It's time to put a stop to Hollywood's heinous abuse of the blind. Just because they can't see the films themselves is no reason for them not to rise up against uncaring filmmakers. How can you help? Read this article aloud to someone who can't read it for themselves.
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In Efren C. Pinon's watershed 1978 film Blind Rage, five sightless men from various walks of life are recruited by shadowy international criminals to knock over a bank in Manila and make off with $15 million. This memorable Philippine film, whose cast includes such notables as Leo Fong, Subas Herrero, Leila Hermosa and the incomparable Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, posits the intriguing notion that a group of resourceful blind men, when carefully coached by an enthusiastic social worker from a local school for the visually impaired, could memorize all the important details about the physical layout of the bank and then execute the heist without anyone noticing that not one of the brigands could actually see what he was doing. That way, the police would waste all their time looking for conventional bank robbers, while the five blind men would go their merry way.
Save for a couple of homicides--a fidgety teller, a foolish security guard--the robbery comes off without a hitch, and the thieves trundle off with their loot. When the police show up a few minutes later and question bank employees about the general physical appearance of the thieves, the manager recollects that, yes, there was something "weird" and "peculiar" about them. From what he could guess, they all seemed to be "foreigners." Neither he nor anyone else affiliated with the bank happened to notice that the five robbers were all wearing sunglasses, that they all seemed to stagger and lurch and bump into things quite a bit, and that they generally bore a much closer physical resemblance to Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Jose Feliciano than to Jesse James, Willie Sutton or John Dillinger.
I will not spoil the ending to this film by revealing how the police finally crack the case, nor by divulging the role that the incomparable Fred "The Hammer" Williamson plays in it. All I wish to say is that Blind Rage, with a cast that includes a blind hit man, a blind matador, a blind kung fu expert, a blind magician and a blind electrician, and which features such dialogue as, "Oh Wang, you missed the table. Let's try once more, okay?" is a film that is deeply offensive to the sensibilities of blind people everywhere. If there was any justice in this world, films such as Blind Rage, which depict vision-impaired people as avaricious psychopaths who will do anything for a fast buck, would never see the light of day in the first place, and would certainly not be readily available for rental at video stores around the world.
The fact that a movie watcher can go out and rent such lurid, degrading, putrescent, abusive, condescending, stereotype-perpetrating trash as Blind Rage proves that one of the greatest, oldest, ugliest prejudices in this society is still very much alive. At a time when it is no longer considered acceptable to make movies that poke fun at blacks, Hispanics, stutterers, the poor, the deaf, Native Americans, senior citizens, the mute, quadriplegics, the chronically short, people suffering from attention-deficit disorder, drunks, cokeheads, anyone Susan Sarandon is identified with, fat people, or the Amish, it is still acceptable for video stores to carry motion pictures that make fun of the blind.
Frankly, a society that makes fun of the blind is a society that deserves to have its eyes put out.
At this point, many Movieline readers are apt to toss up their hands and cry, "Jesus, why's this guy rattling on about a dipshit Philippine film that was made way back in 1978? So, okay, it was pretty tacky to include that scene where one of the blind guys tries to rape the school teacher ('Get off her, sex-hungry bastard!'), but that was 16 years ago. Hey, give us a break."
This nonchalant attitude is typical of most modern Americans blessed with the gift of sight. Just as white people today try to slough off any responsibility for crimes committed by their ancestors against blacks in the past, seeing people of the present era try to escape responsibility for revolting, anti-blindness movies made 16 years ago in a distant country. There are two things that are wrong with this attitude: First, because insensitive movies such as Blind Rage are still available for rental at video stores everywhere, they help to foment rage against blind people by advancing the hideous theory that crack units of highly trained blind bank robbers could somehow overturn our already fragile banking system by knocking over banks and having the police blame it all on seeing people.
Second, and more important, anti-blind movies such as Blind Rage, by presenting unrebutted portrayals of sightless people as murderous fuck-heads, encourage other filmmakers to make similar movies projecting stereotypical images of the blind. It was the villainous portrayal of blind people in Blind Rage that led directly to Richard Pryor's odious portrayal of a seedy blind man in See No Evil, Hear No Evil; and it was Richard Pryor's odious performance in See No Evil, Hear No Evil that led directly to Rutger Hauer's performance as a bloodthirsty samurai in Blind Fury; and it was Rutger Hauer's heinous antics as a whacked-out veteran of a meaningless foreign war in Blind Fury that paved the way for Al Pacino's bravura performance as an obnoxious blind veteran of a meaningless foreign war in Scent of a Woman, also known as Scent of a Film. With each new, unrefuted portrayal of blind people as social misfits, social climbers, social diseases, or people who really shouldn't be driving a brand-new Ferrari, filmmakers blessed with the gift of sight are encouraged to make even more reprehensible films about the moral failings of blind people. Inevitably, this will one day lead to a film describing the adventures of a gang of blind rapists on a college spree weekend, a film about a murderous blind doll, or perhaps even a film that will unveil the role of blind, right-wing Cubans in the death of John F. Kennedy.
Why do moviemakers go out of their way to make blind people seem like the scum of the earth? Basically, because they know they can get away with it. Unlike the deaf, who have taken decisive steps to ensure that the entertainment business doesn't try pushing them around (closed-captions, Marlee Matlin), blind people are at a distinct disadvantage because they can't see. Blind people have no way of knowing how poorly they are being portrayed in contemporary movies because blind people, by and large, don't go to the movies. It is in an effort to correct this situation that Movieline has agreed to publish this article. Since no Braille versions of Movieline yet exist, it is our earnest hope that sensitive seeing people everywhere will first read this article, and then, feeling moved by its contents, take their blind friends aside and read it to them. Only in this way can blind people ever come to terms with the indignities that have been visited upon them in the past, and will continue to be visited upon them in the future, unless they begin to express their dismay, chagrin and outrage.
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:
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.
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.