Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In the Line of Fire
1993 · Wolfgang Petersen · In the Line of Fire 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 Horrigan scan a crowd for the one wrong detail. (camera)
John Bailey shoots the protection work on long lenses that flatten the throng and isolate faces. You are put inside the agent's eye, reading hands, coats, and angles along a rope line.
Payoff: Protection is a reading job. The film trains you to hunt for the detail that does not fit the pattern. In the reading: demark. The reading calls that odd detail a demark: the thing that breaks the habitual chain and forces you to interpret it.
Listen to Malkovich's voice before you get a clear face. (sound)
Leary arrives by telephone: calm, insinuating, close in the ear. The film gives him presence through the receiver long before it gives him a body to look at.
Payoff: A voice with no body attached is harder to guard against. That is the film's sharpest idea.
Listen for the piano theme and notice who is playing. (sound)
Morricone writes a jazz-tinged, melancholy piano line, and Horrigan plays piano off duty. The score and the character's own playing keep crossing, so you lose track of which one you hear.
Payoff: The music belongs to the man's regret rather than to the suspense. It scores his age more than the threat.
Count how often Eastwood is out of breath. (performance)
Horrigan is stung by jokes about his age and winded by stairs. Eastwood lets the camera register fatigue in the face instead of playing the unflappable professional he built a career on.
Payoff: The star is using his own iconography against himself. The question is whether an old man still has the speed.
Watch the film show you what the agents cannot see. (cutting)
Anne V. Coates cuts between the assassin's preparations and the detail trying to anticipate him. She holds each cut past the point a lesser editor would release it.
Payoff: You know more than everyone on screen. The tension comes from watching people work with less information. In the reading: relation-image / the mental-image. The reading puts you in the relation-image's position: the knowing third party who sees both sides of a contest at once.
Once you have seen it
Watch the hand on the rooftop edge. (staging)
Horrigan hangs over the drop with his hand locked around Leary's wrist. The man he is hunting is the only thing holding him up, and neither lets go for a long beat.
Payoff: Leary keeps saying they are the same. The grip makes that claim physical instead of rhetorical. In the reading: binomial. The reading calls this a binomial: two forces locked so tightly that each one defines what the other is.
Look at the photographs of Horrigan in Dallas. (setting)
The production used early digital compositing to place a younger Eastwood into Kennedy-era images, a year before Forrest Gump made the trick famous. He keeps returning to those pictures.
Payoff: A faked photograph carries the film's real wound. Leary forges pictures too, which is part of the pairing.
Watch Malkovich change names, faces, and voices. (performance)
Leary builds a new identity for every checkpoint: aliases, fabricated faces, a non-metallic pistol, even a faked photograph of himself with the president. Nothing about him holds still for long.
Payoff: He is frightening because he will not stay one person. Guarding him means guessing which self shows up.
Carry this in: Watch the crowd the way an agent does. This film is built out of what one man failed to see.