This assignment is part of your Final Test, and it is embedded within the test. You can submit the essay here.
Instructions:
Write a five-paragraph essay with a claim in response to the article.
1. In Introduction, summarize the main argument of the article.
2. In the first body paragraph, analyze the efficacy of the argument. Do you think the author is successful in proving the point? Bring examples such as the type of evidence or appeals that they use in order to support their argument.
3. In the second body paragraph, respond to the main claim by agreeing or disagreeing with the author. The first sentence of the second body paragraph should be your opinion/claim. Add your details to support your argument. Those can be appeals, evidence, or examples to illustrate your points.
4. In the third body paragraph, include additional evidence to help support your main claim.
5. The final paragraph is conclusion that summarizes the main claim and reiterates your argument.
AI Use:
Per the class policies outlined at the beginning of the semester, AI used essays and plagiarized essays will be given 0. Please do not use AI to change your wording to “sound” academic. It will increase the AI score on the report.
You can read the article here
Progressive Profiteering: The Appeal and Argumentation of AvatarBen Wetherbee Ben WetherbeeIntroductionAs Ben Wetherbee shows, mainstream films often make overt arguments. And if a claim about the world is asserted and supported, it can be analyzed. In this concise essay, Wetherbee avoids arguing for the films worth and, instead, shows how it makes and supports a particular claim. Wetherbee is completing a PhD in English, specializing in the rhetoric of film.
In December 2009, director/screenwriter James Camerons sci-fi epic Avatar swept American cineplexes like a gale. Amid vast critical praise, the film grossed nearly 749 million dollars, a record in the United States, besting Titanic, The Dark Knight and Star Wars on the list of the nations all-time top box-office draws (All-Time). Clearly, the film struck a certain chord with American audiences, but to what, exactly, do we owe the monolithic financial and critical success of Avatar? One might highlight Camerons Hollywood savvy, the spectacular CGI jungle serving as the films setting, the steady action, the familiar storyline, or any number of other facets. Most scholars of film or rhetoric, though, would quickly rebuke the oversimplification. Avatars appeal comes from its fusion of standard Hollywood action movie features and the specific time of its release.
One avenue worth exploring is the movies social-political consciousness. I recall a friend of mine who loved Avatar. Its the perfect movie for a liberal, he said, a claim that is perhaps problematic but also understandable. It isnt difficult to imagine why Avatar might fare better among moderates and left-wingers than conservatives. Entwined in no subtle terms into the films plot is a message of environmentalism and anti-imperialism that seems particularly deliberate and timelycoming off the heels of George W. Bushs administration. Contrary to most other sci-fi films dealing with extraterrestrial life (including Camerons own Aliens), Avatar vilifies humankind, illustrating a scenario wherein the technologically superior humans seek to exploit and devastate the home of the Navi, a race of 12-foot blue-skinned humanoids with feline lineaments, for its natural resources. Moreover, the film evinces a distinct allusion to contemporary American politics; as critic J. Hoberman points out, The rampaging Sky People are heavyhandedly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as some sort of shock-and-awe campaign against the Navis, and goad each other with Cheney one-liners. … Camerons screenplay, then, succeeds in landing immediate appeal by grounding its fantastic story in the actual. Viewers who might have dismissed Avatar as a fine-looking fairy tale are invited to consider the film as something weightier. Whether this consideration takes the form of applause or indignation might very well depend on the political ideology the viewer takes into the theater, but either way, the movie assumes an air of importance.
