See No Evil

A bored socialite/gifted equestrian/innocent little baby/macho guy goes blind for life after falling off a horse/accidentally letting a hand grenade go off in his face as a gag/having his eyes drilled out by a power tool operated by someone who doesn't really care for him/seeing Shelley Winters or Oliver Reed naked. The blind person pisses off everybody by refusing to accept anyone's help/refusing to eat dinner with a fork/ refusing to sleep with the maid/playing the cello while being stalked by a serial killer. Eventually, the blind person gets raped by the babysitter/falls in love with Rock Hudson/is threatened by a man who used to play Li'l Luke in a TV show called "The Real McCoys"/pisses off everyone by playing the cello some more, and then becomes close friends with a brooding cop who may be a serial killer/a deaf, antisocial kiosk manager played by Gene Wilder/a friendly Vietnamese villager who teaches him how to chop off people's eyebrows with a four-foot-long sword disguised as a walking cane/Sidney Poitier. After many adventures, the blind person escapes from Shelley Winters/Ann Margret/Cher/Rock Hudson and becomes a popular leader of a religious cult/gifted equestrian/bored socialite/wife of a world-famous brain surgeon/incredibly annoying cellist.

Of course, within these formulaic motion pictures, there are certain obligatory scenes that occur again and again. Falling in love with a brain surgeon is a prominent theme in both Dark Victory and Magnificent Obsession, though the latter film has an additional twist in that Rock Hudson, a jet-setting playboy, only becomes a brain surgeon after he has caused Jane Wyman to go blind after chasing her out of a taxi and into speeding traffic while he is trying to apologize for having inadvertently caused the death of her husband by using up all the oxygen in a respirator while her husband, a doctor who actually owned the respirator, was having a heart attack. Falling in love with someone who doesn't want the blind person to know what he looks like is a dominant theme in A Patch of Blue, where Sidney Poitier conceals from the blind, white girl that he is actually black, while she conceals from the black man that she is related to Shelley Winters; in A Prayer for the Dying, where Mickey Rourke doesn't want Sammi Davis to know what he looks like out of fear that she'll think he's someone like Mickey Rourke; and also in Peter Bogdanovich's joyously stupid Mask, where Eric Stoltz doesn't want blind Laura Dern to know that he looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, doesn't want her to find out that he was raised by lovable bikers, and also doesn't want her to find out that he's related to a woman stupid enough to have once married Sonny Bono. Sleeping with someone who got paid to sleep with you is a theme that surfaces in both Mask and Tommy, and, here again, being blind is a bit of a perk because it means that at least Tommy doesn't have to watch Tina Turner dance.

Blind people kissing brain surgeons while celestial choirs well up in the background occurs in both Dark Victory and Magnificent Obsession, while blind people using their enhanced sense of smell and sound to overcome murderers is the theme of Wait Until Dark, See No Evil, Blind Fury and Jennifer 8. A variation on this theme can be spotted in Scent of a Woman, where Al Pacino can actually hear Chris O'Donnell executing a mock salute in his direction, and in Blind Rage, where three of the blind bank robbers hired to knock over that financial institution in downtown Manila can tell how much they are being paid by taking the roll of $100 bills and riffling it past their ears. Seemingly, the blind can hear the difference between Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Franklin. Good thing they didn't get paid in Kruger-rands or Swiss francs; word has it that those currencies all sound the same. And Philippine money is not yet available in Braille form.

But I digress.

The current staple of most recent films about blind people is the obligatory scene in which the blind person gets to drive a car. Audiences found it so incredibly funny to watch the blind Richard Pryor steer a police car while the deaf Gene Wilder gave him directions in See No Evil, Hear No Evil that the vignette was repackaged in Blind Fury, where the blind Rutger Hauer drives a van while a youthful companion gives him directions. That worked so well that the scene was repackaged in Scent of a Woman, where the blind Al Pacino goes racing through the streets of Brooklyn in a Ferrari he's managed to borrow from a car dealer, while his youthful companion, Chris O'Donnell, gives him directions. That scene worked so well that it was repackaged in the Australian film Proof, where the blind photographer drives the getaway car after his youthful companion is beaten up by thugs at a drive-in.

On one level, it is possible to look at all these movies where blind people get to drive cars, and conclude that Hollywood is merely adhering to another tired formula, where every movie about blind people is simply a rip off of the last movie about blind people. But this jaundiced attitude ignores the important role that motion pictures play in bringing to the screen visually arresting images of the movie-going public's deepest fears. Subliminally, each of these films expresses the public's gnawing fear that the highways have not only been taken over by people who drive like they are blind, but by people who are, in fact, blind. Or Australian. When you think about it, this is kind of scary.

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