JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television

JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television

What do we mean by “values”? A good working definition might be to think of them as generalized, cross-situational disposi-tions to judge and act in certain ways. A value is an enduring tendency that peo-ple have to think of types of actions, ob-jects, and events as good or bad, sacred or profane, prosocial or antisocial, and so forth. In much of the scholarly and pedagogical literature on values, there is a tendency to think of these predis-positions as encoded or invoked in lan-guage—specific terms or expressions that are brought to bear in judgment precisely through the use of language in discursive appeals.

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbre-chts-Tyteca argue that values are among those “objects of agreement in regard to which only the adherence of particular groups is claimed…..Agreement with regard to a value means an admission that an object, a being, or an ideal must have a specific influence on action and on disposition toward action and that one can make use of this influence in an argument….” (74). Notice that a value[unique_solution] is something claimed as being held by a group, and that it is a social agree-ment that is made use of in an argument, which is perforce a linguistic exercise of specific utterances. Values are above all invoked, for as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca say, “Values enter, at some stage or other, into every argument….One appeals to values in order to induce the hearer to make certain choices rather than others….” (74). Values take on the clothing of language to become visible in our shared awareness.

We can find linguistic understandings of values among other scholars. Mil-ton Rokeach defines values as endur-ing beliefs that hold that some ways of behaving and some goals are preferable to others. He argues that values act as “life guides” by specifying terminal or ultimate goals as well as instrumental or everyday goals. His understanding of these values, though, is encoded in specific expressions such as “a world at peace” or “family security” (“Value Theory,” 7–28; Ross and Ross, 29–31). And such expressions would then need to be invoked in articulated appeals of argument. F. G. Bailey does not quite hit the nail on the head in saying what he thinks a value is, but he argues that they “are held in an order of preference” and “may also be presented as moral or di-vine imperatives”—then his immediate example is Lincoln’s 1865 inaugural ad-dress, a verbal articulation of argument if ever there was one (133). Sarah Tren-holm argues that values “have a strong evaluative dimension, they are deeply held and act as powerful guides to ac-tion.” They are “cognitive structures,” she claims, that emerge into social spaces through explicit invocation and argument. Former presidential candi-date Gary Hart ran afoul of widespread values against philandering, she claims, when “allegations” surfaced, and alle-gations are, of course, verbal statements (11). Gary C. Woodward and Robert E. Denton, Jr. claim that “values are our central, core ideals about how to con-duct our lives. They represent what we consider intrinsically right or wrong” (153). In identifying specific values, though, they use language: “the value of freedom,” for instance.

Values are both rhetorical and cen-trally implicated in education. They are rhetorical in that they are used in rhe-torical appeals. Invoking them leads to changes in or strengthening of attitudes. And one must be persuaded to accept values in the first place; they do not sim-ply appear by osmosis. One need only listen to the nonstop cry of Values! in any political contest to see their central-ity to rhetoric. Values are also central to education. Of course, education can b separated from rhetoric only with diffi-culty. The process of socialization is one of persuading people to accept the val-ues, norms, and practices of a group, but also of educating them about the wis-dom and prudence of doing so. A person educated to take a place in a given soci-ety must perforce have been educated as to socially held values.

The philosopher and rhetorician Richard Weaver clearly saw the con-nections among rhetoric, education, and values (Ideas Have Consequences). The first duty of rhetoric, he argued, was to advise an audience as to an independent order of goods. In other words, rhetoric ought first to educate an audience as to what it should value. Only then can rhetoric proceed to align a proposition or course of action with the values pre-viously established. In commentary on his work, Richard L. Johannesen, Ren-nard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks describe this as a process in which “good rhetoric presupposes sound dia-lectic,” and that “rhetoric seeks actual-ization of a dialectically secured posi-tion in the existential world,” a position that is in agreement on facts and values (19). Functionally, this means the rhetor begins an appeal by argument based on genus or definition, “arguing from the nature of things,” which is inherently an educational function in that it reveals to audiences an underlying truth, including truths about values (21). The philoso-pher and rhetorician Richard McKeon held similar views, thinking that rheto-ric is an “architectonic art” that has educational value in that it orders other ways of thinking: “Architectonic arts treat ends which order the ends of sub-ordinate arts” (3). Those ends perforce include values, and so rhetoric must as-sume an educational function in creat-ing an order of values from which civic discourse may proceed.

