Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Skyfall
2012 · Sam Mendes · Skyfall 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 the Shanghai fight play out entirely in silhouette. (light)
Deakins lights the empty floor with nothing but a wall of animated neon outside. Both men become backlit shapes on glass, and for several seconds you cannot separate a body from its reflection.
Payoff: The film's best-known image is a man who cannot tell himself apart from a reflection of himself. In the reading: hyalosign. A thing and its mirror double grown impossible to tell apart is what the reading calls a crystal-image.
Watch Craig's hands at the firing range and the medicals. (performance)
He shakes, he misses, he fails the tests, he drinks before work. Craig plays Bond as depleted rather than suave. His eyes still read every room. His body arrives a half-second late.
Payoff: The suspense comes from a gap between seeing and doing, which this franchise normally keeps firmly closed.
Notice how still and composed the action framing is. (camera)
Stuart Baird keeps the geography legible and Deakins holds the frame, a deliberate answer to the fragmented cutting of Quantum of Solace. You always know where a body sits in a space.
Payoff: The set pieces read as physical events you can follow, so the spectacle stays tied to consequence.
Look at the buildings the film keeps putting people inside. (setting)
A half-flooded derelict island, MI6 pushed down into Churchill-era tunnels, a cold stone house on a moor. Dennis Gassner's design runs on decay and exposure rather than on glamour.
Payoff: An old, ordered world is coming apart from the inside, and the locations say so before the dialogue does.
Listen for where the old Bond riff is allowed in. (sound)
Thomas Newman writes textured, rhythmic, electronic cues instead of brass, then lets the Monty Norman material arrive only at chosen moments. Adele's melody threads back through the score.
Payoff: The famous riff is rationed, so when it lands it is reporting that Bond is working properly again.
Once you have seen it
Watch Silva the first time he walks toward Bond. (performance)
Bardem takes the whole length of a room and a long story about rats. He is the agent the service made, used and dropped, and he plays intimacy as a weapon.
Payoff: He is not an opposing force. He is what Bond becomes if the institution's betrayal is allowed to finish its work. In the reading: inversion-image. A hero met by his own degraded double rather than by an opposing force is what the reading calls an inversion-image.
Notice that the stolen list stops mattering halfway through. (structure)
The plot device is a pretext. What the film runs on is M, Bond and Silva, three people made by the same institution and arranged as a family with a debt outstanding.
Payoff: The thriller machinery is scaffolding for a domestic story, which is why the last act happens at a house.
Look at the DB5 and what the film does to it. (setting)
The silver Aston Martin is wheeled out of storage with the ejector seat intact, a relic of 1964 driven into 2012, and then taken to a moor and destroyed.
Payoff: The car carries the whole franchise's past as a physical object, and the film burns it on purpose. In the reading: symbol. One object that condenses a film's entire relation to its own past is what the reading calls a symbol.
Watch Bond turn his childhood home into a trap. (staging)
He strips the lodge, sets improvised defenses with Kincade and waits for an army. The finish abandons the franchise's globe-trotting glamour for a cold house on a barren moor.
Payoff: The film burns away the place that produced him, which is the only way it can start him over.
Carry this in: Watch the reflections. Deakins keeps putting Bond next to a version of himself.