Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mississippi Burning
1988 · Alan Parker · Mississippi Burning 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
Look at the two drinking fountains before anyone speaks. (setting)
Parker opens on one fountain marked white and one marked colored. After that he keeps showing you separate entrances, the back of the bus, the white side and the Black side of every room.
Payoff: You do not have to decode the order in this town. You read it off the walls, which is how the whole film thinks. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the fountains a symbol: one object condensing a film's whole organizing relation into something you recognize instantly.
Notice when the camera goes loose and when it holds still. (camera)
Peter Biziou shoots the violence roving and handheld. He frames the scenes of intimidation and grief composed and almost motionless, like a photograph. The two grammars alternate across the film.
Payoff: The steadiness of the camera tells you what register you are in before a word of dialogue does.
Watch for fire burning against the night sky. (light)
Days here are sun-bleached and dusty, skies pushed toward white, greens drained out. Nights bring the burning cross, the church in flames, torches at a rally. Biziou shoots the fire nothing like reportage.
Payoff: The documentary surface keeps breaking open into something hotter and less rational. In the reading: expressionism. The reading calls this expressionism: flame given a life of its own that drags the plain surface toward nightmare.
Watch Frances McDormand's face when she is saying nothing. (performance)
McDormand plays Mrs. Pell, a deputy's wife, in bruised stillness. She takes in what the men around her do and holds it in her face. The feeling never converts into an act.
Payoff: Hers is the one white conscience in the county, and the film gives it nowhere to go. In the reading: icon of quality. The reading calls this a face of pure quality: one feeling held in close-up with no action available to discharge it.
Look at how the crowds outside the courthouse are arranged. (staging)
Parker choreographs the mob and the torchlit rally for scale and menace. Indoors he does the opposite: cramped, overheated rooms, the agents' rented office and the county jail pressing men against each other.
Payoff: The town works by numbers outdoors and by closeness indoors. No space in it is comfortable to stand in.
Once you have seen it
Watch how friendly Hackman is right before he threatens someone. (performance)
Anderson is a former local sheriff, easy in a diner, warm with the people he is working. The charm and the menace come out of the same knowledge of how this county runs.
Payoff: He understands the order from inside. That is what lets him take it apart using its own methods.
Track the point where the agents stop following the rules. (structure)
The case breaks only once Anderson's methods take over: intimidation, kidnapping, psychological terror aimed at Klansmen. Gerry Hambling's cutting tightens as the shortcut takes hold and the thriller accelerates.
Payoff: The satisfaction of the last act comes from due process being abandoned. The film turns that shortcut into pleasure.
Watch where the cut goes after each Black face. (cutting)
Parker intercuts testimony and worship with images of terror. Those faces sing, look and grieve. Every time one of them holds, the film cuts back to the two agents and their case.
Payoff: The movie keeps finding people who could carry the story and keeps handing it back to the men investigating it.
Carry this in: Watch the doorways and the drinking fountains. Parker writes the town's rules on its walls before anyone says them out loud.