Blackfish-ing for Buzz: The Rhetoric of the Real in Theme Parks and Documentary

• Main Author: Schoen, Steven W.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Rollins Scholarship Online 2016
• Subjects: Florida; theme park; tourism; rhetoric; discourse; film; documentaries; marketing; Arts and Humanities; Film and Media Studies; Other Film and Media Studies; Other Rhetoric and Composition; Rhetoric and Composition; Orca
• Online Access: https://scholarship.rollins.edu/as_facpub/137; https://scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=as_facpub

In 2014, a year of record tourism in the state of Florida, SeaWorld saw a drop of one million visitors to its theme park in Orlando. The decline followed Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which presented the circumstances of orcas, or “killer whales,” held in captivity at parks like SeaWorld as cruel to the animals and dangerous to their trainers. In 2016, SeaWorld announced it will stop breeding orcas, and phase out its orca theatrical shows by 2019, a move widely attributed in the press to the impact of Cowperthwaite’s film. This article examines the film Blackfish as a rhetorical alignment of the symbolic functions of theme parks and documentaries, analyzing the work of the film’s discourse to influence audiences and challenge to SeaWorld’s use of captive orcas to entertain tourists.