"The Framing Of Meryl Streep"

by Amanda Hess 

[Actors use props in many different ways, the first, but not most important, of which is as an object to use on set.  My father, who wasn’t an actor or any kind of theater professional, used to remark, for instance, on how useful a pipe is.  Dad was a longtime pipe-smoker.  For example, he observed, lawyers found smoking a pipe very handy when they’re asked a question they need time to consider before answering.

[There’s always something a pipe-smoker needs to do.  Pipes often need relighting.  They have to be packed with tobacco when they need refilling.  Pipes have to be reamed out after they’ve been used, and the bowl often needs to be scraped free of accumulated charring.  If nothing else, a smoker can always pause just to take a puff or two.  A few seconds is all someone needs sometimes.

[An actor can find all kinds of ways to use a few seconds of silence to communicate a thought or an idea to the audience.  Creative use of props, like Dad’s imaginary lawyer tamping his pipe tobacco, is a useful skill.  In her article below, from the New York Times’ “Arts” section of 25 July 2022, Amanda Hess examines some of the ways Meryl Streep, arguably one of our most talented and inventive actors, uses eyeglasses.  Hess’s article is part of “Pattern Recognition,” a series that looks at the building blocks of culture.] 

The dramatic use of eyeglasses is a cinematic cliché. On Streep, it’s a revelation.

In “The Post,” the 2017 film about The Washington Post’s pursuit of the Pentagon Papers, Meryl Streep plays the 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.”

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 onscreen 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.

Eyeglass business represents a mishmash of cinematic tropes. Donning a pair of glasses functions as a blunt disguise (now Superman is the 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 – like if you were the brainy Sunnydale High librarian confronted with supernatural activity emanating from a Hellmouth, or else a pre-eminent paleontologist seeing a genetically engineered brachiosaurus for the first time. 

[The references at the end of the paragraph above are to, first, the character of Rupert Giles (Anthony Head) in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), and, second, the character Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) in the movie Jurassic Park (1993).  ~Rick]

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 the 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 clichés. Instead she works fearlessly within them, reveling 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.

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

Miranda is based on Anna Wintour, the 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.

She can play glasses subtly: In “Adaptation,” she portrays the 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,” where 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?

[Amanda Hess is a critic-at-large for the New York Times and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine.  She has also written for magazines including Wired, ESPN, and Elle.]