Fetching
good out of evil by juicing:
Rhetorical
vision in the film Fat, Sick, and Nearly
Dead and companion online community www.jointhereboot.com
Lisa
Nicole Rossignol
University
of New Mexico
Introduction
In 2010, the documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010) was released
in the United States. The film depicted a morbidly obese, Australian business
man named Joe Cross. The film followed Joe on a 60 day fast in which he drank
only fresh, organic fruit and vegetable juice. The premise of this film was
that Joe had long suffered from a condition called systemic urticaria, was 100
pounds overweight, and had become convinced that his poor diet was the sole
cause. Armed with a Breville juicer, a generator to power the juicer, an SUV,
and an obvious personal fortune, Joe traveled the continental United States and
invited strangers to taste his juice and to join him in his bid to get healthy.
The transformation of Joe’s physique was fast and striking; he sheds many pounds
and inches. Along the way Joe met another morbidly obese man with systemic urticaria
named Phil at a truck stop in middle America. Joe offered Phil his phone number
and continued on his way. Once he completed his 60 day fast, Joe returned to
Australia to resume his business until he received a disturbing and desperate
voicemail from Phil. Joe returned to the United States and paid for Phil to
stay in a lakeside retreat, bought him a Breville juicer, and offered him moral
support via telephone conversations. Phil began the 60 day fast and soon
converted the sleepy town around him to begin to juice. The town’s sole juice bar began to run
workshops led by Phil about how to juice.
I can’t tell you why but I became convinced that I had to
get in on this juicing trend. At the time I was 40 pounds overweight and
suffered from thyroid disease that I treated with medication. I had tried to
moderate my diet but with two small children, graduate school, and limited cash
flow I always found myself eating mostly processed food, nothing organic, and
very little vegetables. I watched this film on a cool afternoon on streaming
internet and that night I was on the internet looking for information about how
to get started juicing. I looked at juicers-especially the Breville that Joe
and Phil used-but was afraid to spend the collateral in case I wasn’t able to
stick with the fast. I put a Facebook status that asked if anyone had a juicer
that they wanted to part with or sell to me. A vague acquaintance volunteered
his very old Krupp juicer and we arranged to meet at the local grocery store
known for having organic produce. I also found the official website for the
film Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross
& Engfehr, 2010) which had a link at the bottom that read: “Ready to start
juicing? Join the community. Reboot Your Life”. I was taken to an entirely new
website, www.jointhereboot.com, which
asked me to register.
After signing in with my Facebook account I took a 30
question assessment about my goals for juicing and my eating habits. The site
recommended I take a Classic Reboot which was five days of only eating fruits
and vegetables followed by five days of only consuming juice and ended with
another five days of eating fruits and vegetables. Then I was subscribed to an
email service that would begin sending me daily tips, recipes, and
encouragement when my fast began a week later.
Fat, Sick, and
Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010) produced such an effective call to
action that as of April 19, 2012 there were 317,384 unique user accounts on the
reboot website. A Facebook-style homepage provides status updates, videos and a
picture posted by members, and shows the most recent responses to topic threads
in the main forum.
I was too impatient to wait the week to begin so my
husband and I began to juice the next day. It was expensive (about $60 a day to
produce enough juice for two people), it was very inconvenient, and we only
lasted five days. We continued to only eat fruits and vegetables for an
additional 10 days so we did something related to what the website had recommended.
What I found fascinating was my intense willingness to try juicing, my desire to recruit as many people as possible into juicing, and the online community that
existed as the result of individuals being so moved by the documentary that
they sought out a sort of fellowship around juicing and therefore sprung a
rhetorical community.
With the filter of Earnest Bormann’s (1977) “fetching good
out of evil” rhetorical form, www.jointhereboot.com provides group interactions
that offer insight into the message of the film and the motivation to
participate in juicing as a sort of redemption from sin and specifically for
this community out of gluttony and sloth.
Fetching
Good Out of Evil
First an introduction to symbolic convergence theory
(SCT) which evolved out of small group analysis performed my Robert Bales in
1970. Within his analysis of groups, Bormann (1972) credited Bales with being
the first scholar to describe “how dramatizing communication creates social
reality for groups of people” (p. 396). SCT assumes that groups of people share
their symbols, represented most often by words, in an exchange that results in
members coming to an understanding about how they will then perceive their
reality. SCT also assumes that those new realities, called fantasies, are able to be shared with other people through a
process of chaining out. In an
exchange that involves chaining out, a speaker provides an audience with a
message that accounts for some part of their experience that has not previously
been addressed or has only been addressed in part. Members of the audience then
get excited and engage in the idea by vocalizing their ideas or they may
chain out in their own minds, only to chain out later with members of a new
communication group. This process of chaining out recruits members into a
shared reality called a rhetorical vision.
