Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch I'm Not There
2007 · Todd Haynes · I'm Not There on Sightlines
5 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 grain and the shape of the frame change between strands. (camera)
Lachman shot each of the six worlds on different stock. Jude Quinn is grainy handheld black-and-white. Billy the Kid is dusty golden widescreen. The Woody sections are bright and storybook.
Payoff: You can tell which version of the man you are in before anyone speaks. The film stock is the label.
Listen for anyone to say the name Bob Dylan. (sound)
Six actors play figures called Woody, Rimbaud, Jack, Robbie, Jude, and Billy. An opening credit says the film is inspired by Dylan's many lives. The name is then never spoken.
Payoff: The film withholds the one word that would tie the six together, so you have to do the assembling. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls him the forger: not a liar, but a man who makes himself by changing shape and showing no original.
Watch what triggers each jump from one strand to another. (cutting)
Rabinowitz cuts by rhyme rather than chronology. A gesture, a lyric, a color, or an idea in one world hands you straight into the next. Nothing gets explained.
Payoff: The joins teach you to read six selves at once, and they do it in the first twenty minutes.
Watch Blanchett's spine and hands when she plays Jude Quinn. (performance)
She builds Jude from the coiled posture, the cigarette, the sunglasses, the deflecting wit. You never stop seeing Blanchett underneath it, and the film wants that.
Payoff: Because the actor stays visible, each persona reads as a mask being worn rather than a person you have finally found.
Look at the costumes and the rooms inside each separate world. (setting)
Every strand is a self-contained period reconstruction. Riddle is a frontier town of Americana grotesques in Halloween costume. The Jude scenes rebuild the entourages and press rooms of 1965.
Payoff: The design fixes each figure to an exact cultural moment, which is the only firm ground the film offers.
Once you have seen it
Watch how Bale's folk singer turns up later as a preacher. (structure)
Jack Rollins becomes Pastor John with no transition and no psychology bridging them. Whishaw's Rimbaud contradicts everyone, himself included, from an interrogation chair.
Payoff: The versions exclude one another and the film never picks between them. That refusal is the argument. In the reading: falsifying narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: a film that holds incompatible accounts open at once and declines to arbitrate.
Watch the handheld camera crowd Jude in the press conferences. (camera)
This material restages Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, grain included: a musician fencing with reporters who want one stable answer, filmed in the style that certifies truth.
Payoff: The most trusted form of documentary honesty gets quoted here as one more costume. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: you feel the camera perceiving a man who is already performing for cameras.
Listen for whose voice sings over the end credits. (sound)
For two hours the soundtrack mixes Dylan recordings with newly commissioned covers by other artists. Then his own unreleased 1967 recording of the title song plays.
Payoff: The voice the film has circled all night arrives only once the masks are off and the story has stopped.
Carry this in: Six actors, no Dylan. Stop looking for the real one and watch what each mask is made of.