Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch American Sniper
2014 · Clint Eastwood · American Sniper 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 world arrive inside the circle of the scope. (camera)
The film opens on Kyle's eye at a rifle sight with a figure in the crosshairs, and that framing returns all through the Iraq sequences. Everything he has to decide happens inside the ring.
Payoff: The same picture can mean two opposite things, and he has about a second in which to choose one. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. A gesture that could belong to two completely different situations is what the reading calls an index of equivocity.
Notice how the camera settles down once he gets home. (camera)
Barry Ackroyd shoots Iraq with tight lenses and restless handheld movement. Texas comes back flatter and stiller. The two registers do not share a grammar and the film never blends them.
Payoff: The photography sorts his two lives, so you feel the switch in your body before the story explains it.
Watch how badly Kyle fits inside his own living room. (staging)
Eastwood puts him in the foreground with the suburban space slightly out of register behind him. He keeps checking corners and doors. The furniture is the right size and he is not.
Payoff: His vigilance has nowhere to go indoors, so the blocking carries everything he will not put into words.
Listen to the crack, the delay, then the silence. (sound)
The film treats each shot as procedure: the report, the travel time, the quiet before impact. No music swells over it and nothing is made beautiful. Killing is handled as technical work.
Payoff: The restraint puts you inside the precision instead of at a safe distance from it.
Watch how little Cooper lets Kyle explain himself. (performance)
Bradley Cooper plays the intelligence as physical: patience, stillness, spatial calculation, a jaw doing the talking. The film gives Kyle limited interior life and makes that limit the thing you watch.
Payoff: His posture holds what the dialogue never reaches, so you end up reading the man off his body. In the reading: attitudes & postures. A man whose stance and bearing carry the time he has lived is what the reading calls a cinema of the body.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the circle of the scope. Once Kyle is home, notice how rarely anything fills it.