[il-talk] Article about "Blindness"

[Deborah Kent Stein]

I just came across this fine piece about the movie "Blindness" in Breath and 
Shadow, an online journal  of writing about disability.

_______

The Indignity of Blindness By Chris Kuell

I had a lively debate with my sixteen-year-old son a few days ago. We were 
discussing the movie Blindness, which opened on October 3, and is based on 
the
novel written by Portuguese author José Saramago. Like most teenage males, 
my son thought the previews looked great, with glimpses of epidemic, chaos,
violence and horror. I'm familiar with this type of movie's appeal, as I saw 
I Am Legend and 28 Days with him-both films about the human struggle to 
overcome
an unknown virus which turns people into raging, zombiesque creatures. 
Saramago's twist is that people become blind and are segregated, which he 
postulates
will naturally lead to societal devolution.

The story begins with a man waiting at a red light. Suddenly and without 
cause, he goes blind. A good Samaritan helps him home, and he too becomes 
blind.
The first blind man sees an ophthalmologist, who goes blind, and so on. The 
only person to escape the plight of blindness is the doctor's wife, who 
fakes
being blind so she can stay with her husband when all blind people are 
rounded up and confined in an abandoned asylum.

I understand the allegorical nature of the book/film--how if you pull out 
one of the supportive beams of a society, it will quickly 
crumble--Basically,
a variation on William Golding's classic novel, The Lord of the Flies.

Saramago's choice of blindness as his epidemic was in no way random. After 
all, blindness is fairly rare, highly misunderstood, and feared by every 
sighted
person. It is impossible to imagine what blindness is like, so it is easy to 
believe it's horrible. To envision that without sighted people to help them,
blind people would quickly devolve into animals who defecate where they 
sleep, steal and rape and lose their humanity. A quote from the book is 
illustrative:
"It was too funny for words, some of the blind on their knees advancing on 
all fours, their faces practically touching the ground as if they were 
pigs."

Society, full of misconceptions and false impressions of blindness, easily 
swallows this. Short of zombies, nobody could believe such degradation could
come from anyone else except maybe the mentally retarded or people with 
psychological problems, and of course, nobody would dare portray those 
groups in
such an ugly light.

So why is it okay to portray blind people this way? The truth is, the 
average blind person can do the average job as well as the average sighted 
person.
I can sense the disbelief, as most readers have bought into the myths of Mr. 
Magoo and their own subconscious fears--as I once did. That's why 
able-bodied
blind people have a greater than 70% unemployment rate. That's why blind 
people with masters degrees wind up bagging groceries if they can find a job 
at
all, because the sighted public just can't believe they can do much more. 
That's why people talk to them as if they are slow, or ask the sighted 
person
they are with what they want to eat, or ask if they'd like someone to cut up 
their food for them, or if they need help in the bathroom. You can't imagine
how degrading it is to be pulled by the arm like a child or a dog, or told 
you can't ride the roller coaster because you might get hurt, but a 
10-year-old
can ride all she wants.

Of course, no film/novel like this is complete without somebody to save the 
day. Chaos can't win, the human spirit must prevail, and Saramago's savior,
the only person who can possibly lead the blind animals from the madness is 
of course, the doctor's sighted wife. After she leads her grateful followers
out into the filth of the city, there comes a cleansing rain, and just as 
suddenly as the blindness came, sight is returned. Hope is renewed.

The truth is, many blind people live alone, or together, without the 
guidance of a sighted savior. They travel independently, to cities and 
places they've
never been, and do just fine. They cook and clean and work and play and 
love--all without sighted help.

Films like this feed into society's fears and misconceptions, and are highly 
offensive and damaging to blind people. How would the public react if the 
victims
were women, suddenly struck by breast cancer? Or Caucasians, suddenly having 
their skin darkened, followed by isolation and inevitable social collapse?
There would be outrage.

Saramago's novel has literary merit, and those who have made it through the 
difficult prose (he doesn't use quotation marks or much punctuation, and one
sentence I found was 128 words long) might think it brilliant. People prone 
to ignorance aren't very likely to make it through such a difficult read. 
However,
the film adaptation is being promoted as a horror flick, available to anyone 
with 2 hours and ten bucks to spare. I'm guessing the audience will largely
consist of impressionable teenagers who will soak up the inaccurate 
portrayal of blindness and leave it to fester in their subconscious. Then 
one day when
a blind person comes looking for a job, it will surface, and that blind 
person won't stand a chance.

I know-I am that blind person.

Postscript: My son and his friends never went to see Blindness. It was 
pulled from our local movie theatre less than three weeks after its release. 
According
to my research, the movie has regained only about a third of what it cost to 
make it.

Budget estimate: $25,000,000 (www.imdb.com)
Worldwide Gross, as of November 7, 2008:
$8,683,577(www.the-numbers.com/movies/2008)

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Chris Kuell is a blind writer and advocate living in Connecticut. He is the 
Editor-in-Chief of Breath and Shadow. A version of this essay appeared 
previously
in The New Haven Register.