"Blindness"

The premise in the movie "Blindness" (based on the novel by Jose Saramago, which I haven't read) is great. People start going blind without cause or cure. Julianne Moore's character doesn't. The result is a zombie movie without disembowelment--all the strengths and weaknesses of the human soul, and the societies it can sustain, are drawn to the surface. It's pretty ugly for awhile but not in the way that I enjoy. Nor is this movie well made by almost any measure I would use. The pacing is uneven and sluggish, the emotions seem forced, the crimes are hideous, the connections stereotypical or unnatural. Plus blind people boycotted it for being derogatory.

It's very similar to "Changeling," actually, another movie I didn't like, because it insists on the significance of representing the worst crimes as an ameliorative for the instincts and conditions that breed them. Yes, rape is wrong; yes, greed that kills is wrong. The problem is that in bringing our blood to a boil over such high crimes, this film--and so many like it--miss the iceberg that sinks the ship. The question is how to represent systems (or networks, if one prefers) over the established short hand of rape-patriarchy avarice-capitalism (Slumdog Millionaire is another example).

This was precisely why I had been excited by the premise of "Blindness": what I am calling for is a kind of blindness. The reason actual blind people protested the movie was that it represents blindness as totally debilitating (and to some extent morally corrupting). It's not. There is a particular irony at the beginning of the film in that one of the characters wears sunglasses all the time; I assumed she was blind and the filmmakers were showing how capable blind people can be. Not so. She was a prostitute. Sight and shame are never disarticulated in this film, and so it misses the big picture.