Unit 5 TOW #3

            During Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell repeatedly refers to the grizzly bears he encounters as his “best friends.”  This idea that Treadwell could somehow develop relationships with these wild animals is called into question throughout the film.  For example, following one scene in which Treadwell passionately declares his love for these animals, director Werner Herzog interviews the curator of an Alaskan grizzly bear museum who has a very different take on their relationship.  The curator explains that having grown up around grizzly bears in Alaska, he was always taught never to interact with them.  The members of his town simply believed there was a line between wildlife and man that was never to be crossed.  By agreeing to leave each other alone, both the grizzly bears and the townspeople benefitted.  In fact, Herzog appears to share this stance regarding interaction with wildlife as well.  Towards the end of the documentary, Herzog mentions the fact that after having watched more than 100 hours of Treadwell’s footage, he never once noticed any indication of the relationships Treadwell claimed to be a part of.  Instead of developing relationships, Treadwell was putting himself into a much more vulnerable position by choosing to interact with the bears.  The National Parks Service states that bears must be viewed from at least 300 yards away and that approaching the bear might lead the bear to believe you are attacking it.  Treadwell repeatedly violated this law while attempting to approach the bears and this might have contributed to his death.

            The use of personal video cameras has obviously impacted our society in terms of how we share our lives with others.  With a video camera and sites like YouTube, we can all become filmmakers in a sense.  For Timothy Treadwell, a video camera meant a chance to share his eco-friendly message with the world.  Before he went to live in the Alaskan wilderness each year he would ask a friend of his to make a movie out of his footage if he didn’t return.  Despite the fact that Treadwell was extremely poor, he was able to transmit his message to a much larger audience than he ever could have hoped via Herzog’s use of his own personal footage.  In a way, the use of Treadwell’s personal recordings had a much more profound effect on viewers than that of a more conventional documentary.  The care Treadwell took in creating his shots, along with the manic rants he occasionally went on before and after takes, provided a much clearer picture of the man than one would have gotten from reporters.  While it became obvious that Treadwell was a bit off, the audience was able to look past all of the reports that simply dismissed him as crazy because of the private nature of his footage.  Ultimately, without his own recordings it would have been impossible to develop a complete picture of Treadwell like the one that was developed in Grizzly Man.

TOW Grizzly Man

            In October of 2003, Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist and grizzly bear enthusiast, was killed and partially eaten by a grizzly bear in a national park in Alaska.  For the previous 13 years, Treadwell had spent his summers isolated in the wilderness of Alaska compiling over 100 hours of footage of these bears.  In 2005, director Werner Herzog included some of this footage in a documentary titled Grizzly Man, which detailed Treadwell’s personal struggle to protect the bears.  Treadwell’s work was a subject of great controversy, as many believed he did more harm than good when living among the grizzly bear population.

            In many ways, Treadwell’s own footage speaks for itself and requires little editing on the part of Herzog.  In fact, Herzog commends his skill as a filmmaker throughout the documentary and points out various directorial decisions that Treadwell makes in order to promote himself as a protector of the environment.  To highlight Treadwell’s mania, Herzog juxtaposes scenes in which Treadwell is almost crying simply because he loves the grizzly bear he nicknamed “Mr. Chocolate” with scenes in which he is shouting obscenities directed at the U.S. Park Service.  In addition, he includes humorous excerpts from Treadwell’s recordings in which he relates his struggles of finding a girlfriend to the grizzly bears’ struggle of finding a mate.  All through just the showing of his own footage, it becomes clear by the end of the movie that even though Treadwell is dedicated to his cause, he is probably mentally unstable.

            To emphasize not only the internal conflict that Treadwell obviously faced, but also the external conflict created by Treadwell’s work and his death, Herzog contrasts shots of Treadwell claiming that he is the only person truly committed to protecting the bears with shots of ecologists and bear experts who describe how Treadwell’s interaction with the bears might have hurt the bear population.  In addition, Herzog interjects at points during Treadwell’s footage and offers his own perspective.  He states that even after watching all of Treadwell’s footage, he never once noticed the bond Treadwell believed he shared with his Grizzly Bear friends.  Ultimately, Treadwell’s life and death reveals the fact that many of us believe there to be an unspoken barrier between humans and wildlife that makes meaningful interaction impossible.

TOW Reflection

            As someone who enjoys staying up to date on current events, I looked forward to the weekly TOW assignments as a literary outlet for my interest in global affairs.  Completing them often forced me to contemplate both the text and the issue discussed within the text to a much greater extent than I would have had I just simply read the piece.  Not only has this process allowed me to develop a fuller understanding of the articles I read each week, but it has also caused me to be a more critical reader.  Now when reading TIME Magazine or even just a billboard on the side of the road, I take careful note of how the authors employ certain rhetorical devices.  In this way, I have found that these TOW assignments, and this class in general, has enabled me to become a much more discerning reader.  Just as in Statistics where we are told to be skeptical of graphs or charts created by a biased author, I have learned to be skeptical of texts created only to support the author’s beliefs.  More importantly, I feel as though I am now better equipped to recognize the author’s purpose in creating a text based on his/her use of rhetorical devices.

