Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Thin Blue Line
1988 · Errol Morris · The Thin Blue Line on Sightlines
4 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 reenactments look lit like a film noir. (camera)
High contrast, saturated color, asphalt black and neon and rotating red light, a nocturnal palette that announces itself as staged rather than raw footage.
Payoff: The film tells you upfront that everything you're seeing is a representation, not the event itself.
Notice how the shooting gets restaged differently for each witness. (cutting)
Morris returns to the same roadside again and again, and small details keep changing, where the car sits, who's at the wheel, so the versions never converge.
Payoff: Repetition here corrodes certainty instead of confirming it. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls this crystalline description: a version that only ever refers to other versions, never to a stable fact behind them.
Watch for the milkshake arcing through the air in slow motion. (setting)
Morris photographs an ordinary detail, a spilled drink, a falling clock, a police report, with the reverence usually reserved for a murder weapon.
Payoff: You watch a small, absurd fact get elevated into evidence right in front of you. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls this a fetish: a small object charged with more evidentiary weight than it could possibly carry.
Listen for the looping score under even the most routine testimony. (sound)
Philip Glass's arpeggios repeat and build under interviews that would otherwise sound flat and administrative, lending them a sense of fate.
Payoff: The music makes ordinary statements feel like they are already part of a verdict.
Once you have seen it
Watch for the small cassette recorder in the film's final scene. (sound)
After a hundred minutes of images you've learned to distrust, the resolution arrives as pure sound, David Harris's own voice on tape, with no picture to doubt.
Payoff: The eye has been lying to you all night. The ear gets the last word. In the reading: powers-of-the-false. The reading calls this the powers of the false: using unreliable images as a solvent to dissolve a false verdict before asserting a truer one.
Watch David Harris's face during his last interview in the film. (performance)
He's charming and oblique through most of it, and Morris holds the camera long enough that his near-admission of guilt slips out almost sideways.
Payoff: The film's whole argument turns out to hinge on one man's guardedness finally slipping.
Track how firmly the film argues for Adams's innocence by its end. (structure)
Unlike a purely relativist film, this one lands on a clear conclusion about who did it, using all its doubt to clear away a false certainty rather than replace it with none.
Payoff: Adams's real conviction was overturned within a year of the film's release.
Carry this in: Watch the milkshake arc through the air. The film already knows you can't trust your own eyes.