Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Lego Batman Movie
2017 · Chris McKay · The Lego Batman Movie 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 how many jokes are packed into busy backgrounds. (cutting)
McKay, a former editor, layers gags densely enough that many are built to be caught only on a second or third viewing, never pausing to let one land alone.
Payoff: The film is made to survive rewatching, packed well past what a single pass can catch.
Notice the low camera angles that make Batman loom large. (camera)
The virtual camera borrows sweeping crane moves and low hero angles from live-action blockbusters, lit in neon magentas and cyans against deep shadow.
Payoff: Every shot is built to aggrandize him, which is exactly the joke and the character's whole problem.
Listen for Batman beatboxing his own heavy metal soundtrack. (sound)
A recurring gag has Batman literally producing his own orchestral-sounding accompaniment, a posture that exposes how much work goes into sounding heroic.
Payoff: Heroism here always needed an orchestra, and now you can see who's paying for it. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes the theatrical relation propping a character up.
Notice bricks visibly detaching and walls rebuilding themselves. (staging)
Sets are built to reconfigure on screen, bricks pulling apart and locking back together, so the environment itself behaves like a comic performer.
Payoff: Everything in the frame is legible as a constructed object, which is part of the joke.
Notice how empty and vast Wayne Manor feels around him. (setting)
In a film moving this fast, the manor is staged as huge, quiet rooms holding one small figure, a held breath between jokes.
Payoff: The scale of the space is doing the emotional work a line of dialogue would normally do. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a space that stops being a setting for action and becomes pure feeling.
Once you have seen it
Notice how many unrelated franchises crash into the climax. (structure)
Sauron, Voldemort, King Kong, and the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys all arrive from completely different stories, and the collision between their history and Batman's is the joke itself.
Payoff: None of these characters belong in Gotham, and that mismatch is exactly the point of putting them there. In the reading: demark. The reading calls each arrival a demark: an anomaly that snaps the usual chain of expectation and forces you to interpret.
Watch the montage cataloging every past screen Batman. (cutting)
The film runs Adam West's campy 1966 Batman and the grim Nolan version as one continuous biography, even though the two portrayals can't both be literally true.
Payoff: Eighty years of contradictory Batmen get treated as a single, affectionate, unbroken history.
Notice what Batman refuses to say about the Joker. (structure)
His denial that the Joker is his greatest enemy wounds the villain and drives the entire plot, turning a supervillain scheme into a story about being needed.
Payoff: A plot device as old as the genre gets reread here as a story about needing someone and refusing to admit it.
Carry this in: Watch the crowded backgrounds. They're doing more comic work than most of the dialogue.