Ya'll Got Mozzarella Cheese Sticks?

            The creative piece that I have decided to critique is a scene from one of my favorite documentaries, “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.” In this clip, a couple of the Whites are trying to place an order at a Taco Bell. This scene connects to my favorite chapter that we went over in Media Analysis and Criticism, the chapter about Realism. Here’s the clip:

The first thing that I noticed about this clip is that this documentary uses the style known as Neorealism. Neorealism is a style that originated in the 1950’s and is characterized by an imperfect and unorganized set. What this means is that not everything in the scene was purposely put there. In the drive-thru you can see other cars driving by and there are random people walking around inside of the restaurant. Outside of the actions and conversations that we are watching, regular life is still going on. This helps add to the feeling of the film being realistic to us. Adding to this feeling of realism is the use of loosely framed compositions throughout the entire scene. You can see how the camera is moving around freely, especially while Sue Bob is having the conversation with the drive-thru machine. It also swings over to a reaction shot from the person in the passenger seat, Kirk, which gives us a little subjective access into how she feels about the difficulty of placing the order.

            Another big factor that plays into the realism of this scene is the idea of apparent spontaneity. This concept acknowledges the fact that generally people see reality as unplanned. The first thing I noticed in this scene is that Sue Bob obviously has no idea what she is going to order, the conversation moves slowly, and the drive-thru worker doesn’t seem to know how to handle the situation. There are many pauses as each person in the conversation has to think of a response and Sue Bob stumbles on a lot of the words that have to be said, like saying “fiestas” instead of “fajitas.” Another instance of apparent spontaneity is when she sees her friend Renee eating dinner with her family inside of the restaurant. It seems unplanned that Renee happened to be eating there and adds a lot to the realism of the situation. Along with that, you can tell that the only form of lighting that was used was the lighting that was available at the time. To look further in to the concept of apparent spontaneity, I would like to acknowledge the use of narrative spontaneity in this scene. Narrative spontaneity is when something that is irrelevant to the story line is included anyways. Now, obviously going to place an order at a Taco Bell drive-thru isn’t detrimental to the main plot of this movie. However, its presence places us in the life of these people and not only makes it feel real to us but almost as if we are there ourselves.