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How to watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
2013 · Ben Stiller · The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 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 Walter's eyes glaze just before each daydream starts. (cutting)
Greg Hayden builds the same figure every time. Stiller goes still, the room stalls, the cut launches into something enormous, then snaps back to a colleague saying he zoned out again.
Payoff: These inserts carry no past at all. They are an alternative present that runs until it wears itself out. In the reading: dream-image (onirosign). The reading calls these dream-images: imaginary circuits anchored to no dated memory, expanding until they exhaust themselves.
Watch Walter boxed inside cubicles, elevator doors, and screens. (camera)
Stuart Dryburgh shoots the New York material cool and desaturated, with a grid around him in nearly every frame. The office looks like a photocopy of itself.
Payoff: The framing tells you what he is allowed to do before anyone at the magazine says a word to him.
Count how small Stiller looks against the Icelandic road. (camera)
Dryburgh keeps setting one tiny figure against enormous terrain: a fjord, a glacial coast, a mountain approach. Then he narrows to a single body on a longboard on a serpentine road.
Payoff: The frame keeps swinging between a huge surrounding and one thin line of action, which is how the film measures him. In the reading: respiration-space. The reading calls this respiration: alternation between an enormous milieu and the taut narrow line of an act.
Listen for songs carrying whole stretches where nobody speaks. (sound)
The curated soundtrack does the narrating. José González's 'Step Out' runs a sequence with no dialogue, and Cheryl sings 'Space Oddity' straight into the moment Walter has to move. Shapiro's score sits underneath.
Payoff: The songs stand in for his inner voice, so you can read his state off whatever is playing.
Watch how little Stiller's face does in the office scenes. (performance)
He plays Walter muted and internal, nothing like his comic personae. He absorbs Ted's needling, rehearses lines he never says, and stalls over a dating profile. The stillness is the performance.
Payoff: He is built to receive rather than respond, and that gap is exactly what the rest of the film works on.
Once you have seen it
Time the daydreams and mark when they get shorter. (structure)
The inserts thin out and then stop as the real journey takes over. Stiller spends his central device on purpose, so the story's arc and the gimmick's depletion trace the same curve.
Payoff: The film uses up the thing it is built on, which is why the last stretch needs no fantasy to hold you.
Follow negative 25 and notice it is never on screen. (setting)
An absence pulls Walter across Greenland, Iceland, and the Himalayas. The film treats a physical strip of film as unrepeatable and close to sacred while itself being shot on a digital camera.
Payoff: One missing object carries the whole argument about analog things and the people who handle them unseen. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls that negative a symbol: the object that condenses the film's organizing relation into one thing.
Watch what Sean O'Connell does with his camera on the mountain. (performance)
Penn is on screen briefly and states the film's position with a gesture instead of a speech. He has the shot framed and set, and he lets the moment pass without taking it.
Payoff: The film puts being there above recording it, inside a movie assembled out of engineered postcard images.
Carry this in: Watch Walter go still before each daydream. He stops moving and the world starts doing the moving for him.