Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Vice
2018 · Adam McKay · Vice 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 how each era's footage changes texture and exposure. (light)
Fraser shoots the Ford-era scenes with warm film grain and the modern political scenes with flat, overexposed cable-news light.
Payoff: The visual seam between periods marks history sliding into a flatter, broadcast-lit present.
Notice the nature-documentary shots of predators cut into the story. (cutting)
Corwin drops in hawks and other predators at key political moments, footage that has nothing to do with the plot itself.
Payoff: The film argues through images as much as dialogue, editorializing without narration. In the reading: attraction-image (montage of attractions). Each predator shot works like Deleuze's attraction-image, a picture that argues instead of narrates.
Watch Bale's face stay flat even in moments of triumph or crisis. (performance)
Bale keeps Cheney's voice near-toneless and his posture still throughout, rarely letting expression resolve into a readable emotion.
Payoff: That unreadable stillness is the argument: the most powerful man in the room gives you nothing to read. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). Deleuze calls this a qualisign, a face that holds a quality without ever discharging it into action.
Listen for Britell's score swinging between grand and dissonant. (sound)
The music turns pompous and orchestral in scenes of ceremony, then curdles into distortion and tonal ambiguity underneath.
Payoff: The score tells you the surface confidence of power is hiding something worse underneath.
Once you have seen it
Wait for the false ending, credits rolling at the midpoint. (structure)
Halfway through, Cheney retires happy and the movie closes itself, then a phone call restarts the entire story.
Payoff: The film shows you the untaken path before erasing it, making catastrophe feel like one choice, not fate. In the reading: falsifying narration. Deleuze's falsifying narration holds two incompatible endings as equally real, split by a single decision.
Notice the scene where Dick and Lynne speak in Shakespearean verse. (staging)
Bale and Adams play a plotting scene in deadpan blank verse, parodying Macbeth's collusion scenes without breaking tone.
Payoff: The artificial meter exposes the marriage as a power conspiracy staged in plain sight.
Track who the narrator, Kurt, turns out to be. (structure)
The voice guiding you through Cheney's life is revealed late to have an impossible, literal bodily connection to him.
Payoff: A narrator this compromised means nothing you heard was ever neutral reporting.
Carry this in: Watch Bale's face; the film's whole argument sits in what it will not let you read there.