Dramatistic Pentad: Interactions with Faith (or Faithlessness)

As a medium, film is tremendously influential in teaching American filmgoers religions and how we interact with them. Often, a film is a moviegoer's first peek inside a Christian church or a Muslim home; a film might even be the first time we meet a Jew or an atheist. Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad offers us a useful tool for deciphering the motivations film scenes, including those depicting interactions with spirituality. Below you will find scenes from ten films. You will use the Dramatistic Pentad to identify specific rhetorical elements in three of those scenes illustrating the intersection of people and spirituality (or a lack of one). Additionally, you will analyze the ratio between two elements.

Directions:

1. Choose three scenes from below. Also, choose one ratio with which to examine all three scenes (e.g. purpose:agent, scene:agency).
2. Using the Dramatistic Pentad, identify what you believe to be each of the five elements (agent, agency, etc.) for each of the three scenes (or “artifacts”)—see model below.
3. In one paragraph, examine how your chosen ratio functions in each of the three scenes. For example, what is revealed by examining the scenes through this specific ratio? Are there similarities? What are the differences? You might also consider how this particular ratio informs us versus another.

Example:
 "Start the Day Write" commercial from Kellogg’s
Artifact Description: A boy sluggishly wakes up for school. After a bowl of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, he is more animated. Later, at school, the boy enthusiastically answers his teacher’s questions thanks to the boost he got from the cereal.
 
The Dramatistic Pentad:
1. Act: A boy’s morning sluggishness is only helped by eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes cereal.
2. Agency: In order to pep up her sleepy son, the boy’s mother purposefully serves him a sugary breakfast cereal.
3. Agent: The boy’s mother, who serves her son a sugary cereal in order to wake him up.
4. Scene: Split between his home and his classroom.
5. Purpose: The boy’s mother, needing an efficient means to ready her sleepy son for school, feeds him a bowl of sugary cereal. She succeeds in that he is very engaged soon after in school. 

Choose three scenes from the following for your analysis:

"Has God made you promises?" from The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

"There is no freedom without the law" from The Ten Commandments (1956)

"Every sperm is sacred" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

"Don't you talk like that in here!" from Footloose (1984)

"The joke's on us" from School Ties (1992) [NSFW]

"Will you be my god?" from Little Buddha (1993)

"Let me get this straight, you don't believe in God because of Alice in Wonderland?" from Dogma (1999)

"Tell us, are you the Messiah?" from The Passion of the Christ (2004)

"You're not my son" from The Big Sick (2017)

"Crisis of Faith" from Doubt (2008)

Required:

• MLA Style 

Due: Thu 3.14