We have seen that values are lin-guistic, and because they are linguis-tic, they may be taught and may be engaged rhetorically. But here, I take a turn toward a different kind of rhetoric and education: that which occurs on a nonlinguistic level. Texts have rhetori-cal effects on people outside of expo-sitional argument—indeed, outside of language per se. If one argues, “Vote for Smith, the education candidate,” the lin-guistic appeal to the audience is direct and the value invoked—education—is clear. But might not a nonverbal photo of Smith and Smith’s family in front of the local school, perhaps with textbooks and teachers clustered around, accom-plish as much?

Consider the related rhetorical prob-lem of texts that are fantastic and thus cannot be understood to impact people’s judgments and actions directly. Take haunted house movies, for instance. Probably, very few of the millions who might go to see such films are going to take direct, expositional advice as to how to live their lives from the films. Most are not troubled by moaning spir-its floating through the hallways. Yet do we want to say that such films do not engage or teach values? The rhetorical problem arises also with science fiction or fantasy films. How can these serve, as Kenneth Burke put it, as “equipment for living” (304) when, on any kind of linguistic, literal, expositional, or ref-erential level, they are not about any-one’s life? How can such texts impart or invoke values through nonlinguistic means? Since there have been many at-tempts throughout history to account for the rhetorical appeal of nonliteral texts, let us turn our attention specifically to the question of how texts can, at a non-literal or non-content level, invoke or activate values and bring them to bear on decisions and choices.

This issue of the connection between values and the nonliteral, fantastic, or narrative text is one with particular con-nection to film. Even the driest docu-mentary takes on narrative form, and I would assert that most of the films we see today are not literally about every-day life and are not meant to be. Few members of the film audience are on the run from terrorists, shady government agencies, or zombies. Film especially moves audiences deeply but not by di-rectly addressing their mundane lives. Film moves audiences by using values, as I hope to show, but often not through explicitly invoking them. How, then, do films engage values?

I want to invoke some ideas that I have developed elsewhere in the con-cept of rhetorical homology to answer the question of how nonliteral texts can teach values. These are ideas hav-ing to do with the appeal of form and aesthetics based on the work of Kenneth Burke. I will show how values may be activated, taught, and appealed to, not only through linguistic invocation but through formal and aesthetic evocation. To illustrate this idea briefly, I will later turn to two films in the currently popular trend of films about rage virus, zombies, and the like: the Spanish movie Rec and its English language remake, Quaran-tine. I believe that this analysis will be more widely generalizable toward the analysis of film and the teaching of val-ues in society.

This issue of the connection between values and the nonliteral,

fantastic, or narrative text is one with particular connection to film.

The Idea of Homology

In earlier work, I have developed some of Kenneth Burke’s ideas of form by working with the idea of homology (Rhetorical Homologies). A homology is a formal resemblance across many kinds of texts, experiences, actions, ob-jects, and events. It is a concept widely used in the natural and social sciences and in the humanities. You have an inter-esting, powerful, and useful homology when many disparate kinds of actions, objects, and events in human experience can be shown to be following the same pattern that underlies texts and the me-dia that convey texts. The more fidelity to a form that the critic can show, the stronger is the evidence that a homology links these wide-ranging actions, ob-jects, and experiences. Linkage within a homology then lets texts of all sorts and experiences of all sorts speak to each other, and lets them be influenced by variations in content found across them.

For instance, suppose you enter a special place set apart from the usual run of everyday activity. To enter this place, you must abase yourself, remov-ing shoes and perhaps other offending articles of clothing. You must submit to examination and may have to surrender some of your property. Only when ap-proved may you enter this special place to achieve the purpose for which you came. Now, what does that describe? Entering a place of religious worship, surely. But also passing through air-port security. If there is a formal resem-blance between these two disparate ex-periences, then we would say there is a homology connecting them. What is the use of such a claim? Doesn’t the appro-priation of the form of religious prepara-tion and entrance into a temple help to validate airport security measures and to reinforce values of authority and sub-mission? It doesn’t matter at all whether that is the intended purpose, the form has an educational and rhetorical effect in creating compliance among people entering airports.