Rhetorical visions have the ability to travel globally
with the right platform, provided that it is a message that articulates a part
of human experience that is common to different cultures.
Earnest Bormann (1977) proposed that within all of human
discourse there exist certain rhetorical forms that “cut across rhetorical
visions” (p. 130). Within the messages delivered via sermons by Puritan
preachers in colonial America, Bormann found a rhetorical vision that called
for a repentance and atonement, called a fast, as a spiritual practice to
remove sin from the soul of the faithful. Also termed a “jeremiad”, this was the
process by which a “chosen people” struggle to find health, peaceful times, or
prosperity because they are sinful in thought and action and must atone in
order to return to the good graces of God. Bormann named the rhetorical form “fetching good
out of evil” and found the same rhetorical form in Abraham Lincoln’s speeches
during the Civil War. Bormann describe that throughout American history there
exists a rhetorical vision that unifies those citizens who are suffering and spurs
them into action to civic and personal improvement to receive relief from pain,
war, and degraded society.
Leigh Ford (1989) applied Bormann’s “fetching good out of
evil” to the primary text of Alcoholics
Anonymous, commonly referred to as the
“Big Book” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1976), in order to illustrate the
power that AA has to indoctrinate and convert inquirers to members of its rhetorical community. This analysis proved
to be a perfect fit for AA because it invokes a nearly identical form used by
the Puritan preachers of colonial America. Members are different from their
fellow man and therefore are the chosen people. They share a common calamity
which is powerlessness over alcohol and can be redeemed only by leveling of
pride, and admittance of shortcoming. They can be restored to God’s grace as
long as they seek to do His will. The “Big Book” described the need for a “God
of our understanding” or a “Power greater than ourselves” which leaves room for
believers outside of the scope of the traditional Judeo-Christian norm and
attempts to address others in the chapter entitled “We Agnostics”.
Can a community that rarely mentions God share the rhetorical
vision of the historical “fetching good out of evil”? Bormann articulated that
Abraham Lincoln related evil to war instead of to the sin that the Puritan
preachers claimed. Good and evil do not have to be mutually exclusive with God
and Satan. Good can mean pure, healthy and refer to an underlying notion of
purpose. Evil can be based in sin, war, or merely misalignment or
maladjustment. In the film Fat, Sick, and
Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010) the evil is represented by the
illness and obesity such as type II diabetes or urticaria and God or good in the
rhetorical vision of the film represents education, nutrition, and healthful
living.
Online Weight
Loss Rhetorical Communities
A February 2012 survey by Pew Internet & American
Life Project (2012) revealed that 80% of American adults use the internet. In a
2010 survey, Pew documented that 80% of internet users were looking for health
or medical information and 66% were using a social networking site like
Facebook, Linkedin or Google Plus. In the past years, bright minds have fused
the concept of social networking and online support communities, including
www.jointhereboot com which combines a Facebook-like interface with a
traditional online forum format.
Online communities serve to connect people in ways never
before imagined. Now, people who may have once suffered in silent despair and
agony from a rare illness or ailment have the opportunity to connect with other
people without having to leave their homes. Online support groups that deal
with specific issues can be a lifeline for people who struggle with ailments
that are not socially accepted. Obesity and chronic health issues can bare
feelings of shame and separateness and people with that type of infirmity may
not know how to find support. Online
support groups offer safety for users to divulge sensitive information in the
form of psuedonymity (Wright & Bell, 2003, p. 43).
According to the Center for Disease Control, more than
one-third of adults in the United States are obese (www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html,
2012). The issue of obesity is serious because obesity related illnesses
account for some of the leading causes of death like type II diabetes, heart
disease, and stroke. In addition to being dangerous, obesity related medical
costs were estimated at $147 billion in 2008.
The creators of Fat,
Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010) took hold of this trend
and created the Join the Reboot website. Once there, members of this mass
mediated rhetorical vision about health and happiness have a place where they
can chain out together. The discussion forum on this website provides a textual
document of the group’s rhetorical vision that can be analyzed for fantasy
themes.
