Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Crying Game
1992 · Neil Jordan · The Crying Game 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
Notice the color: Ireland's gray-green versus London's red-amber. (light)
Ian Wilson shoots Northern Ireland in damp, desaturated tones and London in saturated red and amber; the shift happens right at the film's structural break.
Payoff: The color-image, Deleuze's term for color that carries a scene's feeling, marks Fergus entering a world he cannot metabolize. In the reading: Affective color (color-image). The color shift across the film's hinge is Deleuze's color-image: color absorbing feeling instead of describing place.
Watch how often Jordan frames Fergus at doorways or thresholds. (staging)
The camera repeatedly places Fergus in doorways, under the hood over Jody's head, near mirrors: moments where looking is permitted, blocked, or arranged.
Payoff: The framing makes seeing itself the subject: what Fergus is allowed to look at shapes what he understands.
Notice the objects Fergus keeps close: a photograph, a hood, whisky. (setting)
Jordan builds the plot around small held props rather than dialogue; the photograph in particular has no job in the story except that Fergus keeps looking at it.
Payoff: An object with no plot function still carries the weight of an attachment nobody asked Fergus to feel.
Watch Rea's face in scenes where nothing is being said. (performance)
Rea plays Fergus as a man who reacts rather than acts; his face registers cost, and the editing holds on it long after information has been delivered.
Payoff: A face that keeps absorbing rather than resolving is the film's real subject, more than any plot turn.
Listen for songs that seem to argue with the scene. (sound)
Percy Sledge plays over a fairground abduction; Anne Dudley's score stays spare and refuses the swell melodrama usually gets, letting source music carry ironic weight instead.
Payoff: Music that doesn't match keeps the film from telling you how to feel about what you're watching.
Once you have seen it
Track the single cut that joins the film's two halves. (cutting)
Jordan and editor Kant Pan stage the transition from Ireland to London as a rupture, not a dissolve; the disorientation you feel matches Fergus's own.
Payoff: Deleuze calls a cut like this an irrational cut: it says only 'and,' leaving you to cross the gap yourself. In the reading: Irrational cut / interstice. The splice at the film's spine is Deleuze's irrational cut: it joins two unlike blocks and leaves the gap for you to cross.
Count the mirrors and reflective surfaces in the London scenes. (staging)
Dil's hairdressing mirror, the fish tank, the bar's reflecting surfaces: London is staged through doubles in a way rural Ireland never was.
Payoff: This is Deleuze's crystal-image: the reflection and the thing it reflects become impossible to tell apart. In the reading: Crystal-image (hyalosign). Dil's mirror and Fergus's photograph fuse into one surface, which is what Deleuze means by a crystal-image.
Wait for the scorpion-and-frog story to return. (structure)
Jody tells Fergus the fable in captivity; Fergus repeats it at the very end through prison glass, and the whole plot argues against what the fable claims.
Payoff: A story about fixed nature bookends a film about a man who keeps acting against his own.
Watch the haircut scene: whose hands are doing what, and why. (performance)
Fergus cuts Dil's hair and dresses her in Jody's cricket whites; the scene reads simultaneously as protection and as remaking a lover in a dead man's image.
Payoff: One gesture supports two opposite readings at once, and the film refuses to pick between care and use.
Carry this in: Watch Rea's face and the color around him; both change more than the plot admits.