Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Killing Them Softly
2012 · Andrew Dominik · Killing Them Softly 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
Listen to the radios and televisions playing behind the dialogue. (sound)
Bush, Paulson, McCain and Obama run through car speakers, barroom sets and gas station forecourts in nearly every public space. They talk about confidence, credit and collective responsibility while the men in frame argue about who owes what.
Payoff: The picture shows men robbing each other and the soundtrack shows a country using the same vocabulary, and the two never quite separate. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. Sound and image running two stories across a gap is what the reading calls audiovisual disjunction.
Count the scenes that are two men talking across a table. (staging)
Most of the film is a parked car or a booth. Fraser frames cramped two-shots that trap the men opposite each other, and Dominik keeps Higgins's overlapping, digressive talk running long past where another crime film would cut.
Payoff: Talk is the actual transaction in this world, so the negotiation is the scene rather than the setup for one.
Look at the sodium light and the wet empty lots. (light)
The palette is desaturated and bilious. Institutional greens and browns in the bars, black water on asphalt, orange street light. Norris fills the backgrounds with shuttered stores, debris and bailout-era signage.
Payoff: The décor announces a system that has stopped working before anyone in the film says a word about the economy.
Notice how long a conversation runs before anything happens. (cutting)
Kates and Horstmann refuse to accelerate. Scenes breathe, digress and circle. Dread comes from how long you wait rather than from cutting speed, and when violence lands the rhythm breaks completely.
Payoff: Tedious process and sudden consequence get different clocks, which is how the film keeps crime looking like work.
Watch how little Pitt moves while he talks. (performance)
Cogan is played as a professional with no swagger. He listens, prices the job, explains his preference for killing from a distance so he does not have to deal with people getting emotional about it.
Payoff: Even the murder is presented as a service with a fee attached, which is the film's flattest joke and its thesis.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Turn up the radios. The film keeps telling you what the men in the cars are too busy to hear.