• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Seems to be about artistry but is “really” about selling shoes

Seems to be about basketball but is “really” about race

Seems to be about basketball but is “really” about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media and society

Seems to be about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media but is “really” about representing black basketball players as performing seals or freaks

Seems to be about individual expertise but is “really” about working as a group

Here is one version of a more sustained exploration of a single Seems-to-Be-About-X statement.

The Nike Freestyle commercial seems to be about basketball but is really about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media. Of course it is a shoe commercial and so aims to sell a product, but the same could be said about any commercial.

What makes the Nike commercial distinctive is its seeming embrace of African-American culture. The hip-hop sound track, for example, which coincides with the rhythmic dribbling of the basketball, places music and sport on a par, and the dexterity with which the players (actual NBA stars) move with the ball— moonwalking, doing 360s on it, balancing it on their fingers, heads, and backs—is nothing short of dance.

The intrinsic cool of the commercial suggests that Nike is targeting an audience of basketball lovers, not just African-Americans. If I am right, then it is selling blackness to white as well as black audiences. Of course, the idea that blacks are cooler than whites goes back at least as far as the early days of jazz and might be seen as its own strange form of prejudice…. In that case, maybe there is something a little disturbing in the commercial, in the way that it relegates the athletes to the status of trained seals. I’ll have to think more about this.

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Try This 4.8: Apply the Formula “Seems to Be About X, But Could Also Be (Is “Really”) About Y”

As we have been saying, this formula is useful for quickly getting past your first responses. An alternative version of this formula is “Initially I thought X about the subject, but now I think Y.” Take any reading or viewing assignment you have been given for class, and write either version of the formula at the top of a page. Fill in the blanks several times, and then explain your final choice for X and Y in a few paragraphs. You might also try these formulae when you find yourself getting stuck while drafting a paper. Seems to Be About X… is a valuable revision as well as interpretive tool.

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Assignment: Using the Toolkit

Putting the Tools to Work: Composing an Analytical Portfolio. The heuristics introduced in this chapter have been included in the toolkit because they are “all-purpose” analytical moves. In a more extended assignment, try using several of them together. First, review the Try This exercises through the chapter, which suggest a variety of subjects to which you might apply the heuristics. Once you have selected a subject—which could be a film, an advertising campaign, a political campaign, a television series, something you are currently reading for a course or on your own, and so forth—do a series of passage-based focused freewritings as a way of generating ideas.

Try to use both reformulating binaries and uncovering assumptions in the same or consecutive freewrites. Alternatively, try to shake up your thinking by doing Seems to Be About X or Difference Within Similarity in the same or subsequent free writes.

Once you have produced at least four 20-minute free writes, survey them and choose the one you find most interesting. Then do the following:

*Type up three of the free writes, spending 10 or 15 minutes polishing each to achieve some kind of focus and coherence.

*Spend an hour or more expanding and revising your most interesting free write (or some combination of them) into a longer piece, perhaps 3–4 pages. Place this document at the front of the portfolio.

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Chapter 5

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Writing