Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Lovely Bones
2009 · Peter Jackson · The Lovely Bones 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 the color jump from autumn browns to supersaturated light. (light)
Lesnie shoots 1973 Pennsylvania in grainy naturalism, wood paneling and muted suburban tones. The in-between is pushed until the color stops belonging to any object in it.
Payoff: Color is how the film tells you which world you are in, and in the bright one it carries the feeling directly. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: color that stops describing objects and becomes the feeling of the scene.
Watch the camera hold still on earth and roam in the in-between. (camera)
In the Pennsylvania scenes Lesnie is patient and observational, staying on faces in wood-paneled rooms. In the afterlife the camera comes untethered and drifts with nothing to anchor it.
Payoff: The two registers are built into how the camera behaves, not only into what it photographs.
Watch how little Susie does while the landscape rearranges itself. (staging)
She mostly stands. Fields reorganize, gazebos appear, lakes freeze, and skies change color because she has changed. Everything she is barred from doing gets done by the terrain.
Payoff: A character who cannot act has her motion handed over to the world around her. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of the world: the figure goes still and the setting carries the motion instead.
Look for dollhouses, the ship in the bottle, and the sinkhole. (setting)
The film keeps returning to small enclosed things. Harvey builds dollhouses. Susie's father builds ships in bottles. A hole in the ground sits under the ordinary neighborhood.
Payoff: One motif links the man's craft, the girl's memory, and lives kept in containers. Track where each object turns up.
Watch how mild and tidy Tucci keeps the neighbor Harvey. (performance)
Tucci is cast against his usual warmth and plays fastidiousness rather than menace. He is polite, helpful, precise with his hands, and he never raises his voice.
Payoff: The danger is assembled out of ordinary manners, so you have to read behavior instead of waiting for a signal.
Once you have seen it
Watch how fully the afterlife is rendered, down to grass and skyline. (setting)
Weta builds the in-between at the same photoreal fidelity as Middle-earth: real light, real weather, real ground. Nothing about it is sketched or left as suggestion.
Payoff: A place that could not be anywhere gets acreage and a horizon, which is the decision the film is still argued over. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls death the absolute out-of-field: something that cannot sit anywhere in space. Here it is given a location.
Listen to Eno's score underneath the afterlife scenes. (sound)
Eno writes ambient washes instead of themes and cues, a break from the Howard Shore symphonics Jackson's other films are built on. The music suggests without illustrating.
Payoff: Try the in-between as sound. The score keeps arguing with pictures that are busy explaining the same thing.
Watch the cross-cutting while Lindsey searches the house. (cutting)
Olssen cuts between the girl inside and the man on his way back, sustaining dread through parallel action alone. It is the most controlled sequence in the film.
Payoff: Where the picture drops the metaphysics and runs plain suspense, the machinery works exactly as built.
Track how knowing Susie persists changes each scene of danger. (structure)
The afterlife frame promises from the start that she continues, which drains ordinary suspense from the crime, while the investigation and the grieving family keep reaching for it.
Payoff: The tonal seam everyone complains about sits here, between a film that has given up action and one still trying to use it.
Carry this in: Watch the containers. Dollhouses, a ship in a bottle, a hole in the ground, each holding something small.