Gasland Analysis

The film, Gasland, is ineffective at presenting an adequate argument of how hydraulic fracturing --fracking-- is harmful to the environment or people around it. Gasland is a faux home video --documentary-- by an ‘average’ guy, Josh Fox who is living in the woods in pennsylvania, that is trying to convince the viewer that fracking is going to be harmful and overall bad in every way to the environment. He goes around and interviews homeowners in an area called Dimock, Pennsylvania. Dimock has had complaints about the fracking operations and how these operations have polluted the water and have caused all sorts of problems. He tries reaching out to the companies that are involved in fracking and was shut down.
He uses one subjective tactic
While watching the clip, there were many times where the lighting and color has changed due to how he wanted us to perceive the situation. He makes the setting light and bright and colorful when he is not on the oil and gas topic, but the moment it cuts to an interview or a scene with a fracking well, the color becomes dingy and dank. His attempt was to make the scenes with the lack of color seem sad and overall unwanted. An average person wants their life to be bright and cheerful, whereas he depicted the scenes to be dark and colorless when the topic of fracking came up. This doesn’t necessarily help him because he makes it blatant to the viewer that he is trying to persuade them with a minor change in colors. He even shows the same sky and landscape right next to each other, the first part dark and the second bright, on his drive through Weld County, Colorado (at 17:22 on Gas). He, at one point, even takes out color completely when having a conversation over the phone about fracking; how fracking is wrong and how looking into it is a risk (at 13:08 on
He has one flaw with his argument. That one flaw is what keeps him from having an effective argument to someone with a logical and linear thinker. He showed these problems that may or maynot have been caused by fracking. Honestly, there is no way to tell. He gave no hard facts and the few that he did give, did not get connected to the main point. Therefore, these few facts, without any given correlation, are irrelevant. He cannot expect to change an opinion by showing an entertaining documentary with bias tones. For most people, even those that don’t think logically, he needs facts to sway the opinions of firm placed, political, decisions. Josh Fox gave a good presentation of his beliefs and concerns, but he really needs to follow those up with how it happened, where this pollutant came from exactly, what the test results where for the jar of ‘bad stuff’ were, the reason they put a pipe in that lady’s well, and why that guy was able to light his faucet on fire. He didn’t cover any of these. He just left us hanging on his tiny threads of evidence that lead