Sightlines · how to watch
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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Walter go still before each daydream. He stops moving and the world starts doing the moving for him.