Good Essay On The Power Of Film

The film Sicko completely carries out the function of influence on the audience. Michael Moore, the director, succeeded in making his film appealing in many ways. The secret of it is the way Moore presents the information. The thing is that you manage to find the clichés that influence the audience.
One of the clichés in this film is based on a simple thing. Moore tells an appealing story about an old and never-ending struggle between humanity and cruelty. This is what Linda Seger calls “a myth beneath the modern story” (394). Having read the fairytales where the problems of morality arise, as well as in this film, the audience wants to show that it is humane and sympathetic to those who suffer from injustice of the modern society and vividly reacts to the film. Moore manipulates the audience’s feelings and emotions in order to communicate the ideas.
Another cliché that attracts the audience to the screen and works very effectively with the documentary type of media is an incertitude. The audience waits for the answer of whether there is any hope for improvements in the medical field of the USA by the end of the film or everything will be the same, if not even worse. Absorbing information from the film, the viewer urges to find the necessary explanation to be prepared in the face of similar problems of the modern state of medicine in the USA. The viewer feels that the same things may happen with him or her or with someone among his or her family and friends. Besides, Moore interchanges positive information with the negative one that also works as intensifier of incertitude for the audience.
The success of the film depends on many simple and common things, or clichés, that impel you to think and thus the film becomes more complex. “A hundred clichés move us” because “they are talking among themselves” (Eco 442). The fact that Moore uses many clichés in his documentary film Sicko makes it influential and successful.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “Casablanca, or the Clichés Are Having a Ball.” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Comp. Sonia Maasik, Jack Solomon. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2010. 438-443. Print.
Seger, Linda. “Creating the Myth.” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Comp. Sonia Maasik, Jack Solomon. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/
St Martin’s, 2010. 386-395. Print.