Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Usual Suspects
1995 · Bryan Singer · The Usual Suspects 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
Look at the walls and desk clutter behind Kujan during interrogation. (camera)
Singer keeps the interrogation room a plain white box with office furniture, shot in flat light. The camera neither hides it nor emphasizes it.
Payoff: The room is plain and always in view, a steady base for the stories told inside it. In the reading: crystalline-description. Deleuze calls an image that words keep rebuilding a crystalline description.
Compare the flat fluorescent room with the shadowed light of the flashbacks. (light)
Sigel drains the interrogation scenes of atmosphere and gives Verbal's remembered scenes deeper shadows and tighter compositions around faces.
Payoff: Two looks sort the film into the room where it is told and the places it describes. In the reading: powers of the false. The reading calls images that tell their own version of events the powers of the false.
Watch Spacey's left hand and walk whenever he crosses the room. (performance)
Verbal's curled hand and dragging leg are constant. Spacey plays him as a man who talks too much out of fear, eager to agree with whatever Kujan suggests.
Payoff: Spacey builds a nervous, talkative body, and the film lets you spend time with it.
Listen to Ottman's main theme: hushed, lyrical, closer to sad than sinister. (sound)
For a film about a legendary killer, the score keeps refusing menace. It swells for loyalty and loss instead.
Payoff: The music is tender where you might expect threat, and that sets the film's tone.
Count the rows: the lineup, five men in a cell, groups framed together. (staging)
Singer keeps arranging the suspects as a row of faces and bodies. The lineup scene, with the actors' real unscripted laughter left in, sets the ensemble as a single unit before their interests split.
Payoff: The film keeps asking you to read identity off a row of faces, the same task the police are failing at.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the interrogation room and the faces in the lineup. Singer shoots both plainly.