Blindness: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

Blindness tells a story of the collapse and disintegration of our Western capitalist society into a new Dark Age when a mysterious epidemic of blindness suddenly afflicts most of the human population. Nobody knows the cause of the illness and the course of the film’s narrative never reveals it to us mostly because it is unimportant. What is important here is the idea of an epidemic as a metaphor for the collapse of civilization.We should take particular heed of narratives like this because in the same way that certain dreams can prove to be precognitive or in the way that Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility foretold the sinking of the Titanic (his novel was about the sinking of the giant ocean liner Titan, which also struck an iceberg) so too, the narrative of Blindness may turn out to be prescient of the coming collapse of our entire way of life.

Western society seems to be on the verge of a massive restructuring of all of its institutions, and one way of expressing such dramatic change is through catastrophist narratives such as this. Indeed, the timing of the film’s arrival could hardly be more apposite given the looming collapse of the stock market and the inevitable descent into a worldwide Great Depression that will soon follow.

The film tells the story of the isolation and confinement of one group of people afflicted with blindess to a mysterious “ward” where they are rounded up like concentration camp prisoners and left to fend for themselves by guards who generally treat them with contempt or indifference. If, as the saying goes, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then in the case of Blindness, she is a queen, for there is only one person among the group who has not been afflicted by the illness (played by Julianne Moore), for she has feigned blindness in order to keep watch over her husband, who is a medical doctor. This turns out to have been a smart move on her part, for soon enough, the inmates divide up into tribal factions and resort to savagery and violence as they scramble to divide up what few rations the guards dole out to them. 

The doctor’s wife — we are never told the names of the characters, as though to imply their allegorical nature – leads a revolt against the opposing group who tries to ration the inmates’ food in exchange for sexual favors from their women, and before long we are watching Bachofen’s theory of the revolt of the Amazons against their patriarchal brutalizers unfold before us. (Interestingly, unlike the characters in the story, we filmgoers are privileged with the essentially visual experience of watching the film, while they are confined to a white and haptic blindess). The women burn the camp down, and when the group emerges into daylight, they discover that the guards have abandoned the camp and that they are free to leave. What they find beyond the walls of the camp is the remains of a ruined civilization filled with wandering chains of the blind leading the blind, exactly as in Brueghel’s painting “Parable of the Blind.”

By the film’s conclusion, we take note that the nuclear family of the doctor and his wife has given way to an extended family, for they have come to think of the other survivors of the ward now as ”their family,” as though to imply that it is industrialized capitalism that fragments and isolates families into ever smaller, narrower, selfish units, since it is precisely at the moment when capitalist structures disintegrate that older, more archaic tribal structures — such as the extended family — rise to the surface. 

The film’s narrative seems to convey that it is small groups which get things done and that it is mechanized capitalism which prevents their cohesion.The film is based on Jose Saramago’s novel, and as Saramago happens to be a very great novelist, there are many levels and multiple metaphors at work in his narrative. From a different angle, the film can be read as a study of what has been happening in Western civilization ever since the collapse of the intensely visual society which emerged during the Renaissance, with its discovery of perspectival space, the printing press, and the scientific method. That society, from about 1400 to 1800 was made possible by an intense stepping up of the visual function in abstraction from all the other senses, whereas during the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the decline of depth perspective in painting, the rise of mosaic (and haptic) media forms like the newspaper and symbolist poetry, and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, we have seen the gradual dismantling of the visual function as the senses of hearing and touch have come forward once again. 

For the ear creates a different kind of space from visual space, what is known as acoustic space, which has resonant properties (as in Chaos theory) and is spherical since sound comes to us from all directions simultaneously (hence the spherical cosmos of modern physics), while the sense of touch is discrete and discontinuous (hence the rise of such phenomena as syncopation in jazz). Thus, McLuhan’s adage that “to the blind all things are sudden.”

As in the case of postmodern architecture in which each building defines its own uniquely distinct style separate from all the others, we live now in a world of multiple spaces and multiple times. To the blind man feeling his way about, each object similarly exists within its own self-defined and uniquely contoured space.With the rise of electric technologies and the stepping down of the tyranny of the sense of sight, our other senses have come in to play in our culture and they have brought with them the acoustic properties of magical cavern space along with its tribal social structures and continual sense of the magically resonant interval.

So Saramago’s narrative looks back at where we have come from as well as looking forward at where we might be headed, in addition to being aware of the unused potentialities of our present moment.

Saramago has a way of seeing through the hyperreality created by industrial capitalism, for in his great novel The Cave, he shows us that shopping mall culture, with its theme park attractions and glib and glitzy neon, is no real substitute for the culturally authentic and the spiritually rooted. Blindness, too, seems unimpressed with the shallow world of our skyscrapers and transit systems, our expressways and our airports, seeing them as one gigantic and highly ephemeral system that could disappear at a moment’s notice.

It would only require just the right catastrophe to make it all go away.