Description
of the Case
I started by analyzing the 5 most popular threads on the
jointhereboot.com “Share Your Inspiration” forum on April 20, 2012. Next, I
narrowed my analysis to a single thread that had the most responses titled “ 2
Months in and 54 lbs down!! I’m loving it!” by user davestrick78:
“It all started on HBO Go. I saw the
newest addition to the featured movie list...Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead...I
thought...Hey they made a movie about me! So I watched it - twice- and was
brought to tears, literally. I am a 6ft 6 ex college athlete known for being
tough and logical. But here I was, crying - no,sobbing- because of the
realization that I had wanderd so far off the healthy Lifestyle I used to have.
I was 42 years old 420lbs, with a heart stint and type 2 insulin dependant
diabetic. One foot in the grave and the other on thin ice. I sat there thinking
about who would take care of my beautiful wife, my 7 year old daughter and my 6
year old son. I had failed them and me.
Then I
pulled myself together, got my fat ass of the couch and decided - that I would be
the one taking care of them!
I
logged on to jointhereboot.com took the assesment and started following the
plan. Beacuse I am diabetic I do the Juice and Dinner plan. I have started
walking 30 minutes a day and am feeling so much better!
I got
my labs back today from my doctor and here is the amazing news!
Cholesterol
- 143 non aided!!!!!!!!! Was 196 on Crestor
AIC -
6.2!! it was 10.4!!
BP-
120/72 was 140-90
Resting
HR - 76 was 96
Weigth
loss todate - 54 lbs in two months!
I have
so far to go still but i had to share this story. If my fat butt can do it -
you can too! I set the bar for being lazy and apathetic - not any more.
I have
90 more lbs to go and I will get there by my birthday in October.(or sooner)
Wish me
luck and pray for me.”
Study
Method
The method for fantasy theme analysis as described by
Bormann (1985) is to look for inside jokes, short hand for shared experience or
dramatizing that brings members of a rhetorical community into a shared
understanding of reality. Davestrick78 demonstrated that he was a participant
in the rhetorical vision that Joe Cross introduced in the film. By posting his interpretation
of the film’s rhetorical vision he then initiated the dramatizing and chaining
out process for 63 other users who commented and 2215 who viewed the message.
In the first paragraph of his post davestrick78 presents
the fantasy theme that he was once an athlete but had fallen to a life of
gluttony and sloth-like living. For him the sin was eating poorly and becoming
inactive; the redemption came through conversion to a healthier lifestyle that
started with a ritualistic fasting. The preacher for davestrick78 was Joe Cross
and the pulpit was a casual decision to watch Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010) on HBO GO.
By the second post, TCUgirl15 chained out with davestrick78
by sharing that she had been a division one college athlete who has become
unhealthy and overweight. She had just ordered a juicer online, hadn’t even
started the process but felt reaffirmed in her choice to juice because she
joined davestrick78’s fantasy. Three more users chained out with davestrick78
about previously having been athletes and only one person specifically stated
that they were never athletic but were still invested in davestrick78’s
success.
In the first paragraph of his post, davestrick78 also
detailed the health consequences of his poor living which are insulin dependent
type II diabetes and a heart stint. This proved to be a very powerful fantasy
for this group of respondents because there were six who chained out about
having type II diabetes. In the rhetorical form of “fetching good out of evil”,
type II diabetes serves as the peril that the chosen people have attained
through the evil of obesity. By fasting and debasing themselves they can be
delivered from this ailment. If they hadn’t been inactive and unhealthy they
would not have acquired type II diabetes.
Another level of the evil is the harsh humiliation occurred
when davestrick78 referred to himself by “fat ass” and “fat butt. This process
of public self-flagellation proved to be the most powerful fantasy which
allowed six other readers to chain out about their own shortcomings. There was,
amongst at least those six respondents, an admission of failure of will and a newfound
dedication to righteous, healthy, juicy living.
Finally, davestrick78 invoked a God figure at the end of
his post by asking readers to pray for him. Three members chained out with talk
of God, Christ, and Lent, as part of their salvation and motivation to stay on
the fast. Those posts dealing with God were clear examples to the “fetching good
out of evil” rhetorical form.
