Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Shampoo
1975 · Hal Ashby · Shampoo 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 how warm and hazy Los Angeles looks in every shot. (light)
Kovács photographs the city as consistently lovely: sunlight through smog, cream and gold interiors, skin rendered soft.
Payoff: A film that wanted to condemn George would shoot his world harshly. Instead you share his reasons for staying.
Notice how many rooms have a mirror in them. (staging)
Sylbert's interiors put mirrors everywhere, so characters keep glimpsing themselves while they talk, especially in the salon where George works.
Payoff: The mirrors keep reminding you that everyone here is performing for someone, including themselves. In the reading: crystal in decomposition. Deleuze calls a reflection you can't separate from the thing itself a crystal: here it shows a moneyed world watching itself.
Listen for televisions and radios playing Nixon's campaign in the background. (sound)
The political broadcast runs under scene after scene, and no character ever turns to look at it or reacts to it.
Payoff: The politics sits at the level of furniture, which is exactly how much attention this room pays it. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze calls sound and image telling two different stories audiovisual disjunction; the nation's story and these people's story never meet.
Watch George at work in the salon, actually cutting hair. (staging)
The salon is staged as a real workplace, and George's competence there is treated as genuine rather than another performance.
Payoff: It's the one part of George that isn't an act, set against a man who can't say no to anything else.
Watch the motorcycle rides between houses and driveways. (camera)
Kovács shoots them with long lenses that flatten Beverly Hills into one continuous zone of hedges, so the rides never register as travel.
Payoff: It's motion with nowhere to arrive, George's freedom and his aimlessness in the same shot.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the mirrors. Everyone in this film is performing, including for themselves.