Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Boyhood
2014 · Richard Linklater · Boyhood 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
Count how many seconds pass before you notice Mason aged. (cutting)
Adair joins twelve separate shoots with hard cuts. No year cards, no dissolves, no time-lapse. A scene is already running before a haircut or a deeper voice tells you a year is gone.
Payoff: The delay is the invention. You feel elapsed time the way memory delivers it, late. In the reading: weak links / elliptical linkage. These loose joins are what the reading calls weak links: scenes connected by gaps rather than by cause and effect.
Listen for pop songs marking the year, starting with Coldplay's "Yellow". (sound)
There is no original score. Every cue is source music placed by its release year, from Britney Spears through Soulja Boy to Arcade Fire. Nothing swells to tell you a moment is important.
Payoff: Without a composer pointing, you decide for yourself which ordinary moments matter.
Notice how rarely Linklater cuts to a close-up of anyone. (camera)
Daniel and Kelly hold medium-wide 1.85:1 frames in naturally motivated light, the camera walking alongside people rather than pressing in. The look never shifts to mark 2004 from 2010.
Payoff: With style held flat, the only thing visibly changing is the faces.
Watch the dishes, homework and packing boxes running under the dialogue. (staging)
Scenes play out on foot and in cars, with talk overlapping and household business continuing underneath. Traffic, wind and offscreen kids compete with the voices in the mix.
Payoff: The film stores a life in stretches where nothing advances, which the reading calls dead time. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). These unadvancing stretches are dead time, and the reading argues a childhood is only stored there.
Track the gadgets: a Game Boy, a boxy monitor, a Wii, phones. (setting)
No title tells you the year, so consumer devices do it. MySpace gives way to Facebook, an Xbox appears, then the reflexive phone photograph. An Iraq deployment and a 2008 yard sign arrive the same way.
Payoff: The world keeps moving around a boy who mostly watches it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the joins between years. Time how long it takes you to notice the boy has changed.