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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the camera. It moves like nothing human is driving it, all through the chase.