by ELISA GABBERT
On eye contact, staring, gazing, appraising, and looking at.
“Eye contact” is not as well-defined a concept as it seems. As a child, I had an idea that true eye contact required a perfect eye-to-eye lock: my right eye looking into the other’s left eye, my left eye looking into their right, and vice versa. This, of course, is impossible; you have to pick one eye, or a point somewhere near the eyes on the face, in order to focus your gaze. The paths might randomly cross, but they don’t meet and stop. When standing near someone at a party, or sitting on opposite sides of a desk, holding eye contact is tricky — not because of the intimacy, but because you have to move your eyes around to take in their whole face. Counterintuitively, the illusion is easier to maintain if the person you’re looking at is farther away.
I’ve noticed that people will look at me longer if I’m wearing sunglasses — with my eyes hidden, they forget I can see them looking. Is it still eye contact when something in between obscures the gaze? The sunglasses act like a one-way mirror — I know when we’re making eye contact, but the other person does not. If both parties are wearing sunglasses, the atmosphere becomes louche and permissive as a masked ball, and we can stare at each other all we like, since neither one of us is sure that the other is looking.
Los Angeles is a staring culture. People will sit down at the next table over in a restaurant and just look at you, like you’re the entertainment. This is assisted by the fact that almost everyone in LA wears sunglasses, but I think there’s more to it than that. It’s the sense that anyone you pass on the street might be famous, that anything at any moment might be caught on film, like we’re all in the background on reality TV. Also: Everyone wants to be famous — is waiting to be discovered — so they stare as a way of making sure you see them.
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