            When I first began my TOWs, I spent far too much of my time creating a summary of the text as opposed to analyzing its rhetorical devices.  I believe that part of this was due to the fact that I was worried about hitting on all of the points mentioned in the assignment sheet and fitting it all into exactly 300 words or less.  Once I realized that the word limit was more of a suggestion, I was able to devote more time to writing about the author’s purpose and his/her use of certain rhetorical strategies in order to achieve that purpose.  Also, my initial TOWs relied heavily upon discussing ethos, logos and pathos.  While I still occasionally include these devices in my posts, I have learned over the course of the year that there are often more unique strategies present in a text than just the three appeals.  I am also more comfortable in discussing certain aspects of a text even if I am unaware of the specific rhetorical term used to describe it.  Finally, I tended to gloss over the purpose of a text during the beginning of the year primarily because I saw it as just another bullet point on the assignment sheet that needed to be addressed.  Towards the end of the year though I dedicated the majority of my posts to describing the purpose of the text and to analyzing how the rhetorical strategies related to this purpose.

            By the third marking period, I was able to provide the context of the article and a short summary in a way that was complete, yet concise.  Also, I felt I was able to clearly identify the purpose and link the context of the article and the rhetorical devices used for this purpose fairly easily.  Still, I had difficulty expanding the variety of rhetorical devices I discussed.  This could have been due to the fact that I often chose to discuss the ones I could most easily identify, rather than search for those that might be more unusual.  Ultimately, I found the TOWs to be rewarding because they helped me to become more aware of both the rhetorical strategies discussed in class as well as the world around me.    

TOW #28 "Rape -- A Lack of Conviction"

            David McCandless, a British author and information designer, hosts a website titled informationisbeautiful.net.  On his site, he posts infographics designed to question commonly accepted beliefs within our society.  In one of his most recent infographics, titled “Rape—A Lack of Conviction,” McCandless examines our society’s reaction to allegations of rape.  Mostly, he finds that very few rape cases are actually reported because of the stigma that surrounds the topic.

            McCandless uses brightly colored circles to represent various statistics about rape in the UK.  The circles are arranged in terms of the various stages of identifying a rape and prosecuting an attacker.  The size of the circles continues to get smaller and smaller as you move down the infographic that represents the fact that only a small percentage of rape cases actually ends in a conviction.  By using this simple yet impactful design, McCandless allows the viewer to easily identify the logical structure and progression of his reasoning.  Next, at each stage of the infographic where there is a different circle to represent a specific statistic, McCandless compares the size of that circle to the percentages of other crimes that reach that stage of prosecution.  For example, he writes that 82% of reported rapes do not come to trial while only 27% of drug-related charges do not.  In this way, he emphasizes the fact that rape may not be considered as serious an offense as it should be.  Ultimately, McCandless hopes to reveal the fact that we need to be more proactive about prosecuting rapists because they do severe damage to our society. 

TOW #27 Thrift Shop

            In their song “Thrift Shop,” artists Macklemore and Ryan Lewis rap about how wearing vintage clothes is the latest trend in fashion.  At one point in the song they say, “No, for real, ask your grandpa: can I have his hand-me-downs?”  This line is the title for Mireille Silcoff’s latest article in the New York Times Magazine in which she describes “how old got cool.”  Throughout the text, Silcoff writes of a newfound respect and interest many young adults show in the elderly generation.

            Initially, Silcoff establishes a light and humorous tone by listing examples of how fashion companies are utilizing elderly models to market new product lines.  For example, she describes a photo in a fashion catalogue titled “Advanced Style” in which there is “a 100-year-old woman holding a seasoned ostrich purse in one hand and a walking stick in another; her facial expression suggests a certain curiosity as to why in God’s name this boychik with the digital camera wants so much to taker her picture.”  Silcoff recognizes that the topic she is discussing naturally lends itself to jokes and so she entertains the audience by making sarcastic remarks about the younger generation and the so-called “hipster” lifestyle.  Interestingly enough, she also includes a graph below the text that indicates the number of mentions of Betty White in the New York Times by decade.  Not only does the graph reveal the resurgent popularity of a White as a result of this fascination with the elderly, but it also adds to the overall appearance of the text as well.

            Silcoff does an excellent job of being humorous yet insightful.  Even though she pokes fun at some of the latest fashion trends, she ultimately argues that this new respect for our elders is well-deserved.