I chose to do the movie “American Sniper” as my civic artifact. In the beginning of the speech I’ll start of be asking how many people have seen the movie and follow up with a second question asking how many people have had loved ones or friends serve in the army.
Then I’ll show a little clip of the movie which will be the main point of my speech. The clip will be of when he is looking down his sniper scope which is pointing at a little boy who might be carrying an explosive device and he has to decide whether to take the shot or not. And from there i will talk about how it responds civic and what it calls us to do and the hidden messages that are brought to light when we look at it.
After that I will get into how rhetorically this artifact presents itself and how it tries to persuade the audience to have a different look on soldiers and what they go through. How it embodies the commonplaces that we hold about the military and what goes on in war. That these people are killers and they kill innocent civilian while I would bring up a contradictory commonplace ideology that this is war and you don’t know who is friendly and who is an enemy. How this movie calls to people to think again about what war is like for the soldiers who have to go through it every day and how they have to deal with their actions.
How it plays onto the rhetoric idea of language is action and how we listen to Chris Kyle and understand what war has done to him and what he has had to do. I’ll end by talking about how others why doubt movies and this movie in general as being a civic artifact and its use as a persuasive device.
RJ, I really like your artifact idea. I think using this movie as a rhetorical device is creative – not many would people would consider discussing tv/film because they’re not tangible objects – but also extremely relevant to current world discussions about war. Often times, conflict is analyzed with black and white filters, when in reality, it’s inherently so much more complex than that. There are risks involved with war; sometimes innocent people die and sometimes moral decisions are incredibly ambiguous, but is this a necessary danger to ensure that our democracy is protected? Keep pushing your thinking about this.
My main suggestion is that I would make sure to emphasize the civic function of “American Sniper.” You briefly mentioned that the clip you wanted to preview responds civically, but you didn’t really go further than that. How does the movie affect society’s views about war? Who is the movie’s audience? I think you have the ideas, you just didn’t explore them in your blog post.
I also didn’t really get a sense of how the movie employs rhetorical elements to make its claims about the nature of war. You talked about what the movie itself tries to argue, but didn’t explain the method by which it does so.
Overall, solid work, but try to develop your main ideas a little more. Your speech has a lot of potential, and with some elaboration, you’ll have a great end-product.