Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wrestler
2008 · Darren Aronofsky · The Wrestler 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
Watch how often you see the back of Randy's head. (camera)
Maryse Alberti rides at his shoulder, half a step behind, down corridors, into stockrooms, out to the trailer. You rarely get his face ahead of a scene. You follow him into it.
Payoff: You are put permanently at his back, which makes you a companion and keeps him alone in every crowded room. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: an image where you feel a camera present, watching a man watch his own world.
Notice which places in the film get saturated color. (light)
The New Jersey of strip malls, parking lots and off-season boardwalks is wintry and drained, shot on grainy Super 16. Only the ring and the strip club get hot performance light.
Payoff: Color marks the two places Randy is allowed to feel alive, and both of them require an audience.
Watch the upkeep: the tanning, the injections, the staples. (performance)
Rourke built the body for the part and the film sits inside its maintenance in real time. Randy absorbs things rather than acting on them. The posture carries the whole history.
Payoff: You read this man off his body and his labor, not off anything he ever says about himself. In the reading: cinema of the body. The reading calls this a cinema of the body: sense carried in postures and upkeep rather than in deeds or dialogue.
Look at what Randy owns: tights, tapes, a video game. (setting)
Peroxide hair, spandex and fringe, a hearing aid, hair-metal cassettes, and a Nintendo game with his own face on the box. Everything he keeps is from the 1980s.
Payoff: The props mark him as a relic. He lives inside a decade that stopped being current twenty years ago.
Watch the wrestlers plan their match in the locker room. (staging)
They agree the moves, the spots and the finish like colleagues, warm and practical about it, then go out and do real damage to each other. The concealed blades are shown, not hidden.
Payoff: The film takes the craft seriously. The fight is arranged and the injuries are not, and both stay true at once.
Once you have seen it
Watch the walk to the deli counter. (staging)
Aronofsky shoots the corridor, the plastic flaps and the fluorescent light exactly as he shoots the walk to the ring, with the roar of a phantom crowd rising on the soundtrack.
Payoff: The supermarket becomes an arena, and the arena was always a counter where an aging body is sold by the pound. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes the relation underneath it, theater made visible as theater.
Count how long Weisblum lets a scene run. (cutting)
The team that cut Requiem for a Dream into micro-shocks refuses montage here entirely. Scenes play at the pace of lived time and nothing rescues you from the dull parts.
Payoff: The patience is the method. You are made to sit inside the upkeep rather than watch a summary of it.
Compare Randy in the ring with Cassidy on stage. (structure)
The film cuts between two rooms where an aging body performs desire or danger for cash. Both performers are losing their market, and both hold the customers at arm's length.
Payoff: The rhyme is the argument. Neither can get anything in private that comes close to what a crowd gives them.
Listen to Randy's music and what he says about it. (sound)
Hair metal is his entire emotional vocabulary. He blames Cobain and the nineties for ending his culture. Clint Mansell keeps the score sparse, and Springsteen sings over the credits.
Payoff: The songs date him precisely. He is loyal to a sound that stopped selling, exactly like his body.
Carry this in: Watch the back of his head. The camera decided to follow this man and never looks away from him.