Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
1986 · John McNaughton · Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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
Listen for sound that doesn't match the still image on screen. (sound)
Static, posed shots of crime scenes play against audio of a struggle from another moment entirely, so image and sound never quite belong to the same time.
Payoff: You have to assemble what happened yourself, which is worse than being shown it. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. Deleuze calls this mismatch between what you see and what you hear audiovisual disjunction, and it makes the violence yours to imagine.
Notice how still the camera stays around a crime scene. (camera)
Charlie Lieberman holds static or near-static shots on aftermath rather than choreographing the violence itself, an observational stance closer to evidence photography than thriller filmmaking.
Payoff: The stillness makes ordinary rooms feel like the scariest place in the film.
Watch how soft-spoken and courteous Henry stays throughout. (performance)
Michael Rooker plays Henry as watchful and almost gentle, his violence arriving without any change in affect or warning sign.
Payoff: The film denies you the comfort of a visibly monstrous presence.
Notice how mundane every location in this film is. (setting)
Cramped apartments, diners, a gas station, parking lots: the production design emphasizes lived-in squalor over any stylized or gothic setting.
Payoff: Evil here happens in the most ordinary rooms imaginable, under ordinary light.
Once you have seen it
Notice how many different versions Henry gives of his mother. (structure)
His account of her, and of what he did to her, keeps changing across the film, and the contradictions are never resolved into one true story.
Payoff: The refusal to settle on one origin is the film's whole argument about evil. In the reading: falsifying-narration. Deleuze calls presenting incompatible versions as equally true falsifying narration, and Henry's shifting story is a textbook case.
Watch Henry and Otis replay their own recorded tape. (setting)
They sit on the couch rewinding and pausing footage of their own crime, watching themselves the way the audience is also being made to watch.
Payoff: The tape becomes an object they feed on rather than evidence of anything. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls a part-object charged with compulsive force a fetish, and the tape is exactly that for them.
Carry this in: Watch what the camera refuses to show you. What's withheld costs more than blood would.