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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch whose eyes you're seeing Elvis through, and notice how rarely they're his own.