Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Licorice Pizza
2021 · Paul Thomas Anderson · Licorice Pizza 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
Notice the long lens holding Gary and Alana at a slight remove. (camera)
Bauman's handheld telephoto work follows the pair in motion rather than composing them in static frames, so the film feels observed, not arranged.
Payoff: The camera's distance mimics how you learn people by watching them move, not by hearing them declare themselves.
Count how many separate ventures Gary starts across the film. (structure)
Acting agency, pinball machines, waterbeds, a producer's tantrum, a gas-station scramble: each absorbs the film fully, then drops away with no throughline.
Payoff: This is the picaresque: life as a sequence of vivid incidents instead of one goal being chased.
Listen for a song entering before you can tell its source. (sound)
Bowie or a period pop record erupts, bleeding from a car radio into ambient space until score and soundtrack blur together.
Payoff: Music becomes the texture of the world itself, not commentary laid over it.
Watch how Hoffman walks into and commands every room he enters. (performance)
His posture and ease carry an audacity his fifteen-year-old schemes shouldn't support; Haim's bearing keeps sliding between exasperation and longing.
Payoff: Neither actor performs a plan; they inhabit a body, and that body tells you the story.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how the camera follows Gary and Alana in motion. The wanting between them is the film's subject.