Blindness Leads to Insight

I wrote this review at least a year ago, but I wanted to post it anyway.  It was that epic of a movie.

The previews make this movie look like a horror flick about a woman with sight surrounded by blind people. However, this movie has both thematic depth and genuinely distressing scenes.

After one man goes blind in urban rush hour traffic, everyone who he comes in contact with gets infected with the “white sickness.”  The infected people spread the disease to people they come in contact, except the wife, Julianne Moore (Children of Men), of an ophthalmologist, Mark Ruffalo (13 Going on 30).

When the epidemic first begins, the government quarantines the infected.  Unwilling to leave her husband, Moore’s character accompanies him to the quarantine.  Soon the quarantined building is so full that people began to panic. The system of organization that worked at first is no longer functioning. 

The middle portion of the movie is probably one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in my life. Think Holocaust prison camp made for the recently blind, i.e. human nature at its worst. People divided themselves among wards, and Gael García Bernal (The Science of Sleep, Motorcycle Diaries) declares himself dictator over all the wards in order to control access to food. With few valuables to collect, the dictator soon starts demanding more primal forms of “payment.”

This experience, accompanied by the inadvertent death of a woman, causes Moore’s character to rebel. She stabs the king of ward three in the neck with a pair of scissors and war breaks out among the wards. Soon, someone lights the food on fire, and the whole building is on fire. Forced outside, the survivors discover that their guards are gone.  They make it back into the city only to discover it in a post-apocalyptic state (starving people, trash everywhere, dogs eating corpses, people scavenging for food) where everyone is blind.  The “white sickness” could not be stopped.

At the end of the movie, however, there is hope.  The guy who originally got sick regained his eyesight.  This could mean everyone else could regain their eyesight as well, but the movie closes in ambiguity.

Now for the subtext of an already difficult movie. 

The title can be interpreted on different levels besides actual blindness. It very well may refer to the government’s “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the health issue.

The title also could refer to how people are blind to their own racism. Ruffalo’s character talks about how the king must be black because of the way he’s acting. The man in front of Ruffalo’s character, who actually is black, asks how he knows. Ruffalo says it’s because he just knows (for the record, the dictator  isn’t black). When people are blind, race really shouldn’t matter, especially when confined in a building with a bunch of other blind people, yet racism stayed unaltered by blindness. 

Finally, the title could refer to the fact that people are generally blind to what is important.  Blind women in the movie are still concerned about their looks. In one conversation between a man and a woman, the man asks the woman: who are you? The woman responds by telling him what she looks like. The man replies, no, who are you? This poses the question, how do we define ourselves?

So why can one woman see when the world around her has gone blind? The movie never explicitly says, but the news reports that panic led to blindness, blindness to panic. During the entire movie, Moore’s character stays relatively calm and unafraid, though emotional at times. She voluntarily put herself in a position where she was very likely to go blind, but what mattered was being with her husband.

With a difficult movie inflated with subtext, the director has to make some tough choices: what is relevant and what is distracting. One of these artistic choices is the lack of names in the movie. Unfortunately, there are so many characters that the audience could miss the movie’s point by trying to keep people straight. Also, not much is offered concerning the government structure, leaving some confusion as to the plausibility of events.

This movie is very harsh image wise. There is nudity all around, the rooms are trashed, the hallway has been turned into a bathroom, and there are some sexually explicit moments. Yet all these images are critical to the disturbing tone of the movie. There are some redeeming images too. When the radio still works, they find a music station, and as the camera sweeps across the people in the room to show how much they are enjoying it.

In the end, I am reluctant to say I liked this movie. I didn’t like it in the same way I like movies such as Finding Neverland or Mean Girls, yet at the same time I appreciated it for what it was. I don’t ever want to see it again, but there are images and ideas that will stay with my forever.