Blindness opens this Friday and of course blind people are pissed because it’s super offensive.
Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food. For Marc Maurer, who’s blind, such a scenario — as shown in the movie “Blindness” — is not a clever allegory for a breakdown in society.
“The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie,” said Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.”
The organization plans to protest the movie… Blind people and their allies will hand out fliers and carry signs. Among the slogans: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life.”
The movie reinforces inaccurate stereotypes, including that the blind cannot care for themselves and are perpetually disoriented, according to the NFB.
“We face a 70% unemployment rate and other social problems because people don’t think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all,” said Christopher Danielsen, a spokesman for the organization.
Based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, “Blindness” imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light — resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.
The book was praised for its use of blindness as a metaphor for the lack of clear communication and respect for human dignity in modern society. [THR]
These A-holes are just like the Tropic Thunder and Towelhead protestors. I mean, where do they get off protesting a movie they haven’t even seen? **tap dances off stage**
