Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Aviator
2004 · Martin Scorsese · The Aviator 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
Look at the peas on the plate at Hepburn's family table. (light)
They read blue-green, and so does the grass and sky in the early scenes. As the decades pass the palette warms into rich, saturated reds and golds.
Payoff: The image ages with the man, so color tells you when you are before any title card does. In the reading: affective color (color-image). This is what the reading calls affective color: hue that soaks up mood instead of just describing the scene.
Count the cuts in the work scenes, then in the compulsive ones. (cutting)
Schoonmaker cuts the Hell's Angels editing and the speed records fast and forward. When Hughes's illness takes over, the takes go long and airless and the cut seems to stick.
Payoff: The film's rhythm carries the same disorder as its subject, so you feel the jam before you name it.
Notice the hard overhead light blowing out faces and hair. (light)
Richardson keeps a bright top source above his subjects, halos on hair, highlights burned white. It runs through nightclubs, hangars and interiors alike.
Payoff: The polish is too perfect, which suits a man who mistakes control for perfection.
Listen for phrases Hughes repeats: "show me all the blueprints." (sound)
Words snag and replay. The mix muffles, loops, and lets crowd noise and flashbulbs swell until they feel like a threat rather than applause.
Payoff: You hear the illness from inside his ears, not from outside as behavior to diagnose. In the reading: symptom. The reading calls these symptoms: acts that signal a drive the man himself cannot name.
Watch the doors Hughes goes through, and the ones he closes. (staging)
Scorsese keeps staging thresholds, bathrooms, hangar gates, screening rooms. Early on the camera cranes freely through nightclubs. Later the spaces tighten around him.
Payoff: His world shrinks as architecture, so you can measure the decline in square feet.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the color and the cutting. Both are running the illness before anyone in the film names it.