See No Evil

But first, some history. For starters, it is a huge mistake to think that cinema abuse of the blind is a new phenomenon. Almost since Hollywood began, filmmakers have been portraying the blind in a calculatedly negative way. In the 1939 release Dark Victory, Bette Davis plays a ditsy, horse-loving socialite who falls in love with her brain surgeon (George Brent) after he removes a tumor from her otherwise empty skull, but then discovers that he lied about the success of the operation and that she will soon go blind and die in Vermont, of all places. Although the viewer feels a certain grudging sympathy for the doomed equestrian booze-hound, by the end of the film her constant moaning and groaning and bitching and bellyaching will have most viewers wishing that she'd died a whole lot sooner, and had died an even more painful death.

Thus, in the most famous Depression-era movie about the plight of doomed blind people, the heroine is portrayed as a useless numskull who gets exactly what she deserves. This theme of the blind person as a complete fuckup who brings everything upon herself eerily foreshadows the scene in Scent of a Woman, made more than 50 years later, in which Al Pacino's nephew, commenting upon the idiotic hand-grenade accident that cost Pacino his sight, remarks: "He was an asshole before; now all he is is a blind asshole."

The Blind Asshole as an archetypal figure runs all throughout commercial movies of the past half-century. In Magnificent Obsession (1954), Jane Wyman plays a blind woman who is so stupid that she falls in love with the man responsible for her going blind--Rock Hudson, whose inimitable voice she somehow fails to identify. In Wait Until Dark (1967), Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman too stupid to lock the front door of her Manhattan apartment, thus ensuring that a trio of murderers will spend the next few days zipping in and out of her domicile looking for a doll stuffed with heroin that hubby Efrem Zimbalist Jr. brought back from Canada. In Don't Look Now (1973), an extremely annoying blind English asshole keeps telling Julie Christie that her dead child, attired in a garish red mackintosh, is trying to contact her, when in fact the woman has mistaken the dead child for a murderous dwarf who is running around the streets of Venice in a garish red mackintosh, ostensibly killing anyone stupid enough to be married to someone who takes advice from blind English people who don't speak Italian. Oh well, an honest mistake.

Blind assholes also surface in Torch Song, the 1953 musical in which Joan Crawford, clad in canary yellow pajamas so bright they could give sight to a blind man, plays an aging chanteuse who falls in love with an uppity, pipe-smoking, blind English pianist (Michael Wilding) that most viewers would like to see garroted; in See No Evil (1971), the oddly prophetic film in which the blind Mia Farrow sleeps in a house with three bloody corpses for an entire night before realizing that something is awry; and in Tommy, Ken Russell's affectionate 1975 look at the '60s where Roger Daltrey, a seeing asshole in real life, plays a boy who loses the ability to see after staring too closely at Oliver Reed's complexion. In 1992's Jennifer 8, Uma Thurman plays a blind cellist being stalked by a serial killer who only murders blind girls, though some of them do not play the cello, yet who nevertheless insists on spending her free weekends in a deserted dormitory in a remote school for the blind in a movie where John Malkovich has already been spotted. Again and again in contemporary cinema, the point is driven home: Just because you're blind doesn't mean that you're not an asshole. So don't go expecting any special treatment from the rest of us.

Obviously, not every movie dealing with blind people depicts them in such a negative light. In the treacly 1965 film A Patch of Blue, Elizabeth Hartman's blindness can almost be viewed as a gift from God, inasmuch as her accidental blinding by her mother, Shelley Winters (she was throwing acid at her husband's face, but missed), at least spares her from having to look at Shelley's body for the rest of the movie. And in Mask, Laura Dern's blindness shields her from the awful discovery that she may soon have Cher for a mother-in-law.

For the most part, however, positive blind role models such as this are rare indeed. More typical is the blind Australian photographer in Proof who offers to pay people money to tell him what his photographs depict, then uses an elaborate Braille labeling system to catalog each photograph so that he will always be able to describe the images that appear in the picture. This self-centered lunatic is abusive to his housekeeper, negligent with his dog, obsessed with hatred for his mother and not at all nice to waiters. In other words, he's not just a blind person. He's a blind asshole.

It is widely known that all Hollywood films can be reduced to formulas, that Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford plays a middle-aged lawyer whose close brush with death forces him to reevaluate his life's work, rethink his marriage, and turn against his avaricious colleagues, is just a variation on The Doctor, in which William Hurt plays a middle-aged doctor whose close brush with death forces him to reevaluate his life's work, rethink his marriage, and turn against his avaricious colleagues; that House-Sitter, in which Goldie Hawn plays a demonic, blonde housesitter who takes over a household and tries to seduce the male homeowner, is merely a perky version of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, in which Rebecca De Mornay plays a demonic, blonde babysitter who takes over a house and tries to seduce the male homeowner; and that Paradise--a film that closes with a long tracking shot over a cluster of trees and a large body of water, that takes place somewhere down South, that stars Don Johnson as this incredibly repressed guy approaching middle age who can't express his feelings, partly because he's always watching an Atlanta Braves game on TV, and who has a problematic relationship with a woman named Lily--isn't really all that different from The Prince of Tides, which opens with a long tracking shot over a cluster of trees and a body of water, and which stars Nick Nolte as this incredibly repressed Southern guy who can't express his feelings, in part because of his dad, who was always listening to Atlanta Braves games on the radio, but also because of his mother, whose name was Lila. The obvious question, then, is whether a formula for making blind movies exists.

Yes it does, and it runs something like this:

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