William Henry Lewis Extra Credit

If there is one thing I strive for in my creative writing, it is the kind of lyricism exhibited in William Henry Lewis’ prose. “Sounds making themselves on dark pages” exactly describes my impression of his work. I really just don’t have the words to sufficiently explain how much I enjoyed hearing him read. I was particularly interested by his admission that he doesn’t remember his dreams. I guess that I’ve always just taken it for granted that I’ll be able to wake up in the morning and remember most of my dreams from the last night. For someone who doesn’t remember his dreams, he manipulates time, space and somnolent probability exceedingly well—at least in my experience. He captured the fluidity of dreams accurately, especially how you can start in one place and find yourself in another. Of course, maybe I just don’t remember the “traveling” parts of my dreams, but it always seems as though I jump from one place to another. His writing reminds me a lot of e.e. cummings, whose work I adore. It doesn’t all make sense, but it certainly does make an impression. His words are unfamiliar, thrown together in novel combinations—like jazz—washing past. He has a talent for making the vernacular align to his cause, not unlike Jason Robert Brown’s music. Finally, the whole experience was topped off by his wonderful, musical voice. It made me want to start hitting the writing harder.

rhetorical analysis draft

Dark, sexy, alluring. The glamorized side of drug use is chic, just like this commercial. But there is a distinct dichotomy between the positive perception of drugs and reality. As this commercial analogizes, taking drugs is like “lining up to destroy [yourself].” Through visual and auditory support of logos, pathos and ethos, this advertisement functions as a strong anti-drug statement.

This commercial, supported by Care NZ, a New Zealand drug rehabilitation service, starts the narration with a trendy club scene. Mirrors on the wall and nondescript, but hip club music plays. The colors are dark, but varied. There are blues, reds, greens, yellows. While it is clear that the focus is on one man, the other people and objects also draw attention. Everything else is forgotten, however, twelve seconds in when the audience’s focus comes completely to this one man. He enters the men’s restrooms, the sound dims and the colors become shades of black and white almost exclusively. He enters the stall, kneeling in front of a pristinely white toilet (something unseen in clubs) and lays out a couple of things on top of it. The audience is then horrified when he reaches back and peels open his head, accompanied by a metallic/mechanical sound that has that nails-on-a-chalkboard effect. Here, a brilliant red is added to the colors, emphasized by the pure white of the toilet. He picks up his credit card and starts cutting the piece of brain he just pulled out and this is the point that the audience truly understands what he’s doing. That same sound follows for the next few seconds while he forms lines of the brain matter and then licks the card clean. He then rolls up a bill and snorts the lines, coming to a close up of the bloody mess being sucked up the tube. The shot then pulls out and the man gets up, leaving his credit card, incidentally. The next shot is a close up of blood dripping out of his nose, him wiping it away and licking it off, and then the dilation of his eye, all set to that same piercing sound.

The logos of this ad is supported by some of the only text in the spot: “Every day, more and more people are lining up to destroy themselves.” The cause and effect aspect is clear. If you do drugs, then you’re destroying yourself. The next line of text furthers this cause and effect reasoning. “If you need help call 0508 CARE NZ.” The commercial suggests that that getting help should be the next logical step. The wording is also significant because it reinforces the specificity of the target drug. It isn’t just drugs in general this ad is going after. It’s cocaine, which is made clear by the lines that he’s snorting, but also in the text, “people are lining up.”

Ethos, defined as an appeal to the goodwill of the speaker, is also important in this commercial. The “speaker” in this case does no speaking, but ethos can also be inferred through actions. The focus of the ad is a young man probably in his mid-twenties. The audience is unaware of his intentions through the first twenty seconds of the commercial. What we do know is that he’s well-dressed and good looking. Perhaps he’s looking for someone or going to the bar for a drink. There is a slight element of suspense while we wait to find out what he is doing or what is going to happen to him. The ethos of this figure, then, falls into the realm of ambivalence. We don’t trust or distrust him initially, but we’re willing to give him a chance. The audience is then horrified when he reaches back and peels up a part of his scalp to reveal what should be his brain. Whether intentionally or not, it looks nothing like a real brain. This might be a statement to say that he’s been pulling his brain apart for a while and so all that’s left is a soupy mess. His ethos is sent crashing down when he starts cutting the piece of brain into lines, clearly insinuation that this is a parallel to coke use. Thanks to years of being told that drugs are bad, especially hard drugs like cocaine, most people now view this man as distasteful and untrustworthy. This is both an illustration of the analogy of the whole ad. It is illustrated that doing coke is like destroying a part of yourself, and an important part at that. He didn’t cut off a bit of skin, he pulled out part of his brain.

The pathos here is controlled almost exclusively by sights and sounds. It is important to note the target audience for this commercial as well. The setting, specifically, sets the target range at club-going age, somewhere between 18 and 28. This scene appeals to that age group. The music is something you immediately recognize as something you can dance to. The dark colors make it seem intimate and sexy. We feel interested and good about what’s going on in the first twelve seconds. The man then goes into the restroom, something with which we’re all familiar. At this point, the sounds are noticeably reduced, creating a private, intimate, perhaps even clandestine feel. The colors, which were previously muted, but representative of most of the spectrum, become sharp and black and white. Outside the bathroom is a happy club scene; inside, things are serious. The camera follows him into the stall, which is split, top and bottom, into white and black, respectively. Learned color associations put white into the schema of “good” and black into “bad”. This can been seen as reinforcement of the negative connotations of what he’s about to do. The audience can see this stall as representative of heaven and hell, then, and he is crouching quite firmly in hell. The purity of the colors also serve to highlight the shock value of that bright red piece of brain plopping down on the toilet lid. This has been taking place in relative silence until the point when he pulls back his scalp. We are then assaulted with a noise that falls somewhere between a saw and dial-up. This is a noise that can be equated with what one might imagine a “brain ache” would sound like. The noise is creepy and intended to give goosebumps and make one feel queasy. It cuts across your nerves just as the credit card is cutting across this chunk of flesh.

The emphasis in the next 4 seconds is on the “drugs”, to increase the audience’s horror of what’s going on here and make sure that the analogy between using drugs and damaging yourself is clear. There is a wide shot and then a return to a close-up of his hands rolling the bill. The blood under his fingernails is clear. It’s these kind of details that make this commercial truly creepy—and therefore, effective. The next shot is wider again, but quickly returns to a close-up of the end of the rolled bill and the bloody matter disappearing up it. That same noise can be heard, but it’s more subtle now, allowing the full conscious focus to be on the fact that his man is snorting his own brain. The shot then pans upward, creating a well-like effect and this guy is at the bottom of it. The implication is that he’s in a place from which he can’t escape. The final shot is a close up of his nose, blood dripping from it just as coke might. The noise, which we have now come to associate with ingestion of blood and bad things is back in the foreground. He wipes away the blood and, as if it weren’t bad enough already, licks his finger clear. The noise then sustains in something like a crescendo through the focused dilation of the eye.

Just as sounds are important in the Care NZ commercial, sounds add a unique focus to this clip from the movie Requiem for a Dream. And, just as seen in the advertisement, there is a gross-out factor in the insertion of the needle in the infected puncture mark. (Etc, etc, more tying in and wrapping up.)