Evaluate How Language Choices Have Been Made to Promote Certain Values and Attitudes With a Text

"One way or another, I'm getting home to my fucking dog." In a conventional short film, a closing line like this might read as nothing more than a character's private motivation. In"Two Distant Strangers", the line becomes a critical message to the audience about racial discrimination.

Directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, the film traps its protagonist, Carter James, in a Groundhog Day style time loop, in which every attempt to get home to his dog, Jeter, ends in his death at the hands of a same police officer, Officer Merk. Underlying the loop's repetition, the film's central message is police violence against African Americans is not a series of isolated tragedies but a systemic inevitability that repeats regardless of what the victim does differently. Travon and Martin's frustrated and critical attitude towards the systemic racism of African Americans in America has been promoted through their values of accountability and perseverance and constructed through their use of language features. They construct Jeter as a symbolic motif of hope and persistence, utilise intertextual allusion and use Carter's addresses to the camera to close the distance between character and audience.

Two Distant Strangers promotes the value of perseverance in a cyclical system of racial injustice through its symbolic motif of Jeter, the dog waiting for Carter at home. Typically, a pet left waiting at home might function simply as sentimental background detail, a side character that compliments the protagonist. Here, Jeter instead becomes the film's centre, the one constant Carter is fighting to return to in every loop. The film opens and closes with Jeter, and his role in the film elevates his from a pet to a symbol. In the opening sequence we see Jeter going to his food bowl in a low camera angle paired with diegetic sound of Jeter whimpering as he waits, framing the dog's perspective as a source of quiet grief rather than comfort.

By flashing the same image of Jeter regardless of how the loop plays out, the directors use repetition as it mirrors the "never-ending cycle" of the fight against racial discrimination against African Americans. Jeter acts as a symbol of how no matter what decisions the victims make, they remain in a state of waiting, reflecting the decades of waiting African Americans have endured. Through this motif, the film promotes the value of perseverance in the face of systematic discrimination, positioning Jeter as a symbol as a goal of an ongoing battle for African Americans, reflective of modern day campaigns such as B.L.M.

The film also conveys a critical attitude towards the fact that racial violence is historically continuous, not new, through intertextual allusion embedded in its title and dialogue. Two Distant Strangers layers meaning through explicit reference to music: the title alludes to Tupac's 1998 track "Changes," which itself sampled Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is," written in the 1980s. By drawing a direct line from a 1980s song, through a 1990s hip-hop track, into a 2020 short film, the filmmakers use intertextuality as a language choice that argues the injustice depicted is not contained to one decade. The chain of reference spans the 1960s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the present day. Played at the beginning of Carter's journey, the lyric “some things will never change” reinforces the film's representation of society as trapped within a cycle of racial injustice, where repeated discrimination is treated as inevitable rather than something that can be challenged. The song foreshadows the recurring events he will experience, suggesting that society's stagnant, ignorant attitude towards racism allows these patterns to continue. Through this layered allusion, the film depicts this not as a single tragic event but part of an unbroken cycle of racial violence, one the audience is implicated in recognising.

The film promotes values of accountability and a critical attitude towards the reality of racial discrimination in America, through it's use of metatheatrical devices and cinema verite. During the initial police brutality scene, Carter's repeated cry of "I can't breathe" as he is choked is direct allusion to the deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans killed by police. The scene utilises cinema verite, using a close, shaky handheld camera angle to capture the urgent atmosphere of the scene as internal diegetic ringing audio plays to simulate the fading of consciousness. In a conventional narrative film, dialogue is directed only at other characters, maintaining a clear boundary between the characters of the story and the audience watching it. The film ends with a close up of carter and he says directly to the camera, "One way or another, I'm getting home to my fucking dog." The fourth wall break transforms Carter's statement into a commentary on society and its demand for systemic change, forcing viewers to confront the reality that his desire to “get home” reflects the experiences of real people whose lives were abruptly ended. Through the use of theatrical language features, the film promotes the value of accountability, insisting that the audience cannot retreat into fiction when the words on screen are drawn directly from reality.

By constructing Jeter as a symbol of enduring hope within a repeating cycle, embedding intertextual allusion across decades of music to argue this violence is historically continuous, and using direct address to collapse the distance between character and audience, Free and Roe manipulate cinematic and dialogic language to promote their critical attitude towards the indiscriminate racism of African American and promoting their values of accountability and perseverance. "Two Distant Strangers" and it's manipulation of filmic conventions such as diegetic sound, cinema verite, direct allusion and address successfully act as a delivery system for social commentary on the state of racism towards African Americans. The film does not simply ask its audience to feel sympathy for one man. It insists that the language surrounding Black death in America, from a decades old song lyric to the words "I can't breathe," has already been written, and that until the cycle itself changes, that language will keep repeating.