(30:00)

The morning after the raid, as the strains of the last TV show fade, the homeless pick through Justiceville’s rubble. Nada crosses the street, walks into the now abandoned church and, in many ways, into another film, one in which he’ll switch from observer to active protagonist. So much fades, so quickly: farewell to the homeless and their horizontal encampment, with its overtones of the Western, its mess lines and campfires—the remainder of this film is to be played amid urbanites and their vertical buildings, those we’ve been regarding from a contemplative distance. A cut at 30:50 smashes Los Angeles’s geography: Nada rounds the corner of the church and emerges into the mouth of an alley in a downtown neighborhood. He won’t look back.

When Nada tries on the glasses, the ghouls become visible, desublimating the film’s subject, making an obvious revolution in his, and our, experience. Less obvious is the fact that Nada has abruptly become visible himself. Up to this point he’s slipped like Kurosawa’s Yojimbo past any official gaze: policemen and their helicopters seem not to register his comings and goings, and he’s made little more impression on the resistance leaders (ironically, the only one who “saw” him was the blind preacher). From here on, he’s legible to both camps.

Just one thing remains to heavily cue continuity, precisely at this half-hour mark, as Nada frisks the church to find the hidden crate of sunglasses, then migrates into a whole ’nuther mise-en-scène: Bum-bum-bum, waaah-wah!