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.
Payoff: Color carries a scene's feeling before the dialogue does. In the reading: Affective color (color-image). Deleuze's color-image is 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 carries the film.
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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Rea's face and the color around him.