Social relevance alone, however, cannot guarantee box-office success. Avatar would have had meager success were the viewer unable to establish an emotional bond with the characters. In asking American audiences to identify with the Navi, Cameron pulls a textbook Hollywood maneuver that echoes the likes of Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans and The Last Samurai. In each of these titles, the good guys are not, as they are in most Hollywood fare, the Anglo-Saxon Americans. These films employ white malesthe characters of Kevin Costner, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tom Cruise, respectivelyas conduits into the foreign cultures with which the audience is meant to identify. The main character is not Native American or Japanese, but white. In Avatar, Sam Worthingtons character, the paraplegic marine Jake Sully, fills the same role; he is the white male whose consciousness is inserted into a Navi bodyhis avatar. The movie thus establishes a small chain of emotional appeals: viewers identify with Jake Sully, the archetypal white, male American hero (and wounded veteran, to boot), and, then, after Sully has assimilated into the Navi, learned their ways, and fallen in love with a Navi woman, Avatar invites viewers to emotionally invest themselves in and cheer for the blue alien good guys. Cameron, one might infer, concluded before writing his screenplay that American audiences are unready to identify with a group of non-white (indeed, non-human, here) others without a normal protagonist to introduce the group.
While technically non-human, though, the Navi are hardly unfamiliar to American audiences. Their culture comprises a clich-heavy amalgam of Native American philosophies and religious tenetsor simplistic pop-cultural perversions thereofthat abound in other Hollywood films, Dances with Wolves and Last of the Mohicans included, that attempt to treat Native Americans sympathetically. The artificial culture Hollywood concocts for these natives incorporates such teachings and assumptions as, one should only kill out of need, one finds happiness in simplicity, Godor The Great Spiritis found in nature, and happiness, harmony and truth lie in oneness with nature. The common Hollywood representation is that of a simple, self-sustaining and nave people who are, barring the azure skin and catlike features, the spitting image of the Navi. Such beliefs are those exactly of the Navi, and these alien natives speak and dress just like stereotypical Hollywood Native Americans. Their chief, to cap off the comparison, is played and voiced by Wes Studi, a full-blooded Cherokee.
Such Native American pseudo-culture and its assumed wisdom becomes the scaffold upon which Cameron hangs his environmentalist argument. It is interesting to note, here, the lack of a renowned stara Tom Cruise or Daniel Day-Lewisto fill Avatars primary role. Worthington, like most of the films actors, is a B-list Hollywood name; Sigourney Weaver is the only exception, playing an important but decidedly secondary role. Avatars star, then, its true selling point, is not the cast but the CGI world, Pandoracomplete with sky-eclipsing foliage, trees 40 stories high, phosphorescent airborne jellyfish, dragons and floating rocks. Drowning in this ceaseless computer-rendered spectacle, the viewer is meant to develop an awe-induced emotional connection to Pandora, whose beauty towers above and beyond the run-of-the-mill screenplay and performances. The logic that the movie creates, furthermore, reaffirms that true power comes from oneness with nature. Only by praying to Eywa, the Navis equivalent of The Great Spirit, is Sully able to harness Pandoras natural power on behalf of the Navi and defeat the rampaging humans. Nature trumps technology, the argument goes.
Here, however, enters Avatars logical contradiction. The movies explosively violent final act implies what most action films do (e.g., the Rambo and Lethal Weapon franchises): real results, ultimately, come only from manning up and settling matters through armed conflict. This macho, right-wing truism, popular among American film audiences, appears most transparently in the climactic final battle, wherein Sully expresses unequivocal joy at the chance to fight and kill the merciless colonel who had been his superior officer. The movie glorifies this moment, even as it gainsays the Navi wisdom that killing should be only an affair of sad necessity. In its finale, Avatar does not bemoan the violence it presents. The violence is meant to be fun. As audiences uncritically tag along on this final explosive ride, they accept its logic; they accept the git-er-done attitude that values decisive, violent action, and rebukes diplomacy and dialogue.
The movie exploits its conflicting arguments for several purposes: the cultural teachings that Hollywood fabricates for its Native Americans and the Navi, on one hand, serves the purpose of making Avatar a serious film with something to say about the real-world issues of environmental destruction and the American propensity to meddle with cultures it doesnt understand. The second set of argumentsthe any means necessary attitude of valorized militarismsatisfies the simple expectation of fighting, explosions and a decisively happy ending that American audiences bring to a sci-fi epic. Logically, these arguments do not add up, but a quick glance toward Avatars box-office numbers, and toward the enthusiasm that buzzed around its theatrical and DVD releases, indicates that they do financially.