Yes, Lena Dunham was naked on SNL. But Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, also set off a twitstorm during Saturday’s episode when he hit the stage wearing a pair of wire-frame eyeglasses that were described on Twitter as “rapist glasses,” “70s pedophile glasses,” and “80s dad glasses” — and made him look either like Liev Schreiber or Walter White.
Berninger’s eyewear has been a topic of conversation over the years: Redditors tried their damnedest to figure out the make and model of the clear-frame glasses he sported for a while, until he finally ID’d them to GQ, saying, “I got clear frames, and I then noticed a lot of older men wear these. Maybe I should get something hipper. My wife is not crazy about them.”
So was he wearing something hipper on SNL? Nope — in fact he descended into full-on normcore, with Twitter users comparing him to a math teacher, a 75-year-old and their dads. But here’s the thing: in a backstage photo snapped by Takka Takka drummer Conrad Doucette, who also sits in with The National, Berninger is wearing different glasses! Hipper glasses!
On Facebook, someone asked Doucette about the discrepancy but got no response. We can only guess that Berninger was wearing stunt glasses in case he decided to climb into the rafters or something (the wild man once told Rolling Stone that he received multiple eyewear injuries while filming the video for “Graceless”). Who knows. Let’s hope the forthcoming National documentary answers it.
Anyway, all of the tweeters below can rest easy that this might not be his new look.
