Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Choose Me
1984 · Alan Rudolph · Choose Me 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 colored light landing on faces that doesn't match the room. (light)
Kiesser's neon doesn't just fall on the actors, it stains them, and the palette shifts by emotional register instead of matching any true source in the room.
Payoff: Color is doing what the dialogue keeps refusing to do, saying how someone actually feels. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls color used this way an affective color, a quality overtaking the image rather than describing a real light.
Watch how often characters appear through glass or a mirror. (camera)
Compositions repeatedly place people behind bar bottles, windows, and doorframes, so the image is layered and obstructed in nearly every scene.
Payoff: You keep seeing a reflected version of someone instead of the person right in front of you.
Watch how rarely two people face each other directly. (staging)
Rudolph blocks characters talking side by side at the bar, across a room, or through a doorway, rationing any direct address between them.
Payoff: When two people finally share a balanced frame, the film treats it like a real event.
Listen for where the music is actually coming from. (sound)
Teddy Pendergrass songs wash across scenes almost continuously, sometimes seeming to come from the jukebox and sometimes from nowhere at all.
Payoff: The music keeps promising a romantic confidence none of these people can actually manage.
Watch Bujold's voice change between the radio booth and real life. (performance)
She speaks about desire with total fluency on the air and cannot manage a real conversation the moment the microphone is off.
Payoff: The two voices never touch, which is exactly the gap the whole film is measuring.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who shares a frame with whom. A two-shot here is rare enough to be an event.