Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Elvis
2022 · Baz Luhrmann · Elvis 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 Walker's camera leave Elvis for one face in the crowd. (camera)
Luhrmann keeps cutting between the body making the feeling and the faces that feel it, again and again through every performance.
Payoff: This turns the crowd into one hungry organism, the dividual, feeding on Elvis's body. In the reading: dividual. Deleuze calls a crowd like this a dividual, one organism with a single appetite, not many people.
Notice how the film's colors shift from gold to cold blue. (light)
Mandy Walker's palette starts in gospel-tent golds and neon pinks, then curdles into a colder, sicker light as the Vegas years arrive.
Payoff: The color itself works as a clock, marking Presley's decline before the story says so.
Listen for old rock and gospel mixed with modern hip-hop. (sound)
Elliott Wheeler's soundtrack interweaves period rock, gospel, and blues with contemporary pop and hip-hop reworkings throughout the film.
Payoff: This makes audible the lineage Luhrmann wants to assert, from Black Southern music to modern pop.
Track how Presley's costumes change across the film's decades. (staging)
Catherine Martin moves him from the pink suit and eyeliner of the scandal years to black leather in 1968 to the escalating jumpsuits of Vegas.
Payoff: Each costume marks a stage of ownership over his body, ending in armor that is also a coffin.
Once you have seen it
Listen for Colonel Parker narrating his own defense from a deathbed. (structure)
Parker insists love, not him, killed Elvis, and the film never confirms or denies his version of events.
Payoff: Parker is what the reading calls a forger, someone who makes truth instead of hiding it. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). Deleuze's forger doesn't lie about the truth, he manufactures a version and lives inside it.
Notice when the singing voice stops sounding like Austin Butler. (sound)
Butler sings the 1950s scenes himself, but Presley's own masters carry the Vegas-era performances, and the switch is audible.
Payoff: The voice migrates from the living actor onto a recording of the dead man himself. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. This is audiovisual-disjunction: sound and image stop matching and the gap has to be read.
Wait for the cutting to finally slow for one full song. (cutting)
After two hours of rapid montage, Villa and Redmond let 'Unchained Melody' run uninterrupted, a wrecked man at a piano.
Payoff: The stillness lands like a stopped clock, letting one body carry time instead of plot.
Carry this in: Watch whose eyes you're seeing Elvis through, and notice how rarely they're his own.