How do homologies work in film to teach audiences values with rhetorical effect? In one study, I showed a ho-mology obtaining among the experi-ences of watching haunted house films, being in a movie theater, and being in socially awkward situations (“Electric Literature”). The form underlying all of them is that of being in a strange time and strange place. In the content of the films, both the haunted and the spirits experience time and space in strange ways. For the audiences of films, movie theaters operate according to strange logics of time and space. And in every-day experience, surely we have all ex-perienced feeling out of place and time. In that article, I showed how films then offer audiences values of acceptance, of determination to change, or of prudent avoidance of strangeness. In another study, I showed that the film The Horse Whisperer, although at a literal and lin-guistic level seeming to be about white people in Montana, formally enacts a liberal white myth of racial history in the United States (Rhetorical Homolo-gies 73–101). Many of the characters, I argued, are formally taking the place of people of color in that myth. The film could therefore, at a purely formal level, address those holding such a myth even at an unconscious level, advising change, acceptance, or rejection of the values engage by the myth.

Homologies work by creating a sense of connection among texts and experi-ences, which then allows the content of films to address and to invoke values. If a homology can show audiences that this film is about that neighborhood quarrel you are having, then the ways in which characters, for instance, must have race, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth can carry powerful rhetorical effects. Imagine films that reinscribe the form of the Christ myth, for instance. There is rhetorical effect in making the Christ figure of any particular film white, black, male, female, and so forth—an effect that influences values people hold concerning diversity and inclusion.

Consider the recent rash of films about alien invasion: Cowboys and Aliens, District 9, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and so forth. This pat-tern of being moved in on by the utterly alien is homologous with many social and personal experiences in an increas-ingly heterogeneous, urbanized, and international environment. We must em-brace certain values to guide us through these encounters with those who are of a seemingly alien age, race, or class from us. Yet they will never say explicitly, “If you find yourself living next to a fra-ternity house, a Somalian family, or a halfway house, here is what to do.” Yet surely, the films counsel acceptance or rejection of difference. These films en-tertain us, but at a formal level, they are also invoking and creating values that help us get through everyday experi-ences that are formally similar.

The method of rhetorical homologies is to be on the lookout for form that ties together different kinds of experiences, including experiences of texts, media, and everyday experience. One must identify that form as a kind of logic that links disparate experiences. The more particulars of a given text, experience, and so forth one can array according to the pattern, the stronger one’s analy-sis. Then one examines the texts in the homology to show the ways it advises audiences on how to live and what to value.

This idea of homology can be a way to understand how texts may appeal to values without ever linguistically articu-lating them. Predispositions to respond and to judge, socially held guides for choices, all the things that values “are,” may be activated at a formal level. This is not the same thing as being brought to conscious awareness, because we are so often not fully aware of how form is working in our texts and our experi-ences. Like ideology, form is most pow-

Like ideology, form is most powerful when it is most invisible, and that is most of the time.

erful when it is most invisible, and that is most of the time. When a homology obtains across texts, experiences, and media, values may be aesthetically acti-vated, brought to bear upon choices, re-inforced or diminished, at a formal level. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate that is through actual texts. Let me turn now to a brief reading across twin texts, the films Rec and Quarantine, which I think may illustrate how values may be ap-pealed to formally and aesthetically.

Locked Inside with the Rage Virus

Surely, one of the most commonly recurring themes in popular culture to-day is that of zombies. Many studies have been done explaining the appeal of this very popular form, which seems to be evolving across many different genres (Gunn and Treat). I want to use the theme of zombie trouble to point to one particular dimension of zombie at-tacks that we also find in other texts to-day, and that is the idea of the troubled structure.