The vast majority of posts started with a statement about
how inspirational davestrick78’s story was. In this form, davestrick78 served
as a sort of prophet and reminiscent of catholic saints who were converted to
men of faith following profound spiritual experiences. For davestrick78, that
spiritual experience was a quick choice on an average evening to watch Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross &
Engfehr, 2010) that resulted in a revolutionary shift in his diet and
lifestyle. Realizing his place amongst a chosen people who were also plagued by
chronic health issues, davestrick78 searched the internet for a platform to
interact on a more intimate level with the rhetorical vision and found www.jointhereboot.com. By
posting his message he not only accomplished his induction into the rhetorical
vision of the film and the website, he also recruited others into his
particular brand of reality.
It is not a coincidence that 59 of the posts were from
new users who just finished watching Fat,
Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010). Just like davestrick78 and I, the film’s
rhetorical vision was so strong and accurate to our experiences that these new
users joined the site in order to chain out and become fully absorbed into the
rhetorical vision of the community.
Conclusion
Bormann’s (1976) rhetorical form, “fetching good out of evil”
is an effective tool to analyze the success of this online forum and community
that was borne out of a documentary film Fat,
Sick, and Nearly Dead (Cross & Engfehr, 2010). The notion of good and
evil or right and wrong is prevalent throughout the site but in particular in
interactions of members in the forums on topics that detail their conversion to
the juicing lifestyle and the benefits they have received from this salvation.
One limitation of this study is the analysis of only one
thread from this online community. Of the 1214 threads that were begun in the
forum, only 5 had more than 15 respondents pointing to a decrease in cohesion
from the film rhetorical vision and the format of the website. Of those that 5
threads with more than 15 responses, one was a discussion of the uses of the
left over fiber from juicing, and another was about website operation problems
such as speed of connectivity and ease of use.
I also experienced connectivity problems while trying to
analyze the data. I was on the site for over a month before I realized that the
forum even existed. I relied on the recipe section and the Facebook-like
introduction page for contact with my fellows. I never really understood how to
friend anyone and was unable to figure out how to join any of the groups or
events. There seemed to be a lack of technical sophistication or know-how in
the construction of this site that may contribute to the lack of chaining out
that occurred. If the process to communicate is so confusing and cumbersome
then it loses its effectiveness quickly.
Future study should involve analyzing the website, in its
entirety, for other fantasy themes that may be occurring. Also, the website has
a direct link to the Breville website so users can purchase juicers. It might
be worth investigating the role that Breville has in this business. Are they
simply an online ad sponsor because Joe Cross happened to use that brand of
juicer in the film or is it possible that they had a business investment in the
film before its production? That information might change the discussion to one
about corporations engineering spiritual experiences to sell kitchen
appliances.
Despite the limitations, this study contributes to the
understanding of the communication processes that occur in health-related
documentary films and online support communities. The use of symbolic
convergence theory (SCT) and especially the rhetorical form “fetching good out
of evil” are important to aid health communication scholars in assessing how
these communities are working or by providing guidance to the construction of
future obesity and health-related initiatives. As the rates of obesity grow in
the United States, as well as the use of computer mediated communication, so
too must the understanding of fantasy themes and rhetorical forms for these
groups of people.
References
Alcoholics
Anonymous (3rd. Ed.). (1976). New York: Alcoholics
Anonymous World Services.
Bormann, E.G. (1972). Fantasy
and rhetorical vision: The rhetorical criticism of social reality. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 58, 396–407.
Bormann, E. G. (1977). Fetching
Good out of evil: A rhetorical use of calamity. Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 63, 130-139.
Bormann, E.G. (1985). The force
of fantasy: Restoring the American dream. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Ford, L.A. (1989). Fetching
good out of evil in AA: A Bormannean fantasy theme analysis of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Communication Quartlerly. 31 (1), 1-15.
Offman, S. (Producer) Cross,
J.& Engfehr, K. ( Director). (2010). Fat,
sick, and nearly dead [Motion
Picture]. United States: Us & Us Media & Faster Production.
Pew Internet &American Life
Project (2010). http://pewinternet.org/static-pages/trend- data/whos-online.aspx
Retrieved May 2012
Wright, K. B., & Bell, S.
B. (2003). Health-related Support Groups on the Internet: Linking Empirical Findings to Social Support
and Computer-mediated Communication Theory. Journal Of Health Psychology, 8(1), 39-53.
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