Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch I, Tonya
2017 · Craig Gillespie · I, Tonya 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
Notice when a character stops a scene to correct it. (structure)
A fight is running and somebody freezes, turns to the camera and says that is not how it went. The dramatization you were trusting is testimony wearing the costume of evidence.
Payoff: The image builds an event and then overwrites it, so nothing you watch ever settles into a fact. In the reading: crystalline description. A scene that builds up its object and then quietly replaces it is what the reading calls a crystalline description.
Watch the cuts jump decades and change who is speaking. (cutting)
Tatiana Riegel whips between the interview chairs and the dramatized past, and between two people's incompatible accounts of the same night. The rhythm is fast and timed to the songs.
Payoff: The cut is this film's unit of doubt, so the instability reaches you as rhythm rather than as argument.
Listen to the rock songs running on top of everything. (sound)
Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp, ZZ Top, wall to wall. The tracks are period-accurate for this world and also a running commentary that undercuts or amplifies whatever is on screen.
Payoff: The music drives the comic momentum, which is why a beating can land on the same beat as a punchline.
Look at the dresses Tonya sews for competition. (setting)
Homemade costumes against the establishment's tailored ones, wood paneling, fluorescent rinks, cigarettes, big hair. The design keeps her class position in front of you in every room.
Payoff: The judges keep telling her she is not the right image, and the production design shows you exactly what they mean.
Watch Robbie fix her face in the mirror before skating. (performance)
She wipes the tears, arranges the smile and goes out. Margot Robbie plays the armor and the thing under it at once, and the film holds the shot while the face is assembled.
Payoff: You watch a self being manufactured to order, which is what every person in this film is doing constantly.
Once you have seen it
Watch Harding and Gillooly describe the same marriage. (structure)
She says he beat her. He turns to the camera and says he never did. The film puts both accounts on screen at full strength and refuses to choose between them.
Payoff: Two incompatible versions are allowed to stand as equally real, so there is no master account underneath them. In the reading: falsifying narration. Narration that produces incompatible versions and presents both as real is what the reading calls falsifying narration.
Watch each actor play a person and that person's account. (performance)
Janney narrates cruelty as tough love. Paul Walter Hauser's Eckhardt casts himself as a counterterrorism expert. Sebastian Stan's Gillooly keeps his version tidy. Nobody here is simply lying.
Payoff: Everyone is building a usable past for themselves, and the film lets all the versions stand next to each other. In the reading: the forger. A person who creates a workable self rather than reporting a true one is what the reading calls a forger.
Watch the film turn and address the audience directly. (structure)
In the later passages Harding names America as the party that built her up in order to tear her down. The film has spent two hours performing that ridicule for laughs.
Payoff: The picture indicts the appetite it has been feeding, so your own enjoyment becomes part of its subject.
Watch the camera orbit the skater instead of watching from the stands. (camera)
Karakatsanis tracks and circles the body in motion rather than framing the routine at broadcast distance. Robbie's face was composited onto professional doubles for the triple axel.
Payoff: The skating reads as physical labor rather than television, which is where the film takes her seriously on her own terms.
Carry this in: Ask who is telling you each scene. The film never hands you a version without an owner.