Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blow
2001 · Ted Demme · Blow 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
Notice how the color shifts with each new decade. (light)
Ellen Kuras gives every era its own signature: warm and sun-saturated through the California marijuana years, cooler and more brittle across the cocaine money, desaturated and weathered afterward.
Payoff: You can tell where you are in this life by color alone. Three palettes for three stations of one fall. In the reading: affective color-image. The reading calls this an affective color-image: a hue that soaks up the whole scene and its feeling at once.
Listen for the record that opens each new stretch. (sound)
The film tracks Jung's life on licensed rock, soul and country from the sixties into the eighties. A song sets the year, lifts the feeling, and now and then argues with what you are watching.
Payoff: The music does the dating and much of the persuading. Every American crime biopic took this grammar from GoodFellas.
Listen for the older voice talking over the younger man. (structure)
George narrates his own story from a prison visiting room, rueful and still half justifying himself. That voice lets the film jump years on feeling rather than on the calendar.
Payoff: You are never inside the action. You sit beside a man remembering it, which changes how the whole rise plays. In the reading: mnemosign / image-souvenir. The reading calls this a recollection-image: not a present that acts but a stalled present reaching backward.
Watch Depp's posture change as the years go by. (performance)
There is very little makeup doing the work. Depp ages Jung through pace, posture and vocal register. The charm stays where it was while the body slowly stops carrying it.
Payoff: The aging is done in the acting. You watch failure accumulate in how a man holds himself in a room.
Notice how wide and low the camera sits on George. (camera)
Kuras frames him large against the world during the rise, the way this genre always has.
Payoff: Camera height and distance show you how big George feels in each scene.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the prison room at the start. Everything after it is a man remembering, not a man acting.