Blind People Protesting Against Blindness
The National Federation of the Blind will be protesting at 75 theaters across America on Friday, carrying signs that read: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life.” The reason? Julianne Moore has a movie coming out called Blindness, and some blind people aren’t happy about it.
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.
Instead, it’s an offensive and chilling depiction that Maurer fears could undermine efforts to integrate blind people into the mainstream.
“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.”
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 who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.
I’m going to have to be very careful with my wording here because I don’t want to offend anyone…
Can’t they see that it is just a movie? When I saw the trailer I thought it looked quite interesting. I mean, you can tell by the look of the film that it won’t be a huge blockbuster, so lots of people won’t be flocking to see it. I would expect the movie to draw the more mature audience, who have more insight to know that not all blind people trade sex for food.
What is your view on this?
