Red and blue spectacles

My last post, "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," begins with a dream of mine that featured regular commenter Debbie. Debbie responded with an email giving her take on the meaning of her presence in the dream. I won't share the content of a personal email in any detail here, but she was reminded of a dream of her own which happened in March, which reminded her that my birthday is the Ides of March. Researching that led her to the 2011 movie The Ides of March, and she watched a review of it on YouTube, a link to which she included in her email. This is the thumbnail:

The review is from a rather obscure channel called PoliticalLens (210 subscribers), the logo of which is a pair of glasses with one red lens and one blue lens -- referencing red and blue as symbols of the two major political parties in the United States -- and the thumbnails for its movie reviews all show a movie poster with the colored glasses added.

The Ides of March is notable for the fact that the original movie poster already showed a face with one blue eye and one brown eye (brown being the closest non-albino humans get to having red eyes). The thumbnail puts the red lens over the blue eye and the blue lens over the brown one.

The reason for the eye color mismatch is that it's a composite face created by blue-eyed Ryan Gosling covering half of his face with a folded Time magazine with a photo of brown-eyed George Clooney on the cover. Gosling plays Stephen Myers, campaign manager for presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney). After uncovering a scandal, Myers turns against Morris. In terms of the symbolism implied by the title, Morris/Clooney is Caesar, and Myers/Gosling is Cassius.

Weirdly, the two characters have very similar surnames -- the same consonants in the same order -- and they have similar etymologies as well. Morris has two main etymologies can mean either "dark, swarthy, Moorish" or "of the marsh." Myers, in turn, can mean "physician," "mayor," or "marsh." The overlap is "marsh," and names with that meaning have been a major running theme here and previously on Bill's blogs.

(Ryan Gosling is a funny name etymologically, too. Ryan means "little king" and Gosling means "little god," the similarity to the English common noun gosling being coincidental.)

Debbie watched that video, and sent it to me, for reasons unrelated to glasses. However, the post that occasioned her email prominently features sunglasses and connects them to the seeric spectacles used by Joseph Smith. It's interesting that the two seer-stone-like objects that get mentioned from time to time on this blog are Bill's red "Rose Stone" and my "Blue-Green Crystal Ball." I also mentioned in the post that Joseph Smith's spectacles were later dubbed the Urim and Thummim -- the name of a pair of biblical objects that are usually depicted as two differently colored stones. Black and and white is the most common color scheme but certainly not the only one.