It’s a small thing, but close to my heart: glasses. Spectacles. Could all of us owl-eyed glasses-wearers just stand up for a moment to salute the wearing of the Brainy Specs?
Despite the fact that three-quarters of Americans wear corrective lenses, and the majority of those wear glasses instead of contacts, glasses are almost never featured in books or movies. Sure, specs aren’t very action-oriented--Indiana Jones didn’t want his glasses sliding down his nose while he was clinging to the edges of cliffs. Mainly, of course, glasses don’t photograph well. They reflect the light, and if they are actually functional, they distort the eyes and face behind them.
So, we generally see them only when they are trying to signal that a character is smart--like Dr. Indiana Jones in his university classroom or Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds. For a female character, this is not usually a good thing. Criminal Minds’s Penelope Garcia is supposed to be smart and quirky, so she gets cool glasses. Garcia is decidedly unglamorous, though, and normally female characters who even have glasses get them taken away as part of a makeover; we’re supposed to think they look a lot better without them. To go really old-school, the ultimate girl-with-glasses moment is in It’s a Wonderful Life, when George Bailey sees what would have become of his wife Mary if he hadn’t been there--she is shown wearing glasses and she’s a . . . librarian!
So, when the Doctor peers through his brainy specs, my little bespectacled self just cheers! He doesn’t even need them, says the Tenth Doctor in Time Crash; he just thinks they make him look smart. The Doctor wants to look smart--he wants to look like us, when hardly anyone else does--huzzah!
The only other highly authentic spectacle spectacle in books and film that comes to mind is someone who can be costumed simply with the addition of specs--Harry Potter. What is so great about Harry and his glasses, though, isn’t even that they are his signature look and have made the image of a glasses-wearing kid universal and heroic. It’s how real his use of them is. In the books and the movies, when Harry first wakes up, no matter if it’s dark, if it’s a crisis, if it’s just a normal day--he sits up grabbing for his glasses. If you need glasses, that is what you do--you need them both to manage at all in a practical sense and also to feel like yourself. Your glasses are part of you, and having Harry’s connection with them be so authentic is extremely gratifying.
The only other highly authentic spectacle spectacle in books and film that comes to mind is someone who can be costumed simply with the addition of specs--Harry Potter. What is so great about Harry and his glasses, though, isn’t even that they are his signature look and have made the image of a glasses-wearing kid universal and heroic. It’s how real his use of them is. In the books and the movies, when Harry first wakes up, no matter if it’s dark, if it’s a crisis, if it’s just a normal day--he sits up grabbing for his glasses. If you need glasses, that is what you do--you need them both to manage at all in a practical sense and also to feel like yourself. Your glasses are part of you, and having Harry’s connection with them be so authentic is extremely gratifying.
