Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Midway
1976 · Jack Smight · Midway on Sightlines
4 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 for jumps in film grain during the air battles. (cutting)
Editors stitch decades of archival combat footage into new studio shots of actors reacting. Grain, color saturation, and film texture shift abruptly whenever the movie cuts from staged material to stock.
Payoff: Once you spot the seams, the combat stops looking continuous and starts asking to be read. In the reading: the readable image. Deleuze calls an image you must decode rather than watch a lectosign, and budget makes it happen here by accident.
Watch the command room scenes for actors debating over maps. (staging)
Staging splits in two. Nimitz's headquarters and the codebreaking bureau are theatrical, dialogue-driven rooms built for actors; the battle itself is barely staged at all, assembled instead in the cutting room.
Payoff: The war's clearest drama happens indoors, over intelligence, while the battle is stitched together from elsewhere.
Listen for John Williams's score carrying scenes the footage can't. (sound)
Composed in the same years as Jaws and Star Wars, John Williams's martial score supplies a structural and emotional through-line that the mismatched, footage-driven battle scenes cannot provide by themselves.
Payoff: The music does the unifying work an assembled battle otherwise could not do for itself.
Watch the codebreakers work out what the Japanese plan. (structure)
Station HYPO works from scraps of radio traffic. Nothing of the enemy is shown. Officers read fragments and argue over what they mean.
Payoff: Nothing here is shown happening. The knowledge is a chain of inference the audience completes. In the reading: the mental-image. Deleuze calls meaning built from a held chain rather than anything seen the relation-image.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the seams. Where the footage doesn't match, the film shows you it was built, not filmed.