Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Kicking and Screaming
1995 · Noah Baumbach · Kicking and Screaming 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
Notice flashbacks arrive with no dissolve or signal at all. (cutting)
Scenes of Grover and Jane's relationship interrupt the present unannounced, marked only by closer framing and fewer people, so the past keeps supplying feeling the present refuses.
Payoff: The film's forward motion is a trick, it actually advances by remembering. In the reading: recollection-image (image-souvenir). Deleuze calls a flashback that replays a former present a recollection image, and this film runs on them.
Watch the trivia game get resumed again and again. (staging)
The same quiz keeps returning across the film, a way for the group to keep being graded and ranked after the actual grading has stopped.
Payoff: The game is not filler, it is the plot, a whole social order performed as a pastime. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation without naming it a gest, and the quiz is exactly that.
Notice how many bodies the camera holds in one shot. (camera)
Bernstein favors the medium group shot, three or four people across a kitchen or bar rail, held long enough for a full conversation to play out.
Payoff: No one gets promoted above the group, which is exactly the point.
Listen for the pause after a joke that does not land. (sound)
The editing holds a beat past the punchline to catch the silence, and the score stays out of the way instead of covering it.
Payoff: The audible empty pause is where the film's real feeling actually lives.
Watch how well everyone here can talk their way past anything. (performance)
Grover and his friends are fluent, quick, and self-aware enough to see their own routines as routines, and they keep performing them anyway.
Payoff: Knowing you are repeating a cliche has never once been a way out of it. In the reading: consciousness of cliches. Deleuze calls this awareness that changes nothing a consciousness of cliches, seeing the ready made gesture and making it anyway.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what the trivia game and the flashbacks are doing instead of a decision.