Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Chasing Amy
1997 · Kevin Smith · Chasing Amy 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
Count how long a scene runs before the film cuts. (camera)
David Klein shoots at eye level, mostly still, holding two people at a table until the temperature of the scene changes. Sometimes the camera pushes in so slowly you never register the move.
Payoff: The take runs past comfort, so you are stuck inside the argument with whoever cannot leave it. In the reading: attitudes & postures. A camera that asks bodies to carry time instead of advancing a plot is what the reading calls a cinema of the body.
Watch who is allowed to move in each scene. (performance)
Smith blocks most scenes as two people, a table, a decision. One talks and one takes it. The camera usually stays with the one taking it, and Adams and Affleck play the listening as hard as the speaking.
Payoff: You can locate the power in a scene by noticing who has to sit still through it.
Look at how the comic shops and convention tables work. (setting)
Artists' alley, an inker's studio, a retailer, a diner booth. Smith stages them as workplaces with a pecking order and an economy, including which book sells and which book means something.
Payoff: The romance and the argument about selling out are running through the same rooms and the same jobs.
Listen for the music staying out of the big moments. (sound)
David Pirner writes spare acoustic guitar cues that hold back exactly where a romantic comedy would tell you how to feel. The mix is dialogue-forward with very little ambience behind it.
Payoff: Nothing certifies the emotion for you, so you have to decide what a scene means on your own.
Watch Hooper X switch personas at the convention table. (performance)
Dwight Ewell plays a gay man performing militant rage as a sales persona, then dropping it the second the audience walks away. The act has a price list attached to it.
Payoff: Almost everyone here maintains a persona for a living, and the film keeps letting you see the switch. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls him a forger: not a liar, but a man making a truth because the available ones do not pay.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the listening. Notice who gets to move in a scene and who has to sit and take it.