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Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman: A Captivating Yet Incomplete Look into America’s Failing Education System

Distinction between "bad guys" & "good guys"

Frame

Thesis

Background

  • Documentary film's ability to stimulate the discourse around pressing issues in society
  • Simplifying issues for a mass audience
  • Performative dimension to documentary film
  • Controversial methods to attract large audience

1) Situating Waiting for Superman in history:

  • Muckraking Journalism: informative or sensationalist?
  • Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring": exposing the greeds of society to the general public

2) Previous film by Guggenheim: An Inconvenient Truth

  • Appealing to the pathos of viewers, shocking audiences to stimulate discourse

3) Film style: Michael Moore

  • Fahrenheit 9/11: "I hope it gets Bush out of the White House"
  • Thesis: In Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim resorts to rhetorical techniques as a means of oversimplifying the issues of public education in the United States. He does so as a way to capture the attention of an otherwise disengaged and uninformed general public.

  • “So What?”: The film is often criticized for its lack of breadth in scientifically analyzing the issue. But Guggenheim’s main intention in Superman was to attract as much attention as possible to stimulate the discourse around education reform.

  • This is characteristic of the ability of documentary to appeal to a mass audience, but do so by providing a simplistic and often incomplete view of the issue.

  • Animations w/ statistics
  • Terminologies

Method framing

Go-to critic

Analysis

Focus on a few contributors to education reform

  • Elizabeth Dutro, Professor in the School of Education and the University of Colorado Boulder

  • In his simplified explanation, Guggenheim left out factors such as poverty crucially contributing to the crisis
  • Many arguments are false and contradictory

In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he was asked, "Was there anything that didn't make the film that you wanted to be in the film?"

>> "Everything" he responds

>> Techniques

>>>Aristotle's two types of evidence:

1) "Inartistic or non-artificial proofs"

2) "Artistic or artificial proofs"

  • Films like Moore's and Guggenheim, more of (2) - in their contrived rhetoric to give the audience a certain impression
  • (2) is successful for these films, as it stimulates discourse

Appealing to the pathos (emotions) of viewers

Film's effect on discourse around American education reform

"We do what's fair, we place our children and their future in the hands of luck" - Guggenheim

Promotional rhetoric keeping audiences engaged in the discourse of education reform even after the film

  • Money starts flowing into charter schools from donors
  • More attention paid to education crisis with release of film

Ending credits declaring:

  • "We know what works - quality teachers...more classroom time...world class standards...high expectations...real accountability"

http://www.takepart.com/waiting-for-superman

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