The Sightless Movie Experiment: Risky Business

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 2, 2011 5:30PM

Would watching a movie without the picture be as engaging as watching it the standard way? Could watching a movie "blind," so to speak, possibly be even more rewarding? For our experiment we chose Risky Business, a movie totally new to us. We popped it in our DVD player and turned off the picture on our TV. So what was it like?

Risky Business has been ripped off so frequently that, suffice it to say, we had no troubles following the story. Joel (Tom Cruise) is a high school senior in Glencoe, studying hard to get into Princeton. He figures that by playing it safe his future success will be assured. But his annoying "best friend" Miles, a Iago-like figure, has some other advice: just say "What the fuck?" When Joel's parents leave town on an extended trip, Joel does exactly that, getting mixed up with an ambitious prostitute named Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) and even turning his parents' house into a makeshift bordello. Things quickly spiral out of control. Can Joel pull things together in time for his parents' return?

As we said, this is not a hard film to follow, even with the picture turned off. In fact the film is regularly peppered with voiceover which explains what just happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It first appears at the very beginning of the film, when Joel describes his recurring dream. Some train sounds, heavy breathing, chilly synth music, and Joel tells us exactly what's going on. The same synth music pops up again later in the film. It's the perfect sound cue to let us know that another dream sequence is unfolding.

It also helps that, being such a classic film, a great deal of care was obviously taken to remaster the soundtrack for DVD--it’s a 5.1 mix, and music, dialog, and sound effects are all clear and well-balanced. In the film's most famous scene, we hear Joel pour himself a drink, add some soda of some kind (creating a rum and Coke perhaps?) and then crank up Bob Seger. Risky Business likes to follow up a wordless musical montage with either a voiceover or a dialog scene of some kind which talks about what just happened. When Lana declares, "Let's make love on a real train," and we suddenly hear the sound of the "L" mixed with a Phil Collins song, there's not much room for confusion.

Getting back to Phil Collins. Just paying attention to the music on the soundtrack is enough to tell you exactly when a sex scene is taking place. Interestingly there seemed to be very little lip smacking/making out sounds involved. Are these sex scenes nothing more than typical, music video-style montages? There seemed to be a great many montages--a “pop quiz/lab reports/term papers due” montage, a “stoned at the ice cream shop” montage, a “riding around while depressed and looking for Lana” montage. It just goes to show how the conventions of movie structure can help you follow what’s going on even when you aren’t looking.

One disappointment: aside from some perfunctory bits of dialog involving Glencoe and Lake Michigan, and the aforementioned "L" sounds, there's very little Chicago atmosphere at all. We're hoping that when we re-watch the movie the standard way, with both picture and sound, there'll be some location shooting on display. Check back next week when we'll offer up our reactions to finally getting the whole picture.