Rhetorical

Why Blame Hollywood?

It is a safe conjecture to say that everyone has been witness to some sort of violence throughout their lives. Some may have witnessed it in person, and others have only witnessed it through media such as movies or television. Most of the time nobody has any problem with it at all. Until they are somehow affected by it, that is. As soon as that happens, they try to find someone to place the blame on. In the case of a movie, for example, if someone sees a movie that has an excessive amount of violence will that make them want to go out and act the same way as the characters in the movie? According to John Grisham the answer to this question is yes and in his essay entitled "Unnatural Killers," he tries to prove this point but is not effective.

Grisham uses two different forms of rhetoric in this essay, both of which fail. First, Grisham uses personal experience to try to get his point across to the readers. This seems like it would be an effective strategy but the way Grisham uses it, it is ineffective. It may have been effective had the first victim not been a friend of Grisham's, but since he was, entire essay is noticeably biased. Second, he uses the causes and effect analysis. He states that the only reason that the two teenagers went on their rampage is due to the movie, Natural Born Killers, which they had only seen a short time before the first murder. Both of these strategies could have been effective, but ultimately are ineffective in trying to prove Grisham's point.

Grisham begins the essay with a true story from his own personal experience about the murder of Bill Savage and crippling injury of Patsy Byers, the first of which he knew personally. This helps improve the strength of the essay but is still biased nonetheless. It seems as if Grisham is still angry about the death of a friend so he tries to blame it on Oliver Stone's movie Natural Born Killers. This attempt fails miserably. Throughout the entire essay Grisham repeatedly brings up how it is the movie's fault that his friend is now dead. This strategy could have been effective if Grisham hadn't kept mentioning the movie. Every time he makes a strong argument he mentions how it is only the movie made the two teens want to act out the violence that they saw in Stone's Natural Born Killers. He also claims that this films has "inspired several young people to commit murder,"(181) but he doesn't back this up with any proof making it highly ineffective.

Next, Grisham tries using the cause and effect method to make his point. He stays that it is the movie and the movie alone that caused these teens to kill and injure two innocent people. But there are two clear explanations on how this is not true. First, Grisham states that both had a history of either abuse, drugs or psyche problem, or all of these. Any of these could have easily caused these teens to go on the rampage. Also, Grisham is apparently not aware that there is and always has been an excessive amount of violence, hatred and killing in every human culture and society since the time man crawled out of the ocean--which was quite a long time before the invention of radio, TV, movies, and other influential media. As tragic as this and all similar types of events are, it is not and cannot be the fault of a single individual or even one profession. It is sadly inherent