Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blood Simple
1985 · Joel Coen · Blood Simple 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 how often the camera looks up at Visser. (camera)
Barry Sonnenfeld shoots him from below in the yellow slicker, sweat-glazed and grinning, so he takes up more of the frame than he should. Ordinary rooms turn threatening at the same angle.
Payoff: Light and low angle give a shabby man real mass. The photography makes the menace before the character does anything. In the reading: expressionism. The reading calls this expressionism: shadow and angle charging a body with a menace that does not come from the person in it.
Count the doors left ajar in the background. (staging)
The Coens block around planes of concealment. People enter at the edge of the frame, pass behind furniture, stand just out of a sight line. Windows are lit from outside and corridors either invite you in or refuse.
Payoff: You keep straining toward the next room. The suspense is geometry, built from what the frame will not show you. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. The reading calls this a relative out-of-field: the unseen thing is always the adjacent space, near enough to reach and never quite visible.
Notice how much more you know than anyone on screen. (structure)
The film shows you the relevant events plainly and then watches four people misread them. No single misunderstanding would be fatal. Stacked together they are.
Payoff: Nobody here is destroyed by what they know. They are destroyed by what they are certain of. In the reading: the mental-image (relation-image). The reading calls this a relation-image: the meaning sits in connections the viewer holds, with you as the knowing third party.
Listen to the ceiling fan and the cicadas under the scenes. (sound)
Carter Burwell's first film score is spare synthesizer and a few restrained figures. Around it the mix runs wind, insects, a phone ringing in an empty room, footsteps placing somebody before you see them.
Payoff: Near-silence is doing the work an orchestra would do elsewhere, and your ear locates people the camera has not found yet.
Watch Walsh sweat and smile at the same time. (performance)
M. Emmet Walsh builds Visser from the outside, all drawl and slicker and ingratiation, with a working intelligence behind it. Frances McDormand, in her first film, plays the opposite way and gives almost nothing away.
Payoff: A man who performs friendliness and a woman who performs nothing are the two poles the film runs between.
Once you have seen it
Track what each person believes at the end of each scene. (structure)
Every character leaves a room holding a plausible and wrong account of what just happened, and acts on it immediately. The same gesture would look identical under the true version of events.
Payoff: The title names the condition. After violence the mind stops reading the room correctly, and the film is a proof of it.
Look at the objects the camera isolates before they matter. (setting)
A hand, a lighter, a floor drain, a pistol on a rug. The Coens hold on each one in extreme close-up and charge it with weight well before anything in the plot explains why.
Payoff: You are taught to read objects as evidence, which is exactly the habit that ruins every character in the film.
Count how long the burial sequence runs without dialogue. (cutting)
The editing alternates almost unbearable elongation with sudden compression. Silences and hesitations pool instead of being released, and the Coens cut the film themselves under the name Roderick Jaynes.
Payoff: Duration is the instrument. A scene is held past comfort precisely because you know what the man doing the digging does not.
Watch the light come through the bullet holes. (camera)
A woman fires through a wall at a man she is certain is her husband. Thin shafts of light come back through the plaster and the camera pulls away from the pattern they make.
Payoff: Two people divided by a wall, one shooting at a phantom, and only light passes cleanly between them. The whole film is in that frame.
Carry this in: You will know more than anyone on screen. Watch them act with total confidence on half the facts.