Any Tom Dick or Harry (but particularly Shakespeare) will tell you that the eyes are the window to the soul. The number one go-to for immediate character assassination...or love, if you're that way inclined.
Horror flick victims never shut up about "the eyes, the horrible dead eyes", though to be fair I can't even look directly at a photo of Ted Bundy's eyes without suffering mild palpitations of terror, so fair play to them really.
Lovers too - films are littered with them, lightly drooling and gazing in to each others eyes like the winning Lottery numbers might be in there. Interrogation scenes are so overloaded with eyeballing it's a wonder the entire cast of CSI aren't horrendously bonk-eyed by now.
But one thing I'm sure is lurking in there - amongst all the black stuff I got all over Mrs Elgy in GCSE biology class - is sex appeal. As The Office USA so wisely exhumed: "The eyes are the groin of the head."
One hard look into Scarlett Johanssen's big old blues, and you just KNOW she got an A* in rumpy pumpy. She exudes it. And not just through her ample bosom, which I once strongly suspected could be her only medium of sexual communication. Even as a female, I can appreciate that Jessica Alba has the kind of eyes that make you want to take her to a hotel room, not for dinner at your parent's. And Megan Fox is practically the Medusa of arousal.
However, we can't ALL be wandering around giving off sexy vibes through our smizing eyes.
Case in point: Anne Hathaway. Hathaway is unquestionably beautiful. As Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Dairies, I am not ashamed to say she was my teenage hero (luckily my filmic tastes have ripened, like a good smelly Brie). But there is no escaping the fact that she has the eyes of a naïve, cowering Bambi.
So big, so dewey, so utterly devoid of sex appeal. And this, Christopher Nolan, is my overriding problem with your crazed decision to cast Hathaway as Selina Kyle.
Yes, Nolanites, protest all you will, call up Heath Ledger as reason for blind faith in Nolan's casting abilities, but you will not win me over. I'm in no hurry to forget that he also cast Katie Holmes in Batman Begins: a woman who is not only clinically insane for marrying a tiny man who believes tiny aliens run the world, but also one of the most uncharismatic actresses to ever grace our screens. I'm in no rush to forgive and forget that kind of behaviour (although Inception went some way in salving the wounds).
The Bambi effect is not necessarily a curse. It lends just the right amount of charming fragility to Burton's Snow Queen. It makes you want to found a Parkinson's charity as soon as the credits roll on Love and Other Drugs. But it does not make you want to pour her in to bad-gal leather and pop her a-top a purring motorbike. Kiera Knightly suffers the same affliction (see The Jacket for evidence of Bambi abuse), and while Zooey Deschanel may be the stuff indie boys dreams are made of, no amount of kook, quirk and doe-eye will equate to raw, rip-my-togs-off sex appeal.
No, my mind is made up. Batman forums internet-wide can discuss it 'til they're blue in the motherboard. Hathaway may be beautiful, she may be talented, she may still have a hallowed place in my heart...but I'd rather get my claws into Pfeiffer's Catwoman any day. Meeeeeeow.