Tuesday, December 2, 2008

RhetResponse to 'Never Too Late'

The video for 'Never Too Late' by Three Days Grace relies heavily on pathos, compare/contrast and metaphor, while kicking logos completely out the window at times.

Compare/Contrast is used extensively throughout the video, flashing between peaceful scenes from the asylum ward's childhood and her chaotic life in the asylum. In the scenes featuring the inmate as a child, the audience is given a strong dose of pathos from the overly loving, cookie-cutter family she dances with in an ideal child's room, which serves to make the agony-ridden face and frantic efforts of the girl as an asylum ward, being physically torn away from her mother and bound to her bed to keep her from hurting herself or others.

Metaphor is also extremely prevalent in this video - the butterfly, a metaphor for freedom as it lands next to the girl, bound to her bed - the angel, possibly a personification of the mental retreat the girl forced herself into to escape the abusive nature of her father - the black handprints that appear all over the young girl and her bedroom walls, leading back to the father and acting as a physical representation of his abusiveness towards her - and the hands of the father than materialize in stead of the hospital restraints, representing both a physical and mental entrapment of the girl who has gone insane from a childhood of abuse.

This is also where logos gets almost drop-kicked out the window - much of the video's storyline plays out along the lines of Lewis Carrol's 'Alice in Wonderland', with the girl's memories changing to things that can't possibly be real or are highly unlikely, including the angel in the corner of her room, the parents with the band-aid eyes, the black hand-prints all over the girl and her room, and, at the end, when the girl apparently has been lying on a bed parallel to the floor or is walking straight up the wall from her bed.


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