Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Pusher II
2004 · Nicolas Winding Refn · Pusher II 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 how close the camera stays to Tonny's body. (camera)
Refn shoots in a mobile, handheld register that hunts and breathes at Tonny's shoulder, rarely pulling back to a composed, stable distance.
Payoff: The camera's closeness keeps you pinned to a man who can't get any distance from his own life.
Watch for the word tattooed on the back of Tonny's neck. (setting)
Tonny carries RESPECT in block capitals where he can never see it himself, though everyone standing behind him can read it instantly.
Payoff: He's demanding something with his own body that he has no way of checking for himself. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls an object like this a fetish, a part-object carrying the whole force of a drive that has no other outlet.
Notice where Tonny stands in his father's garage. (staging)
Blocking keeps placing Tonny at the physical edge of rooms, hovering near his father's world without ever being let fully inside it.
Payoff: The framing keeps telling you he doesn't belong here before anyone says so out loud.
Notice how long Refn holds on an awkward confrontation. (cutting)
Scenes at the garage, at a deal, at a christening are allowed to run past the point of comfort, curdling instead of cutting away.
Payoff: The discomfort you feel watching is the point: the film refuses you an easy exit too.
Listen to the workshop and club noise crowd out the dialogue. (sound)
The soundscape stays grounded in the din of chop shops, clubs, and crowded rooms rather than a scoring voice telling you how to feel.
Payoff: The noise of the world presses in on Tonny the same way it presses in on you.
Once you have seen it
Notice how few of Tonny's actions change anything that happens next. (structure)
A normal crime film would let a score get settled or a debt cleared; here almost nothing Tonny does converts into a changed situation.
Payoff: That's why the film feels like pressure with no release: nothing Tonny does is allowed to solve anything. In the reading: crisis-of-the-action-image. Deleuze calls this stall the crisis of the action image, when seeing a problem no longer leads anywhere useful.
Watch Tonny's posture in every scene with his father. (performance)
Mikkelsen builds the character almost entirely from slouch, hovering, and the way he angles his body at the edge of a room.
Payoff: Tonny is inarticulate by design, so his body has to do all the talking for him. In the reading: the-gest. Deleuze calls a held bodily attitude like this a gest, a posture that exposes a whole relationship without a word.
Watch what Tonny does in the film's very last moments. (structure)
After a whole film of failing at fatherhood and sonhood both, the ending offers one small gesture that nothing before it has prepared you for.
Payoff: It's the first thing Tonny does that isn't just a symptom of the pressure crushing him.
Carry this in: Watch how close the camera stays to Tonny, and watch his posture whenever his father is near.