Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Star Is Born
2018 · Bradley Cooper · A Star Is Born 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
Watch Ally's face in the wings before she walks out. (camera)
Matthew Libatique shoots handheld and close, eyes and mouth centered, the venue behind her dissolved into backlit haze. Cooper spends his most expensive minute on a face making up its mind.
Payoff: The drama is moved down to the scale of an inch or two of a face. In the reading: icon of power (potisign). The reading calls this a potisign: a face built from small movements gathering toward a threshold, not holding one look.
Listen for the imperfections in the singing. (sound)
The songs were sung live on set, some inside real festival windows at Glastonbury, Coachella and Stagecoach, in front of crowds who were never going to wait around for a second take.
Payoff: You hear breath being budgeted and a throat under strain, which a playback musical cannot give you. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls this an any-instant-whatever: an ordinary instant taken as it came, instead of a perfected pose.
Watch how many people stand between Ally and Jack. (staging)
The early scenes are cramped and warm: a parking lot, a grocery store, a bathtub. As her career moves, managers, stylists and handlers fill the frame and push him toward its edge.
Payoff: The argument about manufacture gets made by who is allowed into the shot.
Listen to how low Cooper pitched Jack's speaking voice. (performance)
Cooper dropped his register substantially and worked with a dialect coach, modeling the weathered baritone on Sam Elliott, who then plays Jack's older brother. The film says so out loud.
Payoff: A man is speaking in a voice he took from someone else, and you can hear it once you know.
Notice how long a whole song is allowed to run. (cutting)
Jay Cassidy holds the performance set pieces longer than a concert film would, so a number lands as one event instead of a montage of angles. Elsewhere he compresses months into seconds.
Payoff: The songs get to be scenes and the career gets to be a blur, which is the shape of the story.
Once you have seen it
Listen for where the mix goes over to Jack's ears. (sound)
His tinnitus and failing hearing are written into the sound design, so the film periodically stops handing you the room and hands you his perception of it instead.
Payoff: In a musical the mix is the thing everyone is chasing. Here it becomes a symptom. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: an image that shows you someone perceiving, so you feel the perceiving itself.
Track who is moving under their own power. (staging)
Ally goes from writing in a bathtub to being styled, choreographed and placed on television stages. She stops moving and starts being moved, while Jack loses the ability to change anything.
Payoff: The two trajectories cross in the blocking before the plot says a word about either of them.
Watch how closely the film follows the 1937 beats. (structure)
Cooper works the inherited skeleton nearly step by step, by way of Pierson's 1976 script: the discovery, the name change, the eclipsing success, the public humiliation.
Payoff: Your foreknowledge turns suspense into dread, and dread is patient, which is why the film can afford the grocery store.
Watch Jack watching Ally from the side of the stage. (performance)
The concert photography keeps returning to his reverse angle, looking out at her. He begins by acting on the world and ends by watching it, with drink and deafness running downhill underneath.
Payoff: One half of this marriage is still in a story where action works. The other half is only looking.
Carry this in: Track who is moving under their own power in each scene, and when that stops.