Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Raising Arizona
1987 · Joel Coen · Raising Arizona 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 camera swoop low, inches off the ground. (camera)
Sonnenfeld sends the camera charging through rooms at ground level, untethered to any single character's point of view, a technique borrowed from Sam Raimi's horror films.
Payoff: The camera itself starts to feel like a fourth character loose in the story.
Listen for the yodeling and banjo under quiet scenes. (sound)
Carter Burwell's score mixes yodeling, whistling, and banjo with a yodeled Ode to Joy, hillbilly Americana spliced against something grander.
Payoff: The music tells you this is a tall tale before anyone says a word.
Notice the Huggies, the La-Z-Boys, the Hawaiian shirts. (setting)
Jane Musky's production design fills the frame with mundane consumer objects rendered slightly larger than life, a comic-strip version of working-class Arizona.
Payoff: The ordinary and the mythic sit in the same shot the whole movie.
Watch Hi's narration fight with what's on screen. (performance)
His scripture-inflected, grandiloquent voiceover describes a petty crook's life in the language of myth, set directly against trailer parks and diaper aisles.
Payoff: The gap between his words and his life is where the film's tenderness lives.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the film treats Leonard Smalls as more than a character. (staging)
The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse rides out of the desert trailing fire, staged less like a plot device than like Hi's guilt given a body and a motorcycle.
Payoff: His dread is not just felt, it is turned into a figure you can watch ride toward you. In the reading: the Figure (reflection-image). Deleuze calls a feeling transposed into a staged figure a reflection-image, and Smalls is Hi's dread made flesh.
Track how the film alternates wide desert shots with tight chase cutting. (cutting)
The diaper-run sequence pulls back to the sunbaked badlands, then snaps tight onto the pursuit, over and over, breathing open and shut through the whole chase.
Payoff: The rhythm of the landscape and the rhythm of the joke are the same rhythm. In the reading: respiration-space / skeleton-space. Deleuze calls this alternation between vast milieu and narrow action respiration-space, and the Coens play it for laughs.
Notice how the film's motion finally goes still at the end. (structure)
After ninety minutes of nonstop propulsion, Hi falls asleep and imagines a future of family and grandchildren he is not sure belongs to him.
Payoff: The one moment the movie stops chasing something is the moment it reaches for grace. In the reading: onirosign (dream-image). Deleuze calls a fantasy untethered from any real memory a dream-image, and it is the film's only still point.
Carry this in: Watch the camera. It moves like nothing human is driving it, all through the chase.