Weekly Blog Post 6

In the video for "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M., the creator of the video uses a variety of rhetorical appeals to add to the overall effectiveness of the video.

One of the most apparent strategies is the use of logos. The video is in black and white and often shows Michael Stipe, the band's lead singer, walking through the desert, but there are other images projected in the background. This creates a structural visual hierarchy because Stipe is always the most focused aspect of the video and is what the eye is drawn to first. However, as Stipe is just walking and singing, the audience tends to pay more attention to what is happening in the background after initially noticing Stipe. Occasionally, the video cuts back to just showing Stipe, again making him the central focus. As the video is entirely in black and white, there isn't a lot of contrast colorwise, but as mentioned earlier, Stipe tends to contrast with the background clips. The background clips generally look like old TV shows with fuzzy pictures and horizontal lines across them, while Stipe is often shown in a clear picture.

The video also sometimes shows several clips of the same thing at the same time. They appear to be randomly located on the screen, and are each portrayed a bit differently. Since they are of the same object or clip, they serve as repetition and create a sense of visual unity. Sometimes the video shows several different clips at the same time, and this can be confusing as there is a lot going on visually and the audience may not know what to focus on and so has to try to take in everything at the same time. This is effective in that it gets the audience to see everything that is being presented in the video.

The structural use of logos helps to formulate pathos and ethos within the video as well. The only hues used are black and white and don't have much brightness. This keeps the video simple, and the simplicity helps the audience to focus on the clips in the video instead of having to take in all the different colors. This avoids over-stimulation, especially when there are a lot of different images shown, and this contributes to the overall effectiveness of the video.

The video is arranged to visually support the argument of the song that there are a lot of things, both true and untrue that people will believe or not believe as discussed in Weekly Blog Post 4. The clips and images used in the video are all of the references made in the lyrics of the song and are organized in such a way to draw the attention of the audience to each aspect and highlight their importance. The end result is a music video that is both argumentative and entertaining, which was probably the original purpose of the makers of the video.

Weekly Blog Post 5

The video for R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" opens with Michael Stipe singing and walking through the desert in a cowboy hat. Coupled with the fact that the video is made to look like an old-fashioned black and white movie, the video immediately establishes an emotional appeal with the audience. Stipe is seen as a down-to-earth cowboy, just a regular guy like the rest of us, and the audience can relate to that. This feeling of identification is confirmed at the end of the video when Stipe goes into a truck stop and everyone there starts singing with him. This intwines both ethos and pathos, as the audience can see Stipe as not a famous musician, but a person, and this identity evokes the emotions of the audience.

Ethos is also established by the name-dropping throughout the song. Andy Kaufman, Fred Blassie, and numerous others including Elvis, Darwin, and Moses are mentioned. Most listeners will be able to recognize these names and understand what the song is about. I had to look some of the events and information up, but when the song first came out in 1992, Andy Kaufman had only recently died and was probably still fairly well-known to the intended audience of the song. This gives a sense of credibility to the band because the audience is able to relate to the song.

Logos is brought forward in the actual lyrics of the song. The whole song is an argument about society's susceptibility to believe things and also the tendency of people, like Kaufman, to take advantage of that fact. Page 203 of Compose Design Advocate names "Lists and Repetition" and "Arguing by Example" as two forms of logos. While these aren't made blatantly obvious in "Man on the Moon" as they would be in a formal written argument, the song mentions and repeats several examples although it doesn't explain them in depth. It is then up to the audience to infer what the specific argument is, which is not that difficult.