Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The End of Violence
1997 · Wim Wenders · The End of Violence 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 Ray Bering watch the city on his monitors. (camera)
Byrne's technician sits inside the Griffith Observatory surrounded by screens that feed him all of Los Angeles, freeways, parking lots, lit windows, all at once.
Payoff: He has perfect vision of the whole city and no power to change anything he sees in it. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls this the seer: a watcher with total sight who cannot turn seeing into an act.
Watch how empty the night city looks in this film. (light)
Los Angeles is shot as a luminous, depopulated nightscape, pools of artificial light, glassy interiors, freeway geographies with almost nobody in the frame.
Payoff: The city reads less like a setting than like a mood with buildings in it. In the reading: any-space-whatever (emptiness). The reading calls this an any-space-whatever, a space emptied of its ordinary use and left to radiate solitude.
Watch the contrast between glass rooms and open streets. (staging)
Wenders opposes a glassed, affluent, surveilled Los Angeles against the open-air world of the gardeners and day laborers on its margins.
Payoff: The two Los Angeleses are a moral geography, not just two different neighborhoods.
Listen for Sakamoto's score against the surveillance hush. (sound)
Ryuichi Sakamoto's austere electronic-orchestral score sits against a soundtrack that also isolates the hush of the monitoring room from the ambient life of the street.
Payoff: The sound design keeps reminding you that watching and living are two different registers.
Watch for the old director playing Ray's father. (performance)
Samuel Fuller, one of American cinema's great filmmakers, appears in a small role in what became one of his final screen performances.
Payoff: Wenders is signing his own cinephile lineage directly into the cast list.
Once you have seen it
Watch how loosely the four story strands actually connect. (cutting)
Przygodda cross-cuts Mike's disappearance, Ray's isolation, the police investigation, and Paige's story, but the film keeps withholding the convergence its setup promises.
Payoff: The looseness is not a failure of plotting; it is the film refusing to pretend it has an answer. In the reading: weak links. The reading calls this weak links: slackened causality between strands where a thriller would supply a clean chain.
Watch where Mike ends up living after he vanishes. (staging)
The powerful producer goes to ground among the gardeners and day laborers on the city's margins, a literal descent from the hills into the working city.
Payoff: His reinvention is staged as a geography, not just a change of heart.
Watch Ray's face change once he understands his own system. (performance)
Byrne plays the technician's slow realization of what his surveillance program actually costs people, a horror that enters his face rather than his dialogue.
Payoff: The most frightened person in the film is the man who built the machine that watches everyone.
Carry this in: Watch the watcher, not the watched. The film's real subject is what total surveillance does to the person running it.