Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Clockers
1995 · Spike Lee · Clockers 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
Watch the opening images before any dialogue starts. (camera)
The film opens on a slideshow of crime-scene photographs, flatly lit at the bored, evidentiary angle of a case file, before the story or characters are introduced.
Payoff: You're made to look before you're given anywhere to put that looking, which is the film's whole opening argument.
Notice the model train set in Strike's bedroom. (setting)
Strike has built an elaborate layout of orderly track and clean departure in a room inside a housing project that offers him neither.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls a symbol in the strict sense, the one object that condenses everything the story is about. In the reading: symbol. Deleuze would call the trains a symbol, the single object a whole film's organizing relation gets condensed into.
Notice how many people are watching Strike at any moment. (staging)
Lee stages the housing project as a closed system of benches and courtyards where Strike is under constant surveillance, by police, by his boss, by other clockers, and by children.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls the relation-image: meaning built from the web of who is watching whom, not from what anyone does. In the reading: the mental/relation-image. Deleuze calls this the relation-image, where a scene's meaning comes only from the network of looks connecting everyone in it.
Listen for the wet, labored sound of Strike swallowing. (sound)
The sound design keeps Strike's ulcer pain audible throughout, close and uncomfortable, as he drinks bottle after bottle of chocolate 'Moo' to quiet his stomach.
Payoff: His body is doing the talking his face and his words mostly refuse to do.
Notice the same handful of images cutting back into the story. (cutting)
Editor Sam Pollard repeatedly inserts crime-scene photographs, the model trains, and the Moo bottles as recurring motifs that interrupt the narrative's forward flow.
Payoff: These interruptions carry bodily and psychological weight that the straightforward plot alone wouldn't give you.
Once you have seen it
Watch for a shot where Strike appears to float past the background. (camera)
Lee mounts subject and camera on the same rig so Strike appears to glide untethered while the world slides past behind him.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls the movement of world: he goes still and the world does the moving instead. In the reading: movement of world. Deleuze calls this the movement of world, the character held motionless while everything around him keeps circulating.
Notice how Strike's story ends, and what kind of scene it is. (structure)
The mystery gets resolved almost as an afterthought, and the film gives Strike an exit by train rather than the courtroom closure the genre trains you to expect.
Payoff: Solving who pulled the trigger was never really the point of watching this film.
Watch Rocco keep investigating after he already has a confession. (performance)
Detective Klein has Victor's confession in hand and refuses to accept it, pushing the case toward Strike and Rodney instead of closing it.
Payoff: His pursuit of truth turns out to be a pursuit of the story he already decided on.
Carry this in: Watch Strike's body, not just his face. His ulcer is metabolizing the life he's living.