Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch sex, lies, and videotape
1989 · Steven Soderbergh · sex, lies, and videotape 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 how the video footage looks different from the film. (camera)
Walt Lloyd shoots the outer life in composed, naturally lit 35mm. Graham's tapes come back grainy and gray on a monitor. Two picture qualities run side by side through the whole movie.
Payoff: The film holds two ideas about where truth lives, and you can see which one a scene is using. In the reading: hyalosign (crystal-image). A person and her recording circling each other until you cannot say which is realer is what the reading calls a crystal-image.
Look at what Graham keeps in his apartment. (setting)
A chair, a mattress on the floor, a camera on a tripod, a shelf of labeled tapes. Spader's Graham has built a room with nothing in it except the machine and the seat.
Payoff: He has arranged intimacy at one remove, so the room states his condition before he says a word about it.
Watch Spader's face while a woman is talking. (performance)
Graham listens with a courteous, wounded attention and almost nothing moves. Spader builds the part out of withholding, and the film keeps the interest on the listener as much as the speaker.
Payoff: The feeling registers and never becomes an act, which is his exact problem held in a face. In the reading: the seer (voyant). A man who takes in everything and can discharge none of it is what the reading calls a seer.
Notice the beat Soderbergh holds after a line lands. (cutting)
Soderbergh cut the film himself and keeps the shot on whoever is receiving the sentence. The rhythm is set by conversation and by the pause after it rather than by anything happening.
Payoff: The turns here occur in reactions, so the silence after an admission is carrying the information.
Notice who sits facing whom in each conversation. (staging)
Lloyd holds sustained two-shots and frontal singles. A kitchen, an office, a bar, a bare apartment. People are arranged for disclosure and inspection in every one of these rooms.
Payoff: Each space becomes a place where somebody is put on the spot, which makes ordinary talk play as testimony.
Once you have seen it
Watch Ann sit down, then turn the camera around. (structure)
The most guarded person in the film walks into the one room built to keep people at a distance and reverses its equipment. Spader's watcher ends up on tape.
Payoff: The sealed world breaks from the inside, and the instrument he used for safety is what exposes him. In the reading: crystal-cracked. A closed mirror-world split open from inside is what the reading calls a cracked crystal.
Watch Gallagher's John lie straight into a face. (performance)
John deceives easily and always in person. The tapes, meanwhile, collect a candor no face-to-face scene in this film manages. Cynthia tells the truth in the chair and lies in the house.
Payoff: The most mediated talk here turns out to be the most honest, and the direct relationship is the biggest lie.
Listen to how little Cliff Martinez's score does. (sound)
The music is texture rather than melody, and the track stays with speech, breath, and room tone. Second time through you notice how rarely the film tells you what to feel.
Payoff: With no musical cue to lean on, your read on each character rests entirely on what they say and withhold.
Carry this in: Watch the listener, not the talker. This film keeps its information in the face receiving the sentence.