Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Risky Business
1983 · Paul Brickman · Risky Business 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
Watch the blue shadow in the big empty rooms. (light)
Villalobos strands warm lamps in fields of cold blue, blocks foregrounds with doorframes and furniture, and puts Joel deep in frame. A teen comedy would light this flat and bright.
Payoff: The house reads as empty rather than free. That coldness is why the film outlasted its imitators. In the reading: espace quelconque (any-space-whatever). The reading calls the house an any-space-whatever: a place emptied of its function that starts radiating a mood instead.
Notice how long the camera stays after a joke lands. (cutting)
Richard Chew came from The Conversation and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He lets scenes run past the laugh and holds on Cruise's face while the situation curdles.
Payoff: The comedy is timed by duration rather than by cutting. The joke is how long Joel has to sit in it.
Look at the objects Joel is told to protect. (setting)
The crystal egg, the stereo, the Porsche 928. Brickman stages Joel as caretaker of his parents' things rather than as somebody who lives in the house.
Payoff: Each object matters more to the family than the boy does. All of them turn out to convert into cash. In the reading: fetish (part-object). The reading calls these fetishes: small part-objects carrying a charge far out of scale with their size.
Watch Cruise perform confidence with nobody in the house. (performance)
The script gave that scene almost nothing. Cruise improvised the slide, the shirt, the socks. He plays a kid doing an impression of cool, and it stays legible as an impression.
Payoff: The swagger is borrowed from a record made before he was born. That is why the scene is funny and why it lasts.
Listen to the synthesizer patterns running under quiet scenes. (sound)
Tangerine Dream built the score from analog sequencer patterns. An arpeggio like that has no cadence, so it can run under a scene without building or resolving.
Payoff: The music refuses to tell you how to feel. It puts dread under the comedy and unease under the seduction.
Once you have seen it
Watch the Princeton interview happen during the party. (structure)
The admissions officer arrives on the brothel's opening night. The same behavior reads as delinquency and as business talent at once, and the film never separates the two.
Payoff: The satire closes here. Hustle and achievement are the same skill, and the school is shopping for it. In the reading: index of equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity: one act that fits two situations at once and stays ambiguous.
Watch the L-train scene in silhouette and passing light. (camera)
Brickman withholds the image and lets In the Air Tonight carry the encounter. Villalobos gives you outlines, window reflections, and the lights of Chicago going by.
Payoff: The sound does the work the picture refuses. That is the film's whole method in one scene.
Listen to the voiceover telling this in the past tense. (structure)
Joel narrates wryly from after the fact, so the film arrives already survived. Warner Bros. also replaced Brickman's darker finish, in which Joel does not get into Princeton, after test screenings.
Payoff: The version you watch rewards the boy the satire was aimed at. Both cuts are worth taking seriously.
Carry this in: Watch the room instead of the socks. Villalobos lights this suburb cold, and the film means the coldness.