Hollywood Spectacles: Time for More Heroes in Glasses?

If so, it was quite an achievement. Glasses wearers have been routinely portrayed as weak, goofy, or excessively brainy misfits in films since the beginning of Hollywood. Harold Lloyd was a struggling comedian, failing to get many laughs, until he started wearing his famous horn-rimmed frames. (There were no lenses in them, his eyesight was good). Glasses would emphasize Woody Allen’s nebbishness and undermine the heroic ambitions of his screen persona. They helped to signify Jeff Goldblum’s offbeat (but pretty cool) nerdiness in Jurassic Park, as well as Velma’s kooky cleverness in Scooby Doo. In Michael Caine’s breakthrough film, The Ipcress File, downtrodden spy Harry Palmer’s glasses are there to remind us he is nothing like his suave contemporary, James Bond. And let’s not forget Clark Kent – his specs helped to convince his colleagues that he couldn’t possibly be Superman.

As the 21st Century began, glasses-wearers got an onscreen boost from the wizarding heroics of Harry Potter, but spectacles were still reserved mainly for novelty heroes or dependable supporting characters, like America Ferrera in Ugly Betty or Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon in the Batman films. Encanto aside, Disney was content to let glasses underline the grumpiness of Up’s Carl Frederickson, the eccentricity of The Incredibles’ Edna Mode, and the energy-sapping frumpiness of Inside Out’s Sadness.

Lowri Moore is 13 now – she’s moved on from Disney. She recently launched the #GlassesOn campaign calling for an option to add glasses to emojis. She told the Unicode Consortium, which approves all new emojis, that the only glasses-wearing emoji she could find is a “nerd face.” It’s an admirable campaign – notwithstanding the argument that a lot of young people might not need glasses at all if they spend less time looking at their phones…

But I’d say Lowri still has a bit of work to do with the Hollywood execs. Director Guy Ritchie increased the number of bespectacled tough guys by quite a margin in 2019’s The Gentlemen, but there’s some way to go, for example, before we see Jason Statham sporting a pair of varifocals throughout an action movie, or Jennifer Lawrence bewitching a romantic suitor while constantly having to de-fog her prescription lenses. And as for the next James Bond – I doubt he’ll be putting on his readers before diffusing a bomb.