Glasses as the window to the soul

In an odd, but fascinating, installment of his Eye Weekly column, Guy Leshinski chats with optician Mel Rapp about the "psychology of eyewear" -- specifically, as it relates to comic books:

Glasses, Rapp argues, have a language of allusion all their own. Take, for instance, the round frames of Tintin's Professor Calculus. "Round frames are always, I think, suggestive of intelligence," Rapp says, a link established by the thinkers who've worn them -- Frank Lloyd Wright, Sigmund Freud, Gandhi -- and the frames' clever mimicry of our natural contours. "The roundness of the frame is parallel to the roundness of the eyeball." But there's another association: villainy. "If you look at documented, archival ghetto pictures of Jews in the 1930s, you will see a lot of Hasidic scholars wearing perfectly round frames," says Rapp. Through the lens of anti-Semitic propaganda, their specs became malignant. "It depends what you do with that shape. There's a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a Nazi is wearing small, round metal frames. He's got this laugh with a mixture of evil, and he's wearing the uniform, but it's the glasses that give credibility to his face as an evil monster. Not to put the round frame in the category of good or evil; it's just a device that is used. These are the stereotypes they're playing on."