Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Ride with the Devil
1999 · Ang Lee · Ride with the Devil 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 men maintain table manners inside a dirt hole. (setting)
The dugout is a burrow roofed with logs and dirt where four men live like animals, and yet they keep addressing each other with the full formality of a parlor.
Payoff: The etiquette surviving inside a hole in the ground is stranger than anything in the fighting.
Listen for gunfire fired at conversational, close range. (sound)
There is no brass or swelling anthem anywhere in the score, and when revolvers go off they are loud, abrupt, and close, nothing like the clean distant shots of a typical Western.
Payoff: The sound design refuses to make any of this feel triumphant or thrilling.
Watch for the only bright color: the guerrillas' embroidered shirts. (light)
Everything around the men runs to mud brown and slate, while their hand sewn shirts stay the one saturated thing in almost every frame.
Payoff: A small vanity is quietly carrying the whole civilian network that keeps the war fed.
Listen for how formally these men speak to each other. (sound)
The men talk in complete, balletic, old fashioned sentences even in the middle of raids and reprisals, courtesy deployed like a kind of armor.
Payoff: The gap between how politely they speak and what they actually do carries most of the film's argument. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest: their courtesy is one long gest for the system underneath it.
Watch how long the film holds on waiting and boredom. (cutting)
The long winter in the dugout is not compressed into a quick montage, months pass in weather and beards instead, and the film simply sits inside the waiting with the men.
Payoff: The waiting itself is treated as the substance of the war, not empty time to skip past. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls this dead time: a stretch that advances no plot because the waiting itself is the actual content.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how differently these men speak compared to what they actually do.