Why We Remember the Sunglasses in Our Favorite Movies
You can take the fighter jets out of a picture of Maverick and still know who he is. The jacket helps. So does the haircut. But put those aviators on Tom Cruise and suddenly there’s a good chance you can hear the opening music from Top Gun. It’s an impressive amount of work for something that takes up so little of the screen.
Movie sunglasses can give a character away before they’ve said a word. They can also make it harder to tell what a character is thinking. Those two things often happen in the same shot. You know exactly who you’re looking at, but you have to wait a little longer to figure out what they’re going to do.
Maverick looks like he belongs there
In Top Gun, Maverick arrives at the Navy’s fighter weapons school with plenty to prove. He has the skill to get there and a habit of pushing his luck once he does. The aviators suit that combination. They look at home on a pilot standing out in the sun, and they give Cruise a little extra cover when he wants to look like he has everything under control. The American Film Institute’s entry on Top Gun gives some background on the real flight school that inspired the film.
There’s also a reason the glasses are so easy to recognize in a still. The lenses slope down toward the cheeks, and the slim metal frame leaves plenty of Cruise’s face visible. You can still see the grin. A heavier frame would draw more attention to itself, especially beside the patches and the collar of the jacket. The aviators feel like part of what Maverick put on that morning.
What happens when a familiar frame changes jobs?
Cruise wears a very different shape in Risky Business. Joel’s dark Wayfarers have a thick rim and a straight line across the top. They make a teenager look a little more sure of himself than he has any right to be. That gap between how Joel looks and how much control he actually has is part of the joke. It’s hard to picture the aviators doing quite the same thing.
The Wayfarer shape has been around long enough that you can see it doing another job entirely. Among the iconic Ray-Ban frames with Meta AI, for instance, the Wayfarer still has the broad outline you can pick out in an old movie still, even with a camera built into the frame. That resemblance raises a fun question for a filmmaker. If someone in a scene is wearing camera glasses, do we first read the frames as part of their outfit, or do we start wondering what they’re watching? A detail that once helped hide a character’s reaction could now make us curious about everything they can see.
Sometimes the lenses are part of the shot
Look closely when Morpheus offers Neo a choice in The Matrix. The red and blue pills appear in the reflections on his round lenses. Neo has to decide which hand to reach for, and we can see both possibilities at once. Morpheus’s eyes stay hidden. For that brief stretch, his glasses show us exactly what Neo needs to look at while keeping his own reaction out of sight.
The frames have already done some work before that close shot. Morpheus wears tiny round lenses that seem to sit on his nose by themselves. They’re strange enough to make you look twice, even in a film where plenty of people wear dark glasses indoors. Neo’s look is different, and so is Trinity’s. You can pick them apart from a distance because each pair has its own outline.
The reflection is what makes that particular scene worth going back to. Without it, you could cut between the pills, Neo’s face and Morpheus’s hands and still understand the decision. Seeing the choice in the glasses makes the image feel tied to the person offering it. Years later, you might forget the exact words Morpheus uses and still remember where you saw the two colors.
A pair can change the mood of a scene
At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly steps out of a taxi in front of Tiffany’s with a pastry and coffee. The streets are unusually quiet. She’s dressed as though the evening is still going, though the light tells us otherwise. The big dark sunglasses belong to the outfit, but they also let her have a few minutes to herself as she looks through the window.
It would be a different scene if we could see her eyes clearly. We might spend those first moments trying to decide whether she looks tired or disappointed. With the glasses on, we notice what she does instead. She lingers in front of the window. She eats her breakfast. The little ritual tells us she’s been here before, or at least that she knows how she wants this moment to go.
There’s a small difference between watching Holly through the taxi window and watching her at the shop window. In the first, she’s on her way somewhere and we’re waiting to see where she’ll stop. In the second, we have time to look with her. The dark glasses make her gaze hard to read, but her feet tell us enough.
The next time a character puts on sunglasses
Watch what you look at once their eyes disappear. It might be a smile, as it often is with Maverick. It might be the shop window in front of Holly or the color reflected in Morpheus’s lenses. Sunglasses give the camera one less part of the face to work with, and that can make the other things in a shot easier to notice.
The reverse is just as interesting. Once a movie has let us get used to a face behind dark lenses, taking the glasses off can feel like a change in the conversation. Suddenly there’s a glance we can catch, or a pause that means more because we can see where the character is looking. That’s a lot to ask of a costume detail. Then again, some of the most recognizable faces in movies are the ones we’ve only been allowed to see in part.
