Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Ace in the Hole
1951 · Billy Wilder · Ace in the Hole on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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 the flat, harsh brightness of the desert exteriors. (light)
Charles Lang shoots the New Mexico landscape in a merciless, shadowless glare that strips away any romance from the setting.
Payoff: The light refuses to prettify anything happening under it.
Watch the empty desert fill up with vendors and rides. (staging)
Across the film an empty patch of ground grows vendors, parked cars, a special train, and eventually a Ferris wheel and midway with its own theme song.
Payoff: You are watching curiosity and commerce build a circus in real time. In the reading: attraction-image. Deleuze calls spectacle staged to be gawked at rather than to advance events an attraction-image, and the carnival is exactly that.
Notice the sampler on the newspaper office wall. (setting)
A framed sampler reading 'Tell the Truth' hangs fixed in the office through the whole film, a quiet rebuke against which every scene can be measured.
Payoff: One small object keeps score on everyone in the room. In the reading: symbol. Deleuze calls an object that condenses a film's whole organizing relation a symbol, and this one never moves.
Notice the cutting speed up as the rescue drags on. (cutting)
The editing builds increasing rhythm between the man below, the manipulations above, and the swelling crowd, a momentum that runs opposite to his chances.
Payoff: The excitement rises exactly as fast as the danger does.
Once you have seen it
Watch the crowd move and react as a single body. (structure)
The gathering tourists behave less like individuals than one collective organism, curious and hungry at once, buying souvenirs while waiting for news.
Payoff: The film treats the crowd as a character in its own right. In the reading: dividual. Deleuze calls a crowd handled as one affective unit rather than a sum of people a dividual.
Track the crowd's excitement against the trapped man's chances. (structure)
As public enthusiasm for the story climbs, the man's odds of rescue keep falling, the two lines locked in exact opposite motion through the film's second half.
Payoff: Watching those two lines cross is the film's whole argument made visible.
Carry this in: Watch the sampler on the wall that says 'Tell the Truth.' Measure everyone against it.