The video for the speech, “This is Water,” by David Foster Wallace, reveals the everyday routines of adults. It is directed towards upcoming adults who are most likely very excited to start their lives as adults, but do not realize what the daily life is really like. Throughout this video, the director Matthew Freidell uses the visual motif of speed to create the argument that awareness of day-to-day life is what allows adults to continue their life everyday even if it is a repetitive routine. In this video, he also reveals how well educated people may not have the awareness he refers to, but if you were privileged with an education then you should be capable of obtaining this awareness.

 The first depiction of the visual motif of speed is shown when then video is describing the dreaded drive home from work. It uses a birds’ eye view of the highway showing your car with all the other cars moving around it at super speed. This is used to describe how you only are aware of yourself when stuck in a daily routine instead of what’s going on around you. The high speed causes the cars around you to be less visual showing the unawareness on the regular adult. The video shifts to the grocery store where you would stop on the way home from work. The motif of speed is used effectively in the grocery to show more unawareness. Your perspective is sped up causing your surroundings to be less visual similar to the highway example. This depicts how when you’re only aware of yourself you block out everything else and get stuck in a routine revolved around you. The sound of the scanner at the check-out is sped up as well the to demonstrate the maddening of repetition.

The videos main point is to show how having an open awareness towards everyday job routine makes it easier to bare. The point at which the video transitions into providing examples for open awareness is in the grocery store. At this point in Wallace’s speech, he is providing the solution to getting out of the displeasure mindset towards repetitive adult work life. The video uses speed to show this transition and solution by slowing down the video from the fast pace that was used to show the unawareness most see. The video slows down causing you to have a better understanding of your surroundings in the grocery store. The slowed down speed of the video correlates directly with speech and its resolution. While in the grocery store most people only think about getting what they need at their speed and can be annoyed by being thrown off from that. Most of the time each individual has no idea what’s going on with the other people in the grocery store. The slowed speed shows that while in the grocery store if you were to stop worrying about yourself and opened up your awareness to the people around you would be okay with being thrown off from your routine because you realize others problems might be more severe than yours.

The video then goes back to the cars on the highway, except now they are in slow motion. The slow motion reveals that Wallace wants people to take their time, consider other’s situations, and be aware of what’s going on around them. For instance, Wallace provides an example of someone driving a large SUV very slowly. Most adults would get very annoyed with the SUV very quickly, and not many would stop to think that maybe this driver had recently been in a horrific car accident. But the speed of video and cars allows you to understand that if you just try to understand what everyone else is going through, your situation isn’t that bad.

Lastly, the video concludes with a stack of books. Words slowly appear on the outside of the books. The words read, “the real value of a real education which has (almost) nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness.” The simplicity of this scene symbolizes how simple the thought of awareness is. The stack of books also symbolizes how awareness cannot be learned in books.  No matter how smart someone may be, they could always be oblivious to their surroundings. The final image of the video is the same fishbowl that the video started with, but this time the view is zoomed out. The zoomed out image of this fishbowl symbolizes how people need to see the bigger picture of things. The viewer is now aware that the fish are definitely in a fishbowl; they are aware of the fish’s surroundings, so now they should be aware of their own.
