Reaction to Inconvenient Truth

True story, like Fast Food Nation, I've already seen it. That is, I read it. No I hadn't seen Fast Food Nation before class, but I have seen Inconvenient Truth. It was good the second time.

It's alarming. That is, when I first saw it, I basically felt like the world would come to an end if I didn't do anything about it. Which is the rhetorical object of the film, I suppose. What makes this film so great is Gore's use of Keynote, that wonderful Apple Powerpoint killer. You gotta love the wealth of charts he uses during the first half or so of the film, especially the one that highlights mean temperature (or carbon emissions, whatever it is) that he has to use a cherry picker to point to it. That visual evidence is enough. But then he shows all the ice fields that have broken up in recent times, like the gigantic ice field in patagonia or the ice sheet in Antarctica that had broken off. Pictures like that are worth much more than a thousand words, but our administration doesn't really think so I take it. Global warming doesn't make money. Unless you're Al Gore and you're scare-mongering people into seeing his terrifying prediction of the future. But seriously, Gore had genuine intentions in producing this film, it's been his labor of love making this presentation for months, years, etc. He makes it personal by injecting it with the anecdotes of his sister who had died of lung cancer or his son who was hit by a car. He makes it clear that he doesn't want to lose something precious to him, and that just happens to include that thing we live on - the Earth. The pictures he uses of our planet are stunning reminders of just how wonderful this planet is, but also how small and fragile. We are a tiny dot in comparision to the the vast universe around us and we gotta start treating it better.

In terms of argumentation, this was the most successful piece we've watched in class, better than Fast Food Nation and it's fictionality and frivolous inclusions but painful imagery, or Iraq stories and it's overt biases but unique perspective. Inconvenient Truth has just such a well-crafted argument and high production values. And it's completely true. It's the perfect package of story-telling and persuasion.