- A Single Man — Christopher Isherwood, 1964
A middle-aged professor moves through a day in which he is, by turns, looked through and looked past. Isherwood is precise about what it feels like to become scenery in your own life, and how a person can be everywhere in a room and still register on no one.
- All About Eve — Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950
Margo Channing watches the spotlight slide off her and onto someone younger, more usable, more new. The film is honest about how brutally attention is reallocated, and how the loss of it is also, eventually, a kind of freedom to be ungoverned by it.
- Carrie & Lowell — Sufjan Stevens, 2015
Songs about people who are barely there: a mother who came and went, a stepfather quietly present in the background. Stevens makes a kind of music for the people who do not get watched, and finds something tender in the unobserved life.