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 at the dollhouses and the ship in the bottle. (setting)
The film keeps returning to small enclosed things. Harvey builds dollhouses. Susie's father builds ships in bottles.
Payoff: One motif links the man's craft and the girl's memory. 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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the containers. Dollhouses and a ship in a bottle, each holding something small.