Assignment 3 Academic writing favors complexity. Often, rather than attempting to reduce a topic to a simple idea, academic writing tries to complicate it, to see multiple perspectives, potential contradictions, to move beyond the obvious. We can see this in the excerpt we read from bell hooks’s book Reel to Real. She describes the act of viewing movies as involving a series of tensions. While movies may seem real, she writes, “giving audiences what is real is precisely what movies do not do” (1). We go to movies to be entertained, but hooks notes that we also “learn stuff” from movies, and “Often what we learn is lifetransforming in some way” (2). She argues that films themselves contain what she calls “multiple standpoints,” and they may mix “revolutionary” and “conservative” standpoints in ways that make it “hard for audiences to critically ‘read’ the overall filmic narrative” (3). Nonetheless, hooks insists, we viewers of film are “usually seduced, at [least] for a time, by the images we see on the screen. They have power over us . . .” (4). That is, despite—or perhaps because of—the complexity of film, it is important to “to understand and ‘read’ . . . what the film tries to do to us” (4) precisely because it can have such power over the way we think and feel. Like bell hooks, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant sees Jordan Peele’s film Get Out as complex. She argues that the film explores “the ambiguities of racial representation” (95) in the contemporary United States. One of the ways that she understands Peele’s film working is through “three types of rhetoric”—“aural, visual, and linguistic”—that “function ambivalently” to communicate with viewers of the film (95). For this paper, use Ryan-Bryant’s essay as a model to perform a similar analysis on a film of your choosing. You should pick a film that allows you to focus on one of the “three types of rhetoric” that Ryan-Bryant emphasizes and explore the film through that lens. (You need not pick a film that highlights racial issues, though you certainly may; doing so might also allow you to utilize other elements of Ryan-Bryant’s analysis.) Your essay might begin by summarizing your understanding of Ryan-Bryant’s ideas about the function of the particular form of rhetoric you have chosen to focus on. You could imagine that you are explaining important elements of Ryan-Bryant’s framework to a reader who has not read her essay and who needs help understanding how her ideas can be a useful lens to apply to other films. As Ryan-Bryant does, you should then look closely at specific details from the film you have chosen as you analyze how that type of rhetoric works in that film and how it connects to the larger meanings of the film. How does that kind of rhetoric work on viewers of this film? What kind of contribution does it make to what this particular “film tries to do to us”? The Cinematic Rhetorics of Lynching in Jordan Peele’s Get Out JENNIFER RYAN-BRYANT AMERICAN HISTORY BETWEEN THE END OF THE CIVIL War and the height of the Civil Rights Movement was marked by intense, unrelenting racist violence in many parts of the country. People of color not only faced discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, education, and access to public facilities, but they also negotiated daily threats to the very fact of their existence. These threats sometimes took the form of lynching, a type of mob violence that sought to punish individuals for unsubstantiated crimes without trial, jury, or consequence for the perpetrators themselves.