If you will think about the zombie movies and television shows you have seen, you will surely recall that the trou-bled structure is central to most, if not all, of them. The non-zombie protago-nists of 28 Days Later move from one threatened structure to another, fending off zombie attacks as they go. They end up in an army compound in the north of England that seems more troubled and dangerous than any besieged apartment building they have stopped in. The se-quel, 28 Weeks Later, begins with the premise of a large structure, urban Lon-don itself, as quarantined from zombie trouble, and it is by going into forbid-den structures that the young protago-nists set off a new round of zombie outbreaks. The Will Smith character in I Am Legend is holed up in a fortified mansion in New York City that is even-tually breached by the undead, and most of his troubles occur when he goes into derelict structures that house zombies. Zombies trouble humans trapped in a mall in Dawn of the Dead, and in a de-partment store in the television minise-ries The Walking Dead.

But we need not stop with zombies. Popular culture is full of structures with bad trouble. Vampires famously want to get into your house and may be sleeping in the crypt of their own tumbled-down mansions. People hang garlic and crosses specifically on en-trances to structures to ward them off. Haunted house movies beyond num-ber show disembodied spirits walking around in structures, and that is a com-mon theme in current television shows such as Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adven-tures. Aliens trap a family inside a rural house in Signs. In District 9, the floating spaceship structure above Johannesburg contrasts with the earthbound shacks of the aliens below, and the protagonist must venture into government structures where horrible experiments are per-formed on aliens to procure the means for his—and their—salvation. When it comes to houses, offices, malls, and other structures in popular culture, it’s one damn thing after another.

The Spanish film Rec, made in 2007, was remade with essentially the same plot as the English language film Quar-antine just a year later. In both films, a television crew consisting of a perky reporter, named Angela Vidal in both films, and a single video camera operator go to a fire station in an unnamed city to film a normal night in the work of a fire crew. Not long after their arrival, the crew is called to investigate a case of an old woman found screaming and de-ranged. Both the fire station crew and the television crew arrive at an old but well-maintained apartment building in the city, and they enter. Going upstairs, with police escort, they discover the deranged woman who cannot be calmed. In a ter-rifying burst of energy for one who looks so frail, she attacks the first responders, biting one of them severely on the neck. The police officer is forced to shoot her.

Carrying their wounded comrade downstairs, they discover they cannot leave the building. It quickly becomes clear that they are surrounded by every government police, military, and quar-antine enforcement agency. The build-ing is being covered in plastic sheets. They cannot escape, and, in fact, when one resident makes an effort to do so later, he is killed by snipers.

In the meantime, the residents of the apartment building are asked to leave their apartments and come to the lobby. They are a mixed lot reflective of to-day’s urban variety in any developed country: none are derelict, none seem highly successful, many are immigrants, some speak no English, and so forth. These are not threatening or dangerous individuals, but the viewer gets a strong sense that they are just hanging on in life, perhaps glad to barely make their rents every month. They seem to know each other casually and can tell the first responders who lives where.

Pretty soon, all hell breaks loose. First one, then a few, then many of the residents and first responders who have been exposed to bodily fluids become floridly violent. A veterinary techni-cian among the residents recognizes their symptoms as rabies. A crew from the Centers for Disease Control (and its Spanish counterpart) enter the building clad in all-protective spacesuits to re-veal that a dog belonging to one of the residents was discovered during a vet-erinary visit to have instant rabies. Alas, their protective suits cannot withstand the onslaughts of those who acquire this affliction. One by one, the voyagers on this ship of the damned succumb to their fate and begin chasing after the re-maining residents. The television crew members are the last to go, trapped in the top floor of the building, where they discover a mad scientist turned monster, the real source of the instant rabies.

One formal reverberation between text and experience should be readily apparent. A commonplace among sym-bologists, including Freudians, is that a house is a symbol for the self. If you dream about discovering hidden rooms in your house, then you are dreaming about discovering hidden potential in yourself. It is but a step from that idea to see the troubled apartment building in these films as formally parallel with real-life experiences of the troubled urban community. Especially over the last few decades, but likely of long-standing duration, people in urban areas have become familiar with the pattern of strangers sharing a common space, doing the best they can despite adver-sity to arrive at a détente among their differences. Different texts may offer different answers to that challenge, but they all address at a formal level what urban dwellers see every day: people they know but barely or not at all, many from far-flung origins, hardly speaking the same language. Rec and Quarantine deliver content through that pattern that is, to say the least, not hopeful.

