In one of my recent school papers, I described and attempted to explain the movie trilogy The Matrix. For those of you who may not have seen it, it is simply a story of a dystopian society where people are controlled by a massive machine driven computer program. If they try to escape from it, they are hunted down like animals. In studying this movie, I found that the Wachowski bothers that wrote it used both pathos and logos style of rhetoric to convey their message.
Usually, anytime the entertainment industry creates a performance to relay a message to the public, you can bet that they are playing on our emotions. Not that this is wrong in any way. It is just that simply their stories aim to entertain. If there is not an emotional response invoked, what good is the entertainment? Therefore, we can say a fair amount of pathos rhetoric has been used.
However, looking much closely and more seriously, in the movie series The Matrix, we see a great deal of logos rhetoric. Logos simply means logic or logical. They movies pointed out how man can become so reliant on something, in this case machines that he can simply get too comfortable and allow that thing to control his life. The movie pointed out how man used the machines for his survival and in the end, that machines were given enough control to use man for their survival. The logic, although perhaps a bit more science fiction than reality does use some interesting logic to point out possible flaws in mankind’s society.
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