Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Departed
2006 · Martin Scorsese · The Departed 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
Count the scenes where you know more than everybody. (structure)
The premise puts a cop inside the mob and a criminal inside the police. Sullivan runs a hunt for a mole who is Sullivan. You are holding a fact that nobody on screen has.
Payoff: The dread does not come from the gunfights. It comes from the one thing you know and they cannot. In the reading: the mental-image / relation-image. The reading calls this a relation-image: the sense of a scene lives in a link only the viewer is holding.
Notice the cool blue of the police scenes. (light)
Michael Ballhaus keeps the state police work desaturated and cold. Costello's rooms run warm and amber. He lights interiors from the lamps that are in them, so the places look seedy rather than styled.
Payoff: Two worlds get two temperatures, and the men crossing between them keep carrying the wrong one with them.
Look at the stairwells, garages and rooftops. (staging)
Scorsese stages the near misses in closed vertical spaces with one way in and one way out. The buildings that shelter one man are the buildings hunting the other, and the geography repeats.
Payoff: Boston is built here as a set of traps, and both men keep walking into the same architecture.
Listen for the Dropkick Murphys and the Rolling Stones. (sound)
Scorsese drives the montages with Celtic punk and brings Gimme Shelter back, a song he had already used in two earlier crime films. Howard Shore's score keeps the procedure ticking underneath.
Payoff: The needle-drops are commentary. They tell you what a scene thinks of itself while the scene plays straight.
Watch how much worse DiCaprio looks each scene. (performance)
Costigan gets haggard, jumpy and chemically wrecked as the months run on. Damon plays Sullivan the other way, pressed and smooth and rising. Nicholson plays Costello as a man performing himself.
Payoff: One body records the cost of the lie and one body hides it, which is the film's whole comparison.
Once you have seen it
Watch how fast the elevator scene is over. (cutting)
The doors open and it is done. No confrontation, no delay, no reversal. Schoonmaker cuts the last act as an accumulation of bodies rather than a resolution of anything.
Payoff: The crime film always promised that the right act restores order. Scorsese keeps the speed and drops the promise.
Look at the rat on the railing at the end. (setting)
The last image holds a rat crossing a rail with the dome of the Massachusetts State House soft behind it. Scorsese lets the shot sit there with no line spoken over it.
Payoff: Corruption is not an intruder in the institution. The framing says it is the institution. In the reading: the symbol. The reading calls the shot a symbol: one object condensing the film's whole relation into a single held image.
Watch Nicholson play a man performing himself. (performance)
Costello is outsized in a film that is otherwise naturalistic. He tells stories about himself, does voices, works the room. Nicholson never lets you glimpse a private version underneath.
Payoff: He has lived at the center of his own legend so long that the performance and the man have fused. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. The reading calls him a forger: a man who manufactures a self rather than having one to return to.
Carry this in: You know who each man really is and nobody in the film does. That gap is where the tension lives.