Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch David Byrne's American Utopia
2020 · Spike Lee · David Byrne's American Utopia on Sightlines
5 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
Notice that no one wears anything different from anyone else. (staging)
All twelve performers, Byrne included, wear identical gray suits and bare feet, so there's no frontman, no backline, and status has to be read through attention instead of position.
Payoff: Nobody is anchored to a spot, so the whole company reads as one moving body rather than a star and his band. In the reading: Dividual. The reading calls this a dividual: a group that behaves as one feeling body without any single member standing apart from it.
Notice the stage has no cables, risers, or wings. (setting)
Everything is wireless and portable, and performers simply exit through a curtain of hanging metal chain on any side, so the stage never reads as a fixed set with a backstage.
Payoff: The bare box could be anywhere, which is exactly what lets anyone move through it in any direction. In the reading: Any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a space stripped of fixed coordinates, so any part of it can connect to any other.
Watch for a shot looking straight down at the floor. (camera)
Kuras occasionally cuts to a fixed overhead camera that turns Parson's choreography into pure pattern, bodies as lines and marks on a lit plane rather than individual dancers.
Payoff: From straight above, you stop being able to tell who's leading, or even which one is Byrne.
Listen for how much of the sound is drums. (sound)
The mix pushes a six-person percussion section to the front, rebuilding the arrangements around a hand-struck, marching rhythm that runs under nearly every song in the show.
Payoff: The beat isn't backing up the songs anymore. It's carrying them.
Count how many players join before the stage fills up. (structure)
The show opens with Byrne alone at a desk holding a model brain, and the other eleven performers walk on one or two at a time until the full company is assembled.
Payoff: The structure itself argues the point before a single monologue does: connection has to be built person by person.
Once you have seen it
Watch for photographs that don't belong to the stage show. (cutting)
During 'Hell You Talmbout,' Lee cuts in photographic portraits of the named dead, images that exist nowhere in the actual Broadway production, breaking his own rule of leaving the show untouched.
Payoff: This is the one moment the film stops just capturing the show and starts making an argument of its own. In the reading: Irrational cut / interstice. The reading calls this an irrational cut: an edit that connects nothing by continuity and lets the gap between two images do the work.
Notice how often the film cuts to the audience. (sound)
Where Demme's Stop Making Sense kept its audience almost entirely offscreen, Lee and Gough cut to the house repeatedly, sung to and eventually standing, because the show's subject is being among others.
Payoff: Showing you other people watching is the film's argument, made in editing rather than in a monologue.
Watch where the company ends up once the show is over. (staging)
The film's final image leaves the Hudson Theatre entirely, the whole cast riding bicycles through the city streets, a Byrne signature that argues the room's effect wasn't meant to stay in the room.
Payoff: The gesture says whatever got built onstage was always supposed to walk back out into the world with you.
Carry this in: Watch which player is looking at which, and how fast it changes. That's the real subject.