9 March

The eyes are said to the be the window to the soul. And it's true that many of a person's feelings, emotions and even thoughts can be directly or indirectly read from their eyes and their surrounds. And that making eye contact with a person profoundly changes your relationship with them. But the eye itself - it doesn't matter how long you look AT it, it won't give you access to anything. We maybe feel the person we know is somehow 'behind' those eyes, but you can stare at the eye itself for as long as you like, and you won't catch a glimpse of anything except eye. It can actually be quite unsettling - we place so much of the character of the people we know and meet within their eyes - it can be a shock to see the cold emptiness of the eye itself, if you dwell on it. Like Hal's red dot in 2001, Kubrick was a genius to play on this cold emptiness of the eye, in portraying HAL.