Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Nixon
1995 · Oliver Stone · Nixon 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 for extreme close-ups on Hopkins's eyes and hands. (camera)
Richardson keeps returning to tight shots of sweat, pouched eyes, and hands clasping and re-clasping, turning the physical texture of Nixon's face into something almost clinical to examine.
Payoff: You are given the evidence of strain on his body before the film ever tells you what it means.
Track which scenes are warm and which are cold. (light)
The California boyhood scenes are lit warm, almost sepia, like an old family photo. The Washington scenes run cooler and more institutional, so you can feel which era you are in by color alone.
Payoff: Temperature does the work of a date stamp, without ever showing you one.
Notice the film keeps leaving and returning to one night. (structure)
The story opens at the Watergate tapes and then jumps backward into boyhood, campaigns, and earlier crises, always circling back to that same night rather than moving forward in order.
Payoff: You are watching a man's whole life pressed together under the weight of one crisis, not a timeline. In the reading: sheets of past. The reading calls this sheets of past: regions of a life coexisting at once, pressing on the present instead of filing neatly behind it.
Look at how often walls and ceilings seem to close in. (staging)
Stone and Kempster rebuild the Oval Office and other real rooms with period accuracy, then stage them so the architecture looms over Nixon instead of framing his authority.
Payoff: The rooms built to symbolize his power keep visually crushing him instead. In the reading: crystal in decomposition. The reading calls this a crystal in decomposition: a grand, ordered world and its own rot shown as the same image.
Listen for a faint, overheard quality in the tape scenes. (sound)
Scenes where Nixon and his aides discuss the cover-up carry a slightly recorded, distant ambience, as if you are listening to a surveillance tape rather than a normal scene.
Payoff: The sound design makes you feel like an eavesdropper on history, which is exactly what the real tapes turned everyone into.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how Nixon's rooms close in around him. Stone keeps pushing the camera in on his face and hands.