Once a month, L’après-coup revisits a motif, an image, or a sequence of shots from one or more recent films. This month, the focus is on the blue and iridescent eyes in The Fabelmans and Disclosure Day. In The Fabelmans, young Sammy is delighted by an electric train his parents gave him for Hanukkah. The train runs at a frenetic pace on the tracks, and his fascination is visible in his eyes, illuminated by the miniature model. The train's whistling and smoke seem almost real. Director Steven Spielberg films this moment to highlight an awestruck gaze, revealing the entire personality of the character through the intensity of this look. However, this gaze also conveys fear, as the miniature train, filmed from a child’s eye level, evokes a more spectacular train from Sous le plus grand chapiteau du monde, which had previously disturbed Sammy during his first cinema experience. For Spielberg, the blue gaze often stems from a collision or trauma, a shocking image that reveals both beauty and underlying danger. The bright blue of the eye—the color of surprise and beauty—cannot mask the abyss that lies beneath. This blue color, inherently cold, carries a double meaning for the filmmaker. It can symbolize purity, like the ocean where bodies bathe carefree and innocent, but it also hints at a darker underside, a lurking danger beneath the surface. Spielberg is drawn to the eye only when it is suddenly confronted with an alarming reality that disturbs the character’s perception of the world. In Disclosure Day, this theme is explored explicitly through a scene that seems to come from an outdated fairy tale. Before focusing on the eyes of a child, Spielberg presents a deliberately supernatural world from his imagination. In this enchanted universe, young Margaret meets an imperial deer that leads her to an enigmatic house lost in a magical forest. As she lies on a glass bed, the cervid gently places its head against hers and looks into her wide open eyes. A camera movement links the blue gaze of the girl to the darker gaze of the animal, and a morphing reconfigures the texture of its face. The creature reveals its true extraterrestrial nature, showing that at the bottom of the eye lies the otherness, which is nothing other than reality—aliens do indeed exist here. These two mirrored gazes are then doubled by those of adult Margaret and Daniel, who watch this memory from the future, not without pain. The truth appears to them as a terrifying revelation. To look is one thing, but to see truly is another. The eyes that have seen—those of Margaret and adolescent Sammy—then become colored and iridescent, borrowing the amber hues of some stained glass adorning the facades of cathedrals. Sharp acuity and inner illumination become one, illustrating the profound connection between perception and reality in Spielberg’s cinematic vision.