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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the crowded backgrounds. They're doing more comic work than most of the dialogue.