But there is another twist that com-pletes the homology. For every bit of both films is seen by the theater audi-ence through the TV crew camera’s viewfinder. Audiences are, supposedly, watching nothing but footage captured by that crew. In a manner similar to The Blair Witch Project, the conceit behind both films is that Something Awful has happened (we discover at the end) to People Engaged in Mediation, and we are left with this final digital testimony to their tragic fates. This forces a read-ing of the films as being about, not so much who “we” are, the urban dwelling audience and their stranger neighbors, but rather as being about media repre-sentations of urban dwellers. The trou-bled physical structure is still a formal parallel to the troubled social structure, but now it is not the only structure that the audience occupies, for we are both at one with and at one remove from all this mayhem. In addition to whatever worries we have about the crowds of urban strangers we encounter in person every day, it is also—perhaps mainly— the troubled social structure as mediated that we witness on the evening news. This form now resonates with medi-ated representations, not only with the audience’s direct experiences (at least insofar as the audience is positioned and called out by the films).

But wait, as the Ginsu steak knife ad on TV says, there’s more! The audience for these films is perforce seeing them on a screen, through mediation, either in the original theater or, in an even closer parallel, on television at home—the same medium for which the ill-fated newscasters in the films worked. The audience’s experience is put into the homology twice, through formal paral-lels to their everyday experience of the urban strange as well as to their imme-diate experience of the medium of film or television. And for film at least, are there not formal parallels between what the audience experiences and what the luckless characters in the films are go-ing through in terms of the structure they are occupying? The film audience has come to a strange structure not en-countered anywhere else—it is unaccus-tomedly dark, there is an unaccustomed degree of regimentation, it is hard to leave without a lot of trouble and com-motion, and so forth. The audience has come to this unhomelike structure to see a mediation about characters who have come to an unhomelike structure to cre-ate a mediation of the strange urban en-vironment into which the audience will re-emerge at the end of the film. The more different the modes of texts and experiences we can see as formally par-allel, the stronger grows the homology, and the more confident we can be that the films and experiences connect to and thus speak to each other with rhetorical effect.

Values are rarely, if ever, explicitly articulated in the films, and if they are, it is in the context of arguments about how to deal with instant rabies rage virus—hardly the sort of relevance one encounters in everyday life. Yet I think the homology obtaining across the films, the audience’s experience of the medium, and the audience’s experi-ence of the strange urban context likely invokes a sense of values and their ap-plication. The values of tolerance and cooperation are invoked rather than ex-plicitly stated, for instance. It is not the immigrant characters in the film who started the virus; indeed, they are among the last to succumb. It is the little dog of some homegrown American charac-ters that started the mayhem, and before that dog, the mad scientist whose lair is discovered on the top floor. It is when characters cooperate and stick together that they last a little longer. When they take a notion to run upstairs by them-selves, against the entreaties of their neighbors, you can bet they will shortly come roaring back downstairs, foaming and gnashing.

I want to focus on one value in par-ticular that the film invokes through the aesthetic experience it creates and not at all through argument or explicit invoca-tion: deference to authority. At several key points, characters choose not to obey the commands of the only police-man on the scene, one of the first re-sponders. They inevitably come to grief from this disobedience. The one char-acter who defies authority to attempt an escape is shot. Of course, authority has the building under lockdown, which is frightening and oppressive, but the moral of the film is that they were right; God forbid you should let the instant rabies outside. And finally, at perhaps the subtlest level, the value of authority is valorized by way of the device of treating the film as footage created by the doomed film crew. In each film, the demise of the crew is shown on the footage we see. Nobody is left to tell the tale, except perhaps the monster in the attic who finally does the crew in. Yet somehow these tapes have been recov-ered. Somehow, they have—fictitiously, of course—made it to the big screen. Whatever rabies there was, wherever the monster in the attic ended up, ev-erything is now under control. We’ve heard nothing about an outbreak of in-stant rage virus, although you may have your doubts about some of your friends. The authorities, we must conclude, have everything under control. And so when we stagger out into the strange urban landscape, despite all the weirdos we encounter, our belief that somehow Someone is ultimately in charge is af-firmed, and our value that this is a good thing gets reinforced.

