Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Vanilla Sky
2001 · Cameron Crowe · Vanilla Sky 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
Look at how gorgeous the light is in David's life. (light)
John Toll gives the apartment, the parties and the women a clean saturated sheen, and keys the sky in places to a Monet the film names out loud. The surface is luxury-magazine perfect.
Payoff: The beauty flatters the hero, and it sets up how much he has to lose. In the reading: affective color. A hue that absorbs a whole scene and its feeling is what the reading calls affective color.
Count the posters, records and paintings on David's walls. (setting)
Crowe packs the frames with borrowed images: album covers, film posters, art books, photographs. Almost nothing in the room was made by the man who lives there.
Payoff: A life assembled entirely out of other people's pictures is something the film keeps quietly pointing at.
Listen for where the songs start and where they stop. (sound)
Crowe runs an extensive song list under the picture with Nancy Wilson's score between the drops. The deserted city sequence inverts the method, making the absence of traffic noise the loudest thing in the scene.
Payoff: The soundtrack narrates his interior, so its disappearance is the first sign that something has failed.
Track which scenes come from the cell and which do not. (cutting)
Joe Hutshing and Mark Livolsi cut between a masked man talking to a psychiatrist and the past he is reporting to him.
Payoff: You hear the past as a man tells it to someone else, with all the gaps that brings. In the reading: falsifying narration / powers of the false. The reading calls this a narrated past: events as one man chooses to tell them.
Watch what Cruise does with his own charm early on. (performance)
David is vain, careless and effortlessly liked, which is exactly the star's stock in trade. Then the film takes the face away and makes him work through disfigurement makeup and a rigid mask.
Payoff: A performance built on charm gets asked what is left once the charm is removed.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the surfaces. Notice how polished David's life looks before things change.