Djelloul Marbrook

Why is Rick saying, Here’s looking at you, Babe, in the 1942 film Casablanca so memorable? Is it because of Humphrey Bogart’s body language, the strange immobility of his mouth, the eternally noirish sound of his voice? Or is it something else, something in the words themselves? We don’t, after all, look at each other as if we really wanted to know something. Not often anyway. Not habitually. Ingrid Bergman, playing Ilsa, Rick’s long-lost love, knows perfectly well, as does the audience, that nobody is ever going to look at her like that again, not even Roberto Rossellini.

Being seen, really seen, is the issue in Randall Jarrell’s poem Next Day where a woman of a certain age in a supermarket wonders why the bag boy loading her car doesn’t see her. Jarrell understands, and he makes us understand, that looking is not seeing, making eye contact, which some of us find hard enough, is not seeing. He makes us understand looking directly at each other when speaking, as we’re instructed to do by people who fear sneakiness in others, is not the same as seeing each other.

What then is this phenomenon of seeing, once we carry the question beyond opthamology? It seems to be a lot easier for most of us to decide where to put our money than our eyes. When we read that the eyes are the window of the soul, we roll them. The insight seems metaphysical in the way the official church suppressed Gnosticism because it was arcane and couldn’t be popularized.

I address such questions this way: there is among us a rare species, perhaps not entirely terrestrial, whose eyes fall where they may and rest there easily. Finding members of this species is more rarified than growing hybrid roses or mushroom picking in strange woods.

There are glances, gazes, blinks, winks, tics, stares, daunts, blanks, glazes, averts, and every other kind of look. Google the sidelong glance and you’ll find rock groups, software, and much else. But rarely are we admitted to a regard perfectly untroubled by the exigencies of time or emotional baggage.

Be it blue, green, black, brown, amber, violet or gray, you are different in the kaleidoscope of those rods and cones than the moment before, and in a way you will never be the same again.

Society yearns to catch us looking and disapprove. When we’re caught looking society can project its unhealthier concerns on us. But there is a species, as I’ve suggested, that doesn’t give a damn about being caught looking, that looks to heal, to reassure, to affirm, to bless, and to inquire. To look and not to look away is rarer than the most exquisite mole in the most secret place, and to be seen, to be willing to be seen, is almost as rare.

The people of this species are demiurges; without them we are shades. In their light, the light of their eyes, we blanch or brighten, according to our wont. I live to encounter them. The darkness of our preoccupations is seeded with them, like a moonless sky, but the most stunning aspect of our being is how perversely we avoid them.

Sneaking looks at what we momentarily deem desirable in each other is merely flirting with the possibility that someday someone’s arresting look will transfigure us. On film others do this for us, relieve us of the burden and reenforce our comfortable conviction that such transfigurations don’t really take place in real life. If it’s true that films influence our lives in profound ways, it’s also true they relieve us of the job of living them.

I’m not talking about the hard stare in which the hidden room is padlocked. I’m talking about the palace doors swung open and the music heard inside.

Only rarely can we inhabit such a gaze—humanity pushes us along—but when it happens it gains admittance to our blood and does its secret work until long after we are dirt and ash.