Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Joker
2019 · Todd Phillips · Joker on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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 low the ceilings sit above Arthur in early scenes. (camera)
Sher starts Arthur in compressed, boxed-in spaces: the social-services office, the refrigerator, cramped apartments. As the film goes on, the anamorphic frame opens out and he stops shrinking inside it.
Payoff: The space he is given on screen tracks exactly how much self he has claimed.
Watch how often the camera shoots through doorways and over furniture. (staging)
Sher rarely takes an idealized vantage on the apartment interiors. You watch Arthur and his mother from awkward angles, close enough to feel like surveillance footage.
Payoff: You are not a guest in this apartment. You are stationed inside it, unable to leave.
Count how long Groth holds on Phoenix before cutting. (cutting)
The cuts come late by franchise standards. Social interactions collapse and the film stays put, letting Phoenix's body set the rhythm instead of any action beat.
Payoff: The refusal to cut away is what makes the discomfort yours instead of Arthur's alone.
Listen for the solo cello, and where it leads Arthur's body. (sound)
Guðnadóttir wrote cues before shooting and gave them to Phoenix. In the bathroom after the subway, his arms unfold to the cello before any meaning arrives.
Payoff: Body first, sense afterward. The score is not commenting on him. It is moving him. In the reading: the gest. The dance is what the reading calls a gest: a posture that exposes a relation rather than advancing the plot.
Watch Phoenix's shoulders and spine in every scene. (performance)
He starts hunched, averted, folded inward. The Joker arrives through hundreds of tiny adjustments, never one cut. You cannot point to the frame where the change happens.
Payoff: Change here is accumulation, not revelation, which is why the face keeps holding more than it releases. In the reading: icon of power (potisign). The reading calls this a potisign: micro-movements gathering across a face toward a threshold, with nowhere to discharge.
Once you have seen it
Track every scene Sophie appears in, from her first hallway greeting. (structure)
Phillips holds the Sophie material at the same level as everything real, with no flagging. On a second pass you can see the film composing an object and then replacing it.
Payoff: The unreliability lives in the cut, not in a confession, so the images themselves stop being witnesses. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls the Sophie thread crystalline description: an image that builds its own object, then peels that object away.
Look at where the light on faces comes from, and its color. (light)
Sher lights from below and from harsh practicals, Gordon Willis style. The desaturated institutional greens and browns give way to saturated reds and golds as the delusion hardens.
Payoff: The palette is a gauge of how far Arthur's version of the world has taken over the film's.
Watch De Niro behind the Murray Franklin desk, mocking the tape. (performance)
In The King of Comedy De Niro played the failed comedian who abducts the host. Here he is the host and Phoenix is the supplicant. The positions are flipped.
Payoff: The casting makes Arthur legible against Rupert Pupkin, and the film knows you are doing that comparison.
Notice the garbage piled on Gotham's streets in every exterior. (setting)
The strike, the shuttered services, the cut-off medication, the gated Wayne estate against the crumbling Bronx block. The film keeps this map visible behind Arthur throughout.
Payoff: The background is an argument about what abandonment manufactures, and the film never settles whether that excuses anything.
Carry this in: Arthur can only watch for most of this film. Notice what the camera does with a man who cannot act.