Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1953 · Howard Hawks · Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 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
Watch Monroe stand inside a field of solid pink. (light)
The Diamonds number places her against a hot-pink background with little sense of a real location, the color itself carrying the scene's mood.
Payoff: The pink stops describing a place and simply becomes the feeling of the scene. In the reading: affective colour (the colour-image). The reading calls this a colour-image: the pink stops being decoration and becomes the feeling of the whole scene.
Notice the two stars dressed in matching red at the start. (staging)
Lorelei and Dorothy open the film as a mirrored pair in identical red gowns, visually established as a unit before either man appears.
Payoff: The film sets up its two women as the real couple before any romance begins.
Watch Lorelei survey the dining room through her compact mirror. (camera)
She tilts the small mirror to scan the room behind her, narrating and appraising rivals under her breath.
Payoff: You watch her watching, and the scheming is happening entirely through her own eyes.
Watch the athletes ignore Dorothy while she looks them over. (staging)
In Ain't There Anyone Here for Love, a troupe of men decline to look at her while she openly looks her fill.
Payoff: The number simply reverses who usually gets to do the looking in a musical scene.
Watch how still Cole keeps Lorelei's body during the numbers. (performance)
Strong silhouettes and angular arms hold her relatively fixed while the chorus and camera do the moving around her.
Payoff: She stops driving the scene and becomes the point all its motion passes through. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: she stops driving the scene and becomes the point the motion passes through.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the pink field in Diamonds, then try to find one frame where she's not performing.