[Ohio-talk] Blindness portrayed on TV

[Deborah Kendrick]

Kaiti, 
This class sounds like so much fun!  Makes me wish I was in college again!  
As for the rain scene you reference, the writers stole that from a memoir by
John Hull, or maybe it's Jonathan Hull, called To Touch the Rock or perhaps
Touching the Rock.  The Hull book is mostly an intelligently written albeit
maudlin view of boing blind, but the rain scene is rather brilliant and has
been stolen by ore than one writer!

It's really very lovely in his book, one of the more positive points,
illustrating how we can see things by using adaptive techniques  
As for the whole super hero arena, well, I personally would rather have J.
Q. Public falling for cheesy notions that we have super powers than his or
her buying into the opposite perspective, i.e., that we are ehlpless,
hopeless, and unaware.  
Deborah

-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio-talk [mailto:ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Kaiti
Shelton via Ohio-talk
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 10:05 AM
To: NFB of Ohio Announcement and Discussion List
Subject: [Ohio-talk] Blindness portrayed on TV

Hi all,

I'm taking a superheros and Villains in Society themed English 200 class,
and am really enjoying it.  Right now we're wrapping up our first reading
assignment, the Marvel graphic novel Watchmen.  As you might imagine,
figuring out how I'm going to access comic books and graphic novels for my
class has been interesting, so for me my professor is weaving film study
into the papers I will write so I can hear the dialog, descriptions when
using described movies, etc.

Our next paper is about diversity in superhero fiction, and we're allowed to
pick any minority superhero to analyze and write about.
The class is going to read a new comic called The Silver Scorpian, which is
about a middle eastern, muslum boy who becomes wheelchair-bound after
getting caught in a bombing.  Though I would love to look at the
anthropological and sociological aspects of a superhero who is diverse
ethnically, religiously, and in disability, I can't do it.  Since its so
new, there are no movie adaptations I can turn to, so I'm going to write
about Dare Devil.  In my research for the movie, I stumbled upon something
which said a series based on the comic will be released to Netflix in May
2015 as a complete series to encourage binge watching.

I don't really know how to feel about this.  I kind of like Dare Devil in a
Gregory House kind of way because their moral compasses seem similarly
skewed, but Marvel has failed to update the character at all.  I understand
that he's a superhero and is supposed to have special powers, but the whole
sonar hearing thing is a bit much from a blindness perspective.  I guess we
could say at least Merdock is competent; he's a lawyer and, although he's
kind of bumbling, so was Clark Kent and he was sighted, the bumbling was
supposed to make him relatable and endearing.  I just don't really know of
having superblind powers is much better than trying to hide blindness like
we saw in Growing Up Fisher.  If you've ever seen the scene of the movie
where Matt and Electra are talking in the rain, and he's describing how the
rain drops create sound which gives him really clear sonar vision, you'll
know what I mean when I say that it's one of the cheesiest romance scenes,
and a pretty bad portrayal of blindness while its at it.

Thoughts?  I'd like to be able to talk about how supers with disabilities
are viewed by members of the community that the character is supposed to
represent, so any musings on the topic would be interesting to hear.
--
Kaiti Shelton
University of Dayton 2016.
Music Therapy, Psychology, Philosophy
President, Ohio Association of Blind Students Sigma Alpha Iota-Delta Sigma

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