Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Superbad
2007 · Greg Mottola · Superbad on Sightlines
4 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
Watch Seth and Evan walk side by side, talking. (staging)
Mottola returns again and again to this mobile two-shot: the boys moving through streets, hallways, and parking lots, always next to each other.
Payoff: This walking-and-talking shot is the film's real subject: the friendship, not the party they're chasing.
Notice Cera's quiet apology against Hill's loud bravado. (performance)
Cera plays Evan recessive and hesitant while Hill plays Seth loud and profane; the film keeps setting these two registers against each other in the same frame.
Payoff: Both styles are cover: the film slowly reveals bravado and shyness as two ways of hiding the same fear.
Listen for the 1970s funk and soul score. (sound)
Lyle Workman's period cues, played by veteran funk musicians, keep entering scenes set in an obviously present-day suburb.
Payoff: The mismatch between old-sounding music and new-looking kids underlines how badly they're faking cool they don't feel.
Notice how ordinary the houses, school, and stores look. (setting)
Generic suburban homes, fluorescent hallways, and a plain supermarket recur as the backdrop for every escalating disaster of the night.
Payoff: The banal setting makes each absurd turn feel like it could happen to anyone, not just movie characters.
Once you have seen it
Track how the three strands converge by the party. (structure)
Seth and Evan's odyssey, McLovin's night with the cops, and the ticking party clock run separately for most of the film, then editor William Kerr braids them into one location.
Payoff: Seeing the seams shows how much of the comic machinery was built just to land the boys together at the end.
Watch the nighttime confession scene between Seth and Evan. (performance)
After a night of crude jokes and near-misses, the film stops the comedy cold for a direct, sincere exchange between the two friends.
Payoff: The scene retroactively reframes every earlier gag about sex and status as a way of avoiding this one conversation.
Notice how the cops behave like teenagers themselves. (performance)
Rogen and Hader play the two officers with the same recklessness and arrested judgment as the boys they're supposed to be policing.
Payoff: The adults mirroring the teenagers suggests the night's anxieties never really get outgrown, only postponed.
Carry this in: Watch the space between Seth and Evan; the party is the excuse, the friendship is the plot.