Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Enter the Void
2010 · Gaspar Noé · Enter the Void on Sightlines
4 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 the screen blink when Oscar blinks. (camera)
The opening stretch locks the camera to his eyeline completely, the frame going dark and reopening every time his eyes close.
Payoff: You are not watching Oscar see the world. You are inside the seeing itself. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: a shot where you feel the camera itself as a second body perceiving alongside a character.
Notice the neon has no visible source in each shot. (light)
Debie floods Tokyo in magenta, electric blue, and acid green light that comes from nowhere in particular, closer to atmosphere than to any single lamp.
Payoff: Light stops belonging to objects and starts behaving like something you could get high on.
Listen for the absence of any orchestral score. (sound)
Noé builds the soundtrack from drones, throbbing low end, and distorted club music instead, with the mix muffled or ringing depending on Oscar's state.
Payoff: The sound is built to be felt physically rather than heard as accompaniment.
Notice the tabletop model of the neighborhood that recurs. (setting)
The miniature city appears again and again as its own motif, a designed hallucination standing in for the real Tokyo the film keeps returning to.
Payoff: Even the film's version of the city admits it is a constructed toy, not a document.
Once you have seen it
Watch the camera detach and drift above the city. (camera)
Once Oscar's body is gone the camera floats free, gliding through walls and looking straight down at people from above, untethered from any single body.
Payoff: He can hover over his own autopsy and cannot close the wound, watch Linda grieve and cannot touch her. In the reading: voyant. The reading calls this a seer: someone who can only look and endure, since there's no longer any action left for him to take.
Watch the camera stay behind young Oscar's head in flashback. (cutting)
Memory gets a different camera position than either the living first-person view or the post-death drift, and the film slides between past and present through recurring images like a lamp or a window.
Payoff: Past and present stop sitting in order and start sitting in the same room. In the reading: sheets of past. The reading calls this a sheet of past: not a memory retrieved in order, but a region of time you fall back into.
Notice where the film's closing minutes take you back to. (structure)
Rather than ending forward, the film loops back toward its own opening and toward birth, replacing cause and effect with recurrence.
Payoff: The structure argues that nothing here simply ends. It only comes back around.
Carry this in: Watch for the blink in the opening minute. It is the whole argument the film will make.