How sick is it to drop an Alexander Skarsgård gay BDSM movie when the girls-and-gays population has already been enfeebled by Heated Rivalry? In Pillion, the new A24 “dom-com” directed by Harry Lighton, Skarsgård plays Ray, biker-gang leader and inscrutable top to the film’s shy bottom, Colin (Harry Melling, a.k.a. Dudley Dursley in the original Harry Potter movies). The film gives us shameless permission to ogle at the six-foot-four actor in all of his chiseled glory. But for all the assless wrestling singlets and bicep-hugging leather jackets he wears, there is one Pillion accessory that will leave you deeply, irrevocably horny: his reading glasses.
As Ray, Skarsgård occasionally wears metal-rimmed oval spectacles you would traditionally associate with aughts computer programmers and other species of geek. On him, they magnify the smoldering gaze of a Nordic hunk whose good looks have been immortalized in a Taylor Swift song. It’s one thing to see Skarsgård speeding down a rural British highway on a motorcycle he polished by hand. But to see him curled up with the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in these slutty little glasses? Lord have mercy!
“Slutty little glasses” — canonized last year by critic Blakely Thornton in a lusty encomium to Jonathan Bailey’s Jurassic World Rebirth spectacles — are one of the most lethal weapons in romantic warfare. Though some consider the term unique to Bailey’s type of small wire spectacles, to me, it’s not about frame style but spiritual juxtaposition. For the glasses to become truly slutty, they must be worn by a conventionally hot person who then becomes not just beautiful but refined and enigmatic. Time and time again onscreen, lovers are driven mad by sirens in eyewear that hint at some unknowable aspect of their psyche — elusive characters like Alice (Nicole Kidman) in Eyes Wide Shut, Eugene (Drew Starkey) in Queer, and Shane (Katherine Moennig) in the L-Word. The glasses make you think, That’s not the emotional terrorist who left me on read for six months; that is my Shayla.
In Pillion, Skarsgård’s Ray is impenetrable by design. More an idea than a person, he conducts his relationship with Colin on strict terms. Colin wears a padlock while Ray wears its key as a necklace; he sleeps on the floor, cooks for Ray, and otherwise yields to his commands. Ray makes it abundantly clear that he has no plans to open up to Colin or share the type of intimate relationship that would allow for lazy weekend mornings of crosswords and coffee. And then, about halfway through the movie, we get a glimpse of him reading on the couch in these delicate glasses — a faint disruption of his tough-guy façade. Pillion’s costume designer Grace Snell, who took the glasses from her personal stash, described them in a Wallpaper interview as “an imperfection to this perfect man.” They tease a tantalizing sensitivity in him, a complex inner life that Colin — and, by extension, we — will tragically never know.
Perhaps spurred to action by this seductive glimpse of Ray living the soft life, Colin eventually drums up the courage to ask his dom for an occasional day off from their emotionally closed-off dynamic. The result is, let’s just say, a reminder that glasses do not an emotionally sensitive man make. Perhaps one big lesson to take from Pillion is this: If you see Rob Rausch at Warby Parker, run.
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