Blind people protesting Blindness.
Oy.
Blindness is a metaphor in the movie... as it has been forever.
The idea that sighted people in their 20s, 30s and older suddenly becoming blind, surrounded by others who are suddenly blind, would not be disoriented and find it hard to deal with a massive new challenge is pretty absurd on its face.
To quote Marc Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind, who said to the AP, "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie. Blindness doesn't turn decent people into monsters.”
This just shows that he carries the bias in a much more profound way than the movie does.
The film, as the novel did, uses blindness as a way of taking power away from a group, suddenly and unexpectedly. How will people react?
Most of the people in the movie are good and well-intended. A group, mostly of men, does become angry, cruel, and dangerous. If anything, this is sexist, against men.
The description in the AP story starts, “Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food.”
That does happen, though it feels completely false in tone. People are quarantined when the government isn’t sure what’s going on. They soil themselves occasionally because they don’t know how to live blind and this all takes place early in their experience. And the “attacking each other” and “trading sex for food” has nothing to do with being blind, but rather to do with power inequity, which is what the movie is ultimately about. (Specifically, there is no trade of sex for food… there is vicious, abusive rape committed by the armed men, who assert the power of having a weapon. The scene would be no more or less horrible if everyone involved was sighted. There is also a story twist in this moment, which I will not disclose, that also speaks to power, not sight.)
Blind people have nothing to protest here. I would be less shocked if feminist groups protested, given the behavior through parts of the movie by the one person who is sighted (the ads give this away, so I don’t feel it is a spoiler).
The movie is not an easy one. And I can understand it being misunderstood… or simply disliked. But it’s a bit like Levi’s complaining about The Accused because Jodie Foster is raped wearing a jeans skirt or feminists complaining because people (some of whom are men) have noticed that Sarah Palin doesn’t know much about national or world politics.
Better to use the sections of the film in which people overcome their sudden, unprepared for handicap with kindness and generosity to remind people that being blind does not have to be a bad thing… but being blind doesn’t automatically make you a saint either.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/09/stupidest_prote.html