Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Hairspray
1988 · John Waters · Hairspray on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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 whose hair is tallest in any given scene. (setting)
Van Smith builds each character's beehive as its own sculpture, and the size and shape of the hair works as a visible index of who has status in this world.
Payoff: Hair alone tells you where a character stands before they say a word. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a physical detail that shows you a whole social position without a word of dialogue.
Notice characters facing the camera almost like a class photo. (camera)
Waters and Insley shoot scenes flat and frontal, arranging people parallel to the picture plane and often looking more or less right at the lens.
Payoff: The stiff, posed framing borrows straight from the TV dance show the story is about, blurring the two.
Notice how bright and candy-colored every set and costume is. (light)
Insley and the design team push turquoise, hot pink, and lemon far past anything documentary, so color feels manufactured on purpose rather than naturalistic.
Payoff: The candy palette makes a cheerful surface out of a story that is also about who gets excluded. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this an affective color: color so saturated it carries the scene's mood by itself.
Watch whole bodies stay in frame during the dance numbers. (cutting)
Hampton cuts the musical numbers on the beat of the records but never breaks a dancer's body into fragments the way later musicals would.
Payoff: Keeping the whole body visible while dancing matters most in a film about a body the culture wants hidden.
Listen for period songs playing as the characters' own music. (sound)
Instead of a composed score, the film uses real early-'60s R&B and dance records as source music playing on the show, in the record shop, at the dance.
Payoff: The soundtrack carries the film's argument by itself: the music teenagers loved was made by people the show tried to keep off screen.
Once you have seen it
Watch where each dancer is allowed to stand on the floor. (staging)
The show's segregation is staged as a blocking diagram, certain bodies in front, certain bodies only allowed on a separate day, so integrating the show becomes a matter of literally rearranging where people stand.
Payoff: Once you see segregation as blocking, you see why the fix in the story is a dance, not a speech. In the reading: action-image-large-form. The reading calls this the large form of the action-image: a shared situation everyone stands inside until one act changes it for good.
Watch for cutaways to families watching the show at home. (structure)
The film keeps returning to shots of viewers watching the Corny Collins Show on their own televisions, nesting the show's frame inside the movie's frame.
Payoff: Seeing the audience watch the audience reminds you the show itself is the instrument of power the story is fighting over.
Watch for the same actor playing two very different characters. (performance)
Divine plays both Edna Turnblad, Tracy's mother, and Arvin Hodgepile, the station owner who fights integration, the same body cast as both the woman the culture ignores and the man who runs it.
Payoff: The doubling turns the casting itself into the film's argument about who gets to hold power over appearance.
Carry this in: Watch who's allowed to stand at the front of the dance floor; the whole plot is about moving that line.