“Strangers on a Train,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film, highlights the perspective and gaze of an inanimate object through the recurring image of glasses, both broken and not. From early in the film, glasses are associated with Miriam, Guy Haines’s wife. She sees the world through this additional lens; because glasses only reveal one section of your surrounding world at a time, there is always something in her peripheral that she is missing. When Bruno coldly murders Miriam, he chooses to take her glasses as evidence and a souvenir, but not before the glasses, laying on the ground, reflect every moment of the murder. They do this without a face behind them as if the glasses have a gaze of their own that witnessed the murder. Hitchcock’s choice to depict the murder through a reflection instead of prom that of Bruno gave the audience an unbiased perspective. Considering Bruno thought no one could see him, the glasses also act as a hidden gaze, spying on a private scenario. After her death, Miriam’s glasses are shattered. She can no longer see her version of the world, and the glasses that observed her death are broken, so anything they saw has also disappeared.

Soon after, however, we are introduced to Barbara, Anne Morton’s younger sister, who wears glasses very similar to Miriam’s. Bruno makes this connection too, as he is captivated by the glasses every time he sees Barbara and expresses fear toward them. In his mind, they are the only thing that knows exactly what harm he has done, and they are living on with that story when Barbara wears them. The glasses are personified to be another character in the film: one, like the audience, who sees everything that happens but physically cannot speak the truth to anyone.