Pathos In The Inconvenient Truth

In The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore showcases his story of his relationship with global warming while explaining what global warming is and its effects. The documentary has a clear purpose and goal set out for the audience: to educate people of the truths of global warming and invoke a change in the actions of people to change their lifestyle and be mindful of the effect they have on the planet. The film itself is very effective in its way that the information is given. Different styles of rhetoric is used that dates back to ancient times. This is ethos, pathos, and logos. The documentary starts with Al Gore narrating over a peaceful scenery of trees and a water stream, but then the scene changes to him in a lecture hall. This juxtaposition …show more content…
Al Gore makes sure to grab the audience's attention through many different techniques, such as humor. He shows an animated video clip of a politician and a little girl to highlight the faults in politicians and their way of combatting global warming. This clip is essentially telling the audience that they are being lied to, but in a humorous way to get people to grasp the information. While speaking, Gore also used sarcastic and dismissive tones when speaking about counter arguments for audience to pay attention to in order to show how those arguments about global warming are wrong. Another time where humor is used to explain an idea is with the video of a frog in boiling water. It showed how if a frog jumped into a pot of boiling water it would jump back out, but if the frog jumped into a pot of water that gradually increased in temperature it would stay in there thinking that everything is okay. In this metaphor, the people of the world are the frog and the earth warming up is the pot of water. It is such a simple video clip that effectively gets the message across of how a change needs to happen. Pathos is also used to showcase the purpose of the documentary in visual and audio elements. Sounds of babies crying and videos of large spans of land close to the coast being covered in water bring out a severe emotional response to heighten the importance of change needing to be done. Sad music put over emotional video clips such as a polar bear swimming in the sea with no land to stand on makes the film very effective in portraying its purpose. These are the types of things that get people thinking and acting. Pathos was used to provoke the intending feelings upon the audience and it was successful. The purpose is well received by many and Al Gore’s documentary did what it set out to