Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch American Hustle
2013 · David O. Russell · American Hustle 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 the title card before the first scene begins. (structure)
The film opens on a line admitting that only some of this actually happened. Russell puts it up before anything else, then never comes back to correct it.
Payoff: You are told at the door that accuracy is not the contract, so stop sorting the true from the invented. In the reading: powers of the false. The reading calls this the powers of the false: a film that treats invention as a way of making, not reporting.
Watch Bale build his comb-over, strand by strand. (performance)
The first minutes are a man gluing hair to his scalp, spraying it, laying the long strands across the bald crown. Nobody is watching him. He takes his time anyway.
Payoff: The care he gives a lie nobody believes tells you what everyone in this film does for a living. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls him a forger: a man who does not lie inside a world so much as build himself out of lies.
Watch for the sudden snap zoom into a face. (camera)
Linus Sandgren prowls the rooms on Steadicam, glides in, whip pans, then jabs to a close-up of a glance or a hairpiece. The camera keeps choosing what matters mid-sentence.
Payoff: The camera behaves like a hustler reading a room, and it trains you to watch people for tells.
Listen for a period record taking over the scene. (sound)
ELO, Steely Dan, Donna Summer, Tom Jones. The songs run almost continuously, with Danny Elfman's score threading between them. Dialogue overlaps and nightclub din sits under everything.
Payoff: The records do the commentary a narrator would, which is what lets the film keep its narrators unreliable.
Look at the hair: perms, curlers, lacquer, comb-overs. (setting)
Judy Becker and Michael Wilkinson build 1978 out of velour, polyester, plunging necklines and grooming. Each character's hair works as hard as their dialogue, and it changes as they do.
Payoff: Surface is where these people keep themselves, so the wardrobe tells you who someone is trying to be.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Everyone here is building a self out of hair, clothes and accent. Watch the surfaces. They are not decoration.