'Glasses business': Meryl Streep's one weird trick

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Photo / Supplied

In The Post, the 2017 film about The Washington Post's pursuit of the Pentagon Papers, Meryl Streep plays publisher Katharine Graham from behind an immense pair of spectacles. Streep is always putting on the glasses to read the newspaper or taking them off as she stops reading the newspaper. Or else she is dozing on her desk with the glasses draped wearily over an arm, or squinting while handling the temples of the glasses, or twirling the glasses absently in her lap. When I watched the movie, I leaned over to my companion and said: Half of Meryl Streep's acting is "glasses business."

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Photo / Supplied

I meant this as an insult. I did not like the movie, and I was taking it out on Meryl Streep. But in the years since, I have become attuned to Streep's seemingly boundless on-screen manipulation of eyewear. It's stunning how often our most celebrated movie actress has built her performances on one of the form's hackiest bits. I now follow this trend not with incredulity but with reverence. I've come to see a pair of glasses on Streep's face as a Chekhov's gun: At some point, you know they're coming off, and it's going to be fabulous.

Streep in The Post. Photo / Supplied

Eyeglass business represents a mishmash of cinematic tropes. Donning a pair of glasses functions as a blunt disguise (now Superman is bumbling reporter Clark Kent). Removing them reveals a hidden allure (now geeky Laney Boggs of She's All That is totally hot). The dramatic glasses pull is acting's least surprising expression of surprise. It's something you'd do if you existed in a fantastical genre world — as if you were the brainy Sunnydale High librarian confronted with supernatural activity emanating from a Hellmouth or else a preeminent palaeontologist seeing a genetically engineered brachiosaurus for the first time.

The glasses removal is such a worn gravitas signal that once, while pontificating at a Senate hearing, Orrin Hatch reflexively pantomimed removing a pair of glasses he had forgotten to actually wear. The most dedicated modern practitioner of glasses business is probably David Caruso, who, as forensics investigator Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami, spent a decade applying sunglasses to punctuate his crude puns about fresh corpses.

Streep is not intimidated by these cliches. Instead, she works fearlessly within them, revelling in their campiness one moment, then imbuing them with unexpected delicacy the next. She seems to understand that the glasses pull is so overworked partly because it is immensely satisfying to watch.

Streep in Adaptation. Photo / Supplied

In The Devil Wears Prada, in which Streep plays exacting magazine editor Miranda Priestly, hardly a scene goes by in which she does not indulge in glasses business, contemptuously fondling her ombre sunglasses as she vanishes into a limousine or ruthlessly lowering an angular pair of reading glasses to scrutinise her unpolished new hire, Andy Sachs.

Miranda is based on Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, who is rarely seen without sunglasses masking her eyes. The glasses, Wintour told CNN, are "incredibly useful because you avoid people knowing what you're thinking about." She added: "Maybe they've just become a crutch."

If Wintour uses glasses to obscure her inner life, Streep deploys them in reverse. She assuredly manipulates the glasses to accentuate Miranda's power, which is her discerning eye. (Her eye for fashion, which includes accessories, which include glasses).

Among the most powerful scenes of The Devil Wears Prada is when Andy discovers Miranda bleary-eyed in her hotel room, her face unexpectedly stripped of eyewear as she reels from the news that her husband has filed for divorce. Streep can fashion eyeglasses into a scrim, using them to withhold full access to her characters until she advances to a more intimate layer of the performance.

Streep in Big Little Lies. Photo / Supplied

She can play glasses subtly: In Adaptation, she portrays New Yorker writer Susan Orlean with an oval pair of wire frames, and the glasses business is only implied. As she lies in bed at a low moment, the glasses appear on her face in one shot and disappear in the next, suggesting a sudden de-escalation of mood. Or she can play glasses broadly: In She-Devil, she adjusts the bridge of her glasses with her middle finger.

There are moments in an actor's career when you get to watch as she ascends to a higher tier of performance. That came for me while watching Streep in Big Little Lies, in which she turns up in the second season as Mary Louise, the aggrieved mother-in-law of Celeste (Nicole Kidman). I was thrilled when Streep appeared, her eyes bulging behind a golden pair of cat-eyed frames. But then, in the second episode, she unexpectedly wields a new accessory. In a confrontation with Celeste's friend Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), Streep lifts the necklace she is wearing, suspends the chain tautly on her chin, and flicks at its tiny cross with her finger.

This is not a subtle move, and yet it is penetrating in its revelation of Mary Louise's bizarre character — a feral brand of sanctimony. It feels as if Streep is challenging herself to make increasingly broad theatrics seem gloriously peculiar. At this point in her career, why would she leave any prop unchewed?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Amanda Hess
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