Blindness

I recently watched Blindness, the film based on the book of the same name by Jose Saramago—a book which I very much enjoyed and count among my all-time favorites. Only after seeing the movie did I learn of protest at the film’s production. Advocacy groups for the blind apparently took offense at the film’s (and presumably, the book’s) use of blindness as a metaphor for moral decrepitude. This is understandable, but it made me question myself and my sensitivity to such issues since I didn’t find anything offensive in either the book or the film. Did I simply miss it because I am not blind? Or is there more to this issue?

First, I believe my understanding of the use of metaphor in the story differs from the understanding of the protestors. Where they see the film showing blind people behaving as “monsters,” I see the film as showing norms suddenly struck blind behaving as monsters. This is a key difference.

I have touched on this idea before, and will no doubt revisit it many times in the future: disability is more than a physical or mental phenomenon; it is a psychic one (as in psyche, not ESP). A person who is injured and loses the use of their legs is disabled, but is not suddenly a disabled person. They are a norm with a disability. It may take many years (if ever) for them to stop seeing themselves as a defective “normal” person. This is how I view the characters in Blindness. They are all (with one notable exception) norms, not blind people. Perhaps that’s why I don’t find their depiction offensive. I do believe that norms in that situation would be helpless, would be afraid, would be lost, and would resort to baser instincts. (What little faith I have in norms.)

In that context, blindness becomes a handy method for exploring humanity’s failings and society’s frailty. Furthermore, as I read it from a disabled person’s perspective, I see how debilitating the fear of disability is in norms. All the norms in the story fall apart when they become disabled; they are terrified and become helpless in the face of that terror. It’s actually quite damning of normate thought—at least as I read it, which to be fair, may never have been in Saramago’s mind as he was writing it.

The story also explores, not just literal, individual blindness and its possible consequences, but societal blindness. Part of the reason society falls apart in the story is that individuals need to know they are being watched if order is to be maintained.

The second issue at question is the use of disability as metaphor. For as long as art has existed, disability has served as a metaphor for weakness, immorality, and evil. Words like “lame,” “deaf,” and “blind” are fraught with meaning that goes beyond disability. To what extent are we to try to alter the meanings of these words, to remove their negative connotations? Is that even possible?

It is possible that there is something inherently symbolic in disability and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to remove all symbolism from the disabled body. Another question is whether doing so would be desirable. In all I’ve studied of people with disabilities, it seems that the more “normal” the disabled person, the more they desire normalcy, the more they desire to erase any stain of “otherness” from themselves. The true freaks embrace their otherness—perhaps because they have no choice.

This is clearly an issue that deserves more exploration than I can give it here. I am not trying to say that the use of the disabled body as something symbolic is good or bad, only that there’s a power in it that instead of denying, perhaps we could learn to utilize.

Again, perhaps I am not qualified to speak about this, since I am not blind. That is part of the problem of the disabled community: its disparateness. But I hope some of these points are valid.