Dramatistic Pentad: The City on Film

Film is the ultimate travel agent. Through film, there is no end to the places we can go. However, film not only shows us what cities are like, it can also teach us how to interact with them. Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad offers us a useful tool for deciphering the motivations film scenes, including those depicting human interactions with cities. 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 ways people engage the cities around them. 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:

• Commercial: “Start the Day Write” 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.

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Choose three scenes from the following for your analysis:

"New York, New York" from On the Town (1949)
"When you're a Jet" from West Side Story (1961) "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) "We're only going one way" from What's Up, Doc? (1972) "He adored New York City" from Manhattan (1979) "Someone get him a biscuit" from 8 Mile (2002) [NSFW]
"Maybe we should've left town a little earlier, right?" from Cloverfield (2008) "This is my favorite spot" from 500 Days of Summer (2009) "A lovely night" from La La Land (2016) "Took you long enough" from Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (2018) DUE: Thu 3.14