See No Evil
Worse still, in none of these movies does the blind driver receive so much as a ticket or a reprimand or a bullet in the head from the authorities after his misadventures behind the wheel. Mostly, the issue isn't taken very seriously at all. Consider the situation in Proof, where the blind Australian photographer smashes up the car and then claims that the accident caused him to lose his sight.
Doctor: "You've been blind all your life. What were you doing driving a car?"
Photographer: "I forgot."
Actually, the closest anyone comes to receiving a citation for an outrageous transgression of the Motor Vehicle Code in a film is when the personable young police officer in Scent of a Woman tells Al Pacino to take his Ferrari straight back to the dealership. The failure of one of New York's finest to even realize that Al Pacino is blind is the cinematic expression of the subconscious, deeply seated, almost primal fear of all Gothamites that New York City policemen are not only ineffective, corrupt, and inured to malfeasance, but also that they are incredibly dumb.
Are there any honest, sincere, affecting movies about blind people that take a compassionate, pro-blind stance? Not as far as I can see. By the end of The Miracle Worker, most viewers are ready to strangle Patty Duke, and the same goes for the inane Bette Davis, the unpleasant Al Pacino, the sadistic Rutger Hauer, and the always irritating Mia Farrow. True, in the 1970s there was Ice Castles, an upbeat, life-affirming movie about a partially-blind ice skater from a farm in Iowa, but when you take a look at cereal prices these days not everyone is going to be sympathetic to the plight of skating farmers, and besides, Robby Benson was in the movie. There may be some nice stuff about blind people in Wim Wenders's 1991 film Until the End of the World but who has time to watch a two-and-a-half hour film about blind people starring William Hurt and made by Wim Wenders? Besides, my video store didn't have it anyway.
Where are blind movies headed in the future? It's hard to say, but hopefully courageous articles such as this, by focusing on Hollywood's unfair treatment of the blind, will lead to more sensitive, caring, politically correct films in the future. A step in the right direction might be fewer movies about the blind and more movies about the nearsighted. Perhaps Renny Harlin could do something in the action-film genre--_Die Blind II_, say, or Last Blind Action Hero. The best solution of all would be to simply stop making the things. Blindness is an extremely depressing subject, because blindness itself is a physical condition which has no real upside.
Except, of course, that the blind get to go through their entire lives without ever seeing Shelley Winters.
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Joe Queenan wrote "Look Ma, No Hands!" for the Jan./Feb. Movieline.
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