Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Blues Brothers
1980 · John Landis · The Blues Brothers 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
Watch the brothers' faces while things explode behind them. (performance)
Belushi and Aykroyd see everything, the squad cars, the fire, the bazooka, and convert none of it into a reaction. Elwood stays literal and inert, Jake stays barely contained, and neither registers that anything has gone wrong.
Payoff: The comedy is the missing beat between seeing and responding. Landis holds that gap open for two hours. In the reading: the interval. The reading calls that gap the interval: the hinge in a body where perception turns into action, held open here as a joke.
Notice that the numbers are cut on the musical phrase. (cutting)
George Folsey Jr. cuts Aretha Franklin's number and James Brown's church sequence to the build of the music rather than chopping them for coverage. The performance swells as one continuous thing.
Payoff: The songs are allowed to be whole. Nothing in the editing interrupts a number to remind you there is a plot. In the reading: montage-organic. The reading calls this organic montage: cutting that serves the growth of the whole rather than colliding pieces against each other.
Look at the Chicago streets, the L, and the expressways. (setting)
Maxwell Street market, elevated trains, lakefront expressways, Daley Plaza. The film uses the real horizontal sprawl of the city, much of it filmed shortly before urban renewal changed it.
Payoff: The city is not a backdrop for the chases. It is the thing that supplies their scale and their direction.
Count how long the film goes without music. (sound)
It barely rests between numbers. The band was recorded for live fidelity rather than the polished pop production of 1980, with Cropper and Dunn from the Stax house band playing on it.
Payoff: The film is closer to a compilation record with a story attached than to a comedy with songs in it.
Watch each musician get a whole scene, not a cameo. (staging)
Franklin runs a soul food counter, Brown preaches, Ray Charles sells instruments, Calloway mentors, John Lee Hooker plays the street. Each one gets a scene with a shape and a finish rather than an inserted clip.
Payoff: The film hands real dramatic ground to the performers it exists to point at, which is the whole reason it was made.
Once you have seen it
Watch Jake get thrown into a backflip in church. (performance)
James Brown preaches, the congregation erupts, the light comes down. Jake does not decide anything. The movement of the room picks him up and puts him through the air.
Payoff: Motion belongs to everything except the two men the plot is about, and the conversion scene states that outright. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still and the surroundings supply the motion instead.
Watch the mall chase and listen to their conversation. (staging)
The Bluesmobile goes through plate glass while Elwood keeps both hands on the wheel and reads out store names. The background destruction has to be choreographed precisely against two men not looking at it.
Payoff: The gag needs the wreckage and the calm in the same shot. Cut them apart and neither one is funny.
Count the separate people chasing them. (structure)
Police, a country band with a grievance, neo-Nazis, and a woman with military hardware. Each pursuit is introduced, used, and dropped when the film wants a song instead. Scenes pile up rather than build.
Payoff: The plot is a line strung up to hang performances on, which is why nothing gets resolved before the next number.
Notice that every wrecked car is a real car. (setting)
There was no digital compositing available. The production bought a fleet of decommissioned police vehicles and destroyed them, and the mall was a real closed mall in Harvey, Illinois, dressed with fake storefronts.
Payoff: The weight in these sequences is actual weight, which is why the scale still reads decades after the effects era arrived.
Carry this in: Watch how little the brothers actually do. Everything else in the frame works hard to stay funny around them.