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.
Once you have seen it
Watch Piggy's diamond fascination read two different ways at once. (structure)
Her charm toward the rich, diamond-owning old man could be read as either enthusiasm or calculation, and the evidence supports both equally.
Payoff: The same gesture proves whatever the person watching it already wants to believe. In the reading: index of equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity: one gesture belonging to two situations at once, which is the joke and the plot.
Watch Lorelei's breathy delivery next to what she actually says. (performance)
Her lines about marriage and diamonds land as both innocent and calculating at once, the timing never letting you settle on just one.
Payoff: The timing never lets you settle on just one true version of her.
Watch the detective's report never actually produce any evidence. (structure)
Ernie Malone is hired specifically to catch Lorelei doing something disqualifying, and the surveillance turns up nothing that sticks by the end.
Payoff: The apparatus built to expose her produces nothing, which is the film's real verdict on the men running it.
Watch the wedding happen exactly as Lorelei said it would. (staging)
Her stated plan from the start of the film plays out precisely as she described it, without her ever having to hide what she wanted.
Payoff: Her honesty about wanting money turns out to be the most accurate account anyone gives.
Carry this in: Watch the pink field in Diamonds, then try to find one frame where she's not performing.