Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
1998 · Guy Ritchie · Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the picture freeze while a name comes up. (cutting)
Ritchie stops the film to label each new player, holds the pose, then lets the world move again. The stutter repeats all through the picture and never slows the plot down.
Payoff: Each card is a posed moment stamped on top of the chase, the way an advertisement stops you with one image. In the reading: privileged-instants. The reading calls these privileged instants: decisive poses lifted out of ordinary continuous motion and held up for inspection.
Listen for the cut landing on the beat. (sound)
The soundtrack runs funk, soul, reggae, ska and rock, and Niven Howie cuts to it. Speed ramps push and drag the action in time with the track. The music is a motor, not a bed.
Payoff: The rhythm of the film is the rhythm of the records, which is where the whole swagger comes from.
Notice the wide lenses and the low, tilted angles. (camera)
Tim Maurice-Jones prowls, pushes into faces, money and guns, and tips the frame off level. The compositions are graphic and emphatic, built so they read instantly when the film cuts fast.
Payoff: The look comes out of commercials, where an image has to land in a fraction of a second.
Count how many separate schemes you are following. (structure)
A narrator introduces the crews and keeps the strands straight. Debt collectors, shotgun hunters, growers, hired muscle, the four friends. None of them can see the whole thing. You can.
Payoff: The comedy runs on your overview. You laugh because you know what every person in the room does not. In the reading: the relation-image. The reading calls this the relation-image: the machine only becomes a machine in the head of the viewer holding all the strands.
Track the antique shotguns as they change hands. (setting)
The guns start with one crew and pass through nearly all of them, along with bags of cash and stolen weed. The staging keeps shoving objects across the plot from person to person.
Payoff: Everything here is something stolen on its way to somebody else, and the guns are how you see it. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the shotguns a symbol: the object that condenses the whole economy of theft the film is built on.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: You can see all the schemes at once and none of them can. Watch the wall between the flats.
A Deleuzian reading of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels →