Culture

SBS’s New Show ‘Look Me In The Eye’ Will Make You Ugly Cry

Grab the tissues!

by Matilda Dixon-Smith  8 September 2017
Look Me In The Eye

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It’s a bit of an odd concept for a TV show: two estranged loved ones come together, at the behest of TV behemoth Ray Martin, and stare silently at each other for a full five minutes. That’s it. That’s the show.

But, strangely, it works… it works really damn well. The first episode of SBS’s new series Look Me In The Eye premiered this week, and audiences were captivated by the experiment.

The Guardian has called the show “heartbreaking and unexpectedly mesmerising reality TV” and they’re bang on: the series shouldn’t be so engrossing, but it is.

Raw, real and highly emotional, Look Me In The Eye will make you ugly cry alone at home… which is exactly what I did when I watched the experiment play out between Kayleigh and her estranged father Peter in the series’ third episode. I was watching in preparation for my interview with Kayleigh, and when we connected via phone a few days later, I found that I was nervous. Watching Kayleigh try and reconnect with her father, who she hadn’t seen in person for 18 years, felt powerful, a little invasive and… intense.

“Intense is probably the only word you can use,” Kayleigh agrees, when I confess how affected I was by her episode. “There’s so much going on, so many emotions. And it’s funny that when you’re doing the whole “Look Me In The Eye” part, even though you’re surrounded by cameras, nothing seems to exist.”

Kayleigh, who hasn’t seen her father Peter in nearly two decades, engaged Ray Martin and the SBS crew to help her reconnect with him. Their painful past, marred by rumours that Kayleigh was not Peter’s biological child, had kept them at a great distance — until now. Kayleigh is engaged to her girlfriend and she wants Peter to walk her down the aisle. But first, they have to go through the Look Me In The Eye process.

“I was lead to believe — growing up — that he [Peter] didn’t think I was his daughter. So that’s what caused the lack of contact on my part, because my thinking had always been: why would you want to talk to someone who doesn’t believe you’re theirs?” Kayleigh explains.

“It was pretty scary when I did send through the application because I honestly thought that he would say no to doing the show. I honestly believed that he didn’t want to be part of it, because of what I’d been brought up believing. So it was a massive shock when I got the call saying he’d agreed to be a part of it.” 

Still, Kayleigh showed up at the Look Me In The Eye set, met with Martin, and hoped her father would show up to meet her.

 

The actual process of sharing five minutes of silent eye contact is one the show claims is recommended by neuroscientists, who believe direct eye contact can convey “much more than just words”. It might remind you of the performance art piece “One Minute of Silence”, created by artist Marina Abramovic, where she shares one minute of silent eye contact with visitors to the art gallery where her exhibition is installed. That exhibition yielded one very emotional (viral) result: when an old lover of Abramovic’s, who was estranged from her for 23 years, tracked her down at her MoMa retrospective and sat in the performance with her.

That emotional moment is very similar to what you’ll experience watching Look Me In The Eye, which could have been a cheap gimmick, but is handled with sensitivity and integrity by Martin and the SBS team. And though it’s a fairly radical method of reconnecting with a loved one, Kayleigh found the assistance of SBS quite cathartic.

“I kind of didn’t know how to deal with this on my own. I think the show sort of gave me a protective atmosphere in which I could reconnect with him. Because obviously you go through this process where you speak with psychologists and what not, so for me it was the protection of having the show and doing it this way.

“I think that’s what sort of pushed me to do it, it was just more protection in my mind.”

Understandably, a lot of the challenges for Kayleigh were motivated by fear. “The biggest fear is that if he would not follow up with anything. That he would just do the show as he’s meant to do and then he would just fall off the edge of the Earth. A big fear for me was rejection.” 

But for Kayleigh, the fear was tempered by her need for answers. “The biggest thing is getting to the truth — finding out why everything happened how it happened. I just wanted to have a dad.”

The experience of watching these people share eye contact is an emotional one, but of course it’s one thousand times more emotional for the real people involved in the experiment. “You can tell straight away,” she explains, “If the person wants to be able to talk to you.

“And a flicker of regret was the first emotion I saw from him… followed by this adoration. It’s the only word I can give; it was just, you could see the love. That’s when I knew that things were going to be okay.”

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Look Me In The Eye screens on SBS on Wednesdays at 8.30pm, or you can stream episodes via SBS OnDemand.

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Matilda Dixon-Smith is Junkee’s Staff Writer. She tweets at @mdixonsmith.