Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Shame
2011 · Steve McQueen · Shame 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 how long Bobbitt lets a shot run before cutting. (camera)
The date in the restaurant plays out in one sustained two-shot. No reaction cuts, no rescue. The social discomfort builds because the film will not release you from the table.
Payoff: Duration becomes pressure. You feel the length of a bad moment the way the people sitting inside it do. In the reading: temps mort. The reading calls this dead time: ordinary minutes held past the point where most films would cut away and spare you.
Look at Brandon's apartment and how little is in it. (staging)
The surfaces are bare, ordered, expensive. McQueen stages the city the same way, in glass offices, hotel corridors, subway cars. Then Sissy leaves her clothes, her noise, and her body all through it.
Payoff: The emptiness is a defense rather than a taste. Watching her clutter arrive tells you what it costs him. In the reading: derived-milieu. The reading calls this a derived milieu: a polished social surface that is only skin over the drives running underneath it.
Watch the long unbroken take of Brandon running at night. (camera)
Sean Bobbitt glides alongside him for blocks without a cut. There is no destination and nobody chasing him. The camera simply refuses to let him out of frame.
Payoff: Compulsion turns into pure motion here. The shot will not end, which is the closest the film comes to explaining him.
Watch Fassbender's face in the seconds after sex. (performance)
He is charming and composed in company, then goes blank or faintly disgusted alone. Everything registers in small adjustments: the jaw, the breath, the way he holds his shoulders with nobody watching.
Payoff: Pleasure is being played as labor. Once you see that, every encounter in the film reads differently.
Notice the color: blues, grays, sodium orange after dark. (light)
Bobbitt shot on available and practical light, so the New York interiors stay cool and faintly clinical. Warmth shows up rarely and never lasts, not even in the bars and clubs.
Payoff: The palette keeps the film from getting aroused by what it looks at. You observe rather than indulge.
Once you have seen it
Listen to Sissy's slowed New York, New York and watch Brandon. (sound)
Mulligan sings nearly a cappella, dragged to a crawl, held in close-up past comfort. McQueen cuts to Fassbender's face and the song becomes something between them that neither one will say.
Payoff: A song about arriving in the city turns into a confession, and it is the closest the film comes to naming their history. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture or performance that exposes a whole buried relation without anybody stating it.
Watch the last subway ride against the first one. (structure)
The film returns to the encounter it opened with, staged almost identically, the same geometry of glances. Nothing in the dialogue tells you what Brandon decides this time.
Payoff: The loop is the argument. The film refuses to say whether anything changed, and the repetition is what makes that question land.
Track the point where Joe Walker's cutting starts to accelerate. (cutting)
For most of the film the shots run long and patient. In the last stretch the assembly tightens into agitation as Brandon's night keeps going through bars, refusals, and rooms he does not want to be in.
Payoff: The editing follows a gradient that runs one way only. You feel the slide before the story gets around to naming it.
Carry this in: Watch how long each shot is allowed to run. McQueen makes you sit inside the moment Brandon is trying to outrun.