Miracle By Kenneth Burke Essay

Kenneth Burke says that, “life is not like a drama, life is drama” (Griffin 293). Burke’s theory says that all of life is drama and everything can be analyzed through his work. Most everything can be evaluated by using the tools of Burke’s dramatism theory. The movie that I chose to watch and analyze was Miracle. Miracle is based on the story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. The movie was released in 2004 to celebrate the team’s miracle and portrays the drama of life perfectly. It is about Coach Herb Brooks, his U.S. hockey team, and their journey to the Olympics in 1980. Coach Brooks wanted to do things a little differently than they had done in the past. He didn’t want a team of all-stars to play for him in the Olympics. He wanted a team that could work together and win a gold medal. This wasn’t a popular decision and it didn’t come without its struggles. It took a long time and a lot of hard work to win the gold. The biggest challenge that the U.S. faced was playing the Soviet Union. They were the greatest hockey team in the world and had consistently held that title for many years. The U.S. wasn’t even on the radar for a medal, let alone winning the gold. This movie tells their miraculous story.
There are many aspects of dramatism that can be used to analyze the movie, but I am going to use the pentad. The dramatistic
For the movie Miracle, the pentad was a great way for me to analyze certain aspects of the film and to determine which elements were the most important in different situations. The ratio between two elements of the pentad was, again, helpful in determining the most important of the five elements. I determined that out of the scene that I chose to analyze the act-agency ratio was the most important out of the five elements because if either of these had been different or occurred any other way the whole scene would have been drastically