Can You See the Point of a ‘Blindness’ Protest?

It's happening again. When Tropic Thunder was released this summer, some association, or organization, or coalition, or whatever protested the film for its depiction of the mentally handicapped. Now it's happening again to Blindness, a movie I caught a couple weeks back in preview (opens tomorrow). In the movie, based on Jose Saramango's book, a mysterious plague wipes out the vision of an entire unnamed city, which in turn descends into chaos (shit on the walls, mass rape, the usual). Saramango used the blindness as a metaphor for our failure to communicate with one another. No one protested, and in fact, it won him a Nobel Prize. Now get this: The National Federation of the Blind is planning on protesting at theaters nationwide by holding signs and handing out flyers with crafty slogans like, ""I'm not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life."

A fellow named Marc Maurer had a chance to hear the movie (he is himself blind) and came to the conclusion that the film “portrays blind people as monsters.” In the movie, everyone goes blind, almost simultaneously. Society, rules, law, all collapse. The blind aren’t attacking those who can see; everyone’s blind, and they don’t know how to take care of themselves because they’ve had vision their whole lives. And there’s no one to show them how to cope. Because everyone’s f*cking blind! The film’s director, Fernando Meirelles, hasn’t commented, but at Cannes he addressed the film’s central theme. “There are different kinds of blindness. There’s two billion people that are starving in the world. This is happening. It doesn’t need a catastrophe. It’s happening, and because there isn’t an event like Katrina, we don’t see.”