Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Targets
1968 · Peter Bogdanovich · Targets 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
Notice how flat and shadowless the daylight scenes look. (light)
Kovács shoots the freeway and suburban scenes in even midday light with no chiaroscuro, while the Orlok scenes stay richer and more classically composed.
Payoff: The flatness tells you nothing here is hidden; the horror is sitting in plain sight.
Watch for shots framed through a rifle's crosshairs. (camera)
The film repeatedly gives you the view through a telescopic sight, treating the scope as a viewfinder and the act of aiming as a kind of framing.
Payoff: Aiming and framing start to look like the same gesture, which is the film's real subject. In the reading: Dicisign (the camera perceiving a perceiver). The reading calls this a dicisign: a shot that makes you feel the camera perceiving someone else perceiving through a lens.
Listen for how small and dry each gunshot sounds. (sound)
There is no score anywhere in the film, and the shots land as flat, quiet cracks rather than the amplified booms studio movies usually supply.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel about what you just heard, which makes it land harder, not softer.
Notice ordinary household objects sitting beside weapons. (setting)
Platt's design lays rifles out on a bedspread with the same flat attention given to Coke bottles and wood paneling in the house.
Payoff: The guns are staged as just more household objects, which is exactly what makes the room so unsettling. In the reading: Fetish (part-object of the impulse-image). The reading calls the guns a fetish: an ordinary object loaded with more drive than the polite room around it admits.
Notice the film alternate between two strangers' stories. (cutting)
An aging horror star and a clean-cut young man share no scenes for most of the runtime, cut side by side with no explanation offered.
Payoff: You start to sense these two lives must meet long before the film ever tells you why.
Once you have seen it
Notice Orlok's projected face loom behind his real body. (staging)
At the drive-in, Orlok walks toward the boy while his own enormous image advances on the screen behind him, achieved with no cut and no effect.
Payoff: For a moment there are two Orloks in the frame, and you can't quite say which one is real. In the reading: Crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal-image: a thing and its double swapping places until you can't tell which side you're on.
Notice how simply the confrontation actually ends. (structure)
An old man in a leg brace just walks over and takes the gun away, no struggle, no speech, nothing staged as a triumph.
Payoff: The horror doesn't get defeated so much as revealed to be small, which somehow lands as worse.
Notice the camera hold on the freeway far too long. (cutting)
Bogdanovich keeps the wide shot running well past the point it needs to for information, staying on a scene that offers no relief.
Payoff: The extra length is exactly what makes the violence feel obscene instead of merely fast.
Carry this in: Watch through the crosshairs when the film gives them to you; aiming and framing turn out to be the same act.