The Opening Keyframe Of Matthew Mcconaughy

The opening keyframe from MotivationHub’s bricolage of Matthew McConaughey’s speeches and interviews freezes on an image of McConaughey with the caption “Why don’t they teach this in every school?” Toward the end of the video, he claims that we are more likely to remember what we earn, not what teachers have told us. This question and reference to education allude to the primary, underlying message interwoven into the compilation: To be free, you need to reject conventional wisdom, and listen to yourself. McConaughey’s animated delivery engages the audience with a highly informal style that conveys his message both by using different forms of repetition throughout the entire video and by relying on a folksy and energetic persona that reflects

The opening 20 seconds rely on gradatio to emphasize McConaughy’s rejection of society’s conventional perspectives toward failure. Around the 2:15 mark, McConaughy uses ploche in his recounting advice he received about identifying a hero, and his response in identifying his future self as his hero; the rhetorical form draws attention to his rejection of the implied expectation of the question in choosing himself, albeit the future self. Starting at just after the 3:08 point, McConaughy brings up the topic of loneliness using polyptoton to approach his perspective on being alone and its role in self-discovery. In this discussion he also uses the onomatopoetic “ding” to accentuate the epiphany he wants his audience to experience. Later, he describes his personal experiences through metaphors, including at the 5:35 mark where he compares his approach in acting and character development to creating a beautiful, original song of a character, and later at 8:45 when he uses the perpetual energy of solar power as a comparison to the enduring opportunities that arise from the “green lights” resulting from hard

Using grammatical approaches appeals to this Language Arts teacher, and the juxtaposition and conceptual pairings also draw my attention. One strategy is antimetabole at 7:45 when McConaughey introduces his discussion of freedom: “There’s a responsibility to freedom; and that there is freedom in responsibility.” Similarly to much of the content in the video, the reversal employs repetition of key ideas; stylistically, the pairing reflects McConaughey’s discursive pattern. However, this repetition creates an equivalence between the terms that creates an interdependent relationship. This strategy allows McConaughey to continue using references to his experiences and generalized examples as proof. From a logical perspective, the claim is circular as the two implied proofs simultaneously prove each other. The content that follows as support examines the idea of freedom by relying on additional hypothetical examples and figurative language; proof, in a traditional sense, is missing. The claim does allow for opposing perspectives and invited me to consider the consequence of his message. For example, a critical audience may question how we develop a responsibility to an abstraction such as freedom. The substitution of