Conclusion

The films Rec and Quarantine would seem to have rhetorical messages to give their audiences, although at the level of form. The conclusions I have reached in my reading are nowhere explicitly articulated. Yet the patterns the films follow seem both to invoke and to teach values. At the very least, audiences are given a lesson in the value of respecting authority.

It may not come as news that films in popular culture can influence audi-ences or appeal to values. This study urges critics to pay attention to ways in which that happens formally, out of conscious awareness. Because claims of form cannot be documented by di-rection quotation from the text, this and any other homological argument must show that a preponderance of the texts in question follow the form that is be-ing asserted. I hope I have shown that in this particular case. This article may then also be an example of how homo-logical, formal analysis may be used to study some ways that popular film both persuades and teaches its audiences. We

need to understand a full range of how values are called into rhetorical action, and I hope this study has been one ex-ample of how to do so.

This sort of homological analysis of film may proceed in at least two general paths. First, the critic may be aware of widely accepted forms within a given culture and may be on the lookout for experiences and films that are linked to-gether by that pattern. The quest story or the Christ myth are but two such patterns. The critic identifies the basic form of the pattern in question and then finds films and experience the films may speak to homologically that match the pattern. So: a stranger with strange powers comes among us. The stranger is fundamentally changed and, in the pro-cess, changes us; that is the pattern of the Christ myth. When do we encounter that pattern in life, and when in film? When we identify films that speak to life through form, then we can identify the values the film invokes and imparts.

On the other hand, one may have certain films or kinds of films in mind already as powerfully connected to real-life experiences. For instance, I believe it can be shown that superhero films have significantly increased, at least in the United States, since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The critic may wish to discover why, since there ap-pears to be no literal connection. Iden-tifying the homology—showing it is a homology by arraying a preponderance of evidence from texts and experience according to the pattern—and then iden-tifying the values purveyed by the film can be an important task.

In these and perhaps other ways, the critic equipped to study films homologi-cally can advise her audience as to the rhetorical potential of these films. Much of that potential lies on a terrain of val-ues. A universe of influence proceeding formally, out of conscious awareness, is waiting to be discovered.

WORKS CITED

Bailey, F. G. The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Print.

Brummett, Barry. “Electric Literature as Equipment for Living: Haunted House Films.” Critical Studies in Mass Commu-nication 2.2 (1985): 247–61. Print.

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Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. Print.

Gunn, Joshua, and Shaun Treat. “Zombie Trouble: A Propoaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.1 (2005): 144–74. Print.

Johannesen, Richard L., Rennard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks. Language Is Ser-monic: Richard Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1970. Print.

McKeon, Richard. Rhetoric: Essays in In-vention and Discovery. Woodbridge: Ox-bow Press, 1987. Print.

Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise in Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1969. Print.

Quarantine. Dir. John Erick Dowdle. Perf. Jennifer Carpenter and Steve Harris. An-dale Pictures, 2009. Film.

Rec. Dir. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. Perf. Manuela Velasco and Ferran Ter-azza. Filmax, 2008. Film.

Rokeach, Milton. The Nature of Human Val-ues. New York: Free Press, 1973. Print.

——. “Value Theory and Communication Research: Review and Commentary.” Communication Yearbook 3. Ed. Dan Nimmo. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1979. Print.

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Barry Brummett (Ph.D. Minnesota, 1978) is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor in Communication and Chair of the Depart-ment of Communication Studies at the Uni-versity of Texas at Austin. He studies the rhetoric of popular culture. He has authored several books including Rhetorical Homolo-gies: Form, Content, Experience and A Rhet-oric of Style.

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