being advertised. That's hard enough to do but television commercials as a visual medium. The average television commercial is thirty seconds long. Film has 24 frames per second (FPS) (Digital video runs at 30 FPS) or images. The average commercial throws 720 individual images (900 on video) at its viewer. During a five minute commercial break, viewers are exposed to 216,000 individual images (359,100 images with digital video). Thinking of that many copies of Ronnie Lamarque can possibly inspire murderous rage (just ask his wife who put out a hit on him).

How can a commercial break though all the white noise that is being thrown at audiences. Almost fifty years of TV watching have pretty much desensitize most people to commercials as background noise. Do advertisers employ digital rhetoric? Perhaps we need shocking images during commercials? Consider this ad for Gap clothing stores by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button):

If you're already wondering: Gap never ended up using this commercial for very obvious reasons. It is perhaps too jarring, too shocking. The every day of consumer shopping changed in a moment of very clear violence. The music ("The Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt) is similarly violent. Gap wanted to show that their stories were going to have a radical make over, but you really shouldn't advertise wanton destruction with 1. a shopping experience and 2. clean clothes (look at all that dust!).

From a classical rhetoric perspective, it does not do anything rhetorically either. It is not the Visa commercial which Bowers showed us in class. It doesn't ask the audience to achieve for anything greater (and think of all the ways that Visa can help you get there). It does not try to show that shopping at the Gap is better than other stores (Actually maybe I want to shop at the Banana Republic across the street?) nor how shopping at Gap will improve my life. It make me think that director Fincher had ulterior motives (Fight Club is a $60 million anti-consumerist film produced and released by Rupert Murdoch's Fox).

In a later post, I'll give an example of a commercial where the rhetoric works both argumentatively and visually. It also happens to sell clothing like the Gap ad.

Finding the "Truth"

Rhetoric, as we have been learning, is a very powerful and at times dangerous tool. Being able to tell the difference between the types of rhetoric we’ve seen and simply being able to realize what is rhetoric is important, especially the older we get. Take, for example, the ongoing New Orleans mayoral race. Speeches, platforms, websites and commercials are all real-life examples of rhetoric. This rhetoric affects us on a very real and important level. And the more we know the better equipped we are to make decisions.

So far, we have been introduced to three types of rhetoric: the “fact-based,” “I’m only interested in your best interest” approach; the more emotional “I know what is best so trust me” approach; and the “this simply is the truth” approach. What I want to know is if there are any examples now of the third approach. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech” is an example of the third approach, but it seems to me that the age of truth, one might say, has past. Cynicism, deception, doubt, greed and a history of dishonest and insincere rhetoric have turned us away from the truth. One candidate in the mayoral debate, James Perry, claims to embrace the truth. This is one of his more popular, and controversial, campaign commercials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8S24JAUsVE

Do you think that James Perry might be using the third form of rhetoric? Or do you think his claims are simply another, though clever, form of deception? If the latter, can you think of any modern examples of rhetoric that doesn’t deceive or have some ulterior motive? In this day and age, can any politician actually have the good of his constituents at heart? How can we, as educated voters, cut through the technique and find the truth? Or can we at all?

The First Speech

If a quasi-objective rhetoric can be persuasive, as is argued in the Phaedrus, can you think of examples of this sort of rhetoric? Has any instance influenced you?

Callicles and Television

In their free time, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Study reported in newspapers today, children ages eight to eighteen spend 4.5 hours watching television, 2.5 listening to music, 1.5 on the computer, and 1 with video games. If we follow Callicles’ argument that rhetorical victories should and do go to the stronger, is the television still the winner as the medium that is most rhetorically compelling? Why is that so? Or is it just more available? What do you think that these young people are watching in their 4.5 hours? Do you think that there would be different results by gender?

Welcome to our Class!