‘Blindness' film opens to outcry across country

When people drive by Tinseltown theaters and see blind protesters with signs that say, "Don't Believe Everything You See," they tend to take notice.

"Everything," in this case, includes the new Miramax film, "Blindness," a thriller about a strange event that causes all but one person in a city to go blind. The people devolve into savages, clawing at one another over an ever-dwindling supply of TV dinners.

Scott LaBarre, president of the Colorado chapter of the National Federation of the Blind marched with about 25 other blind people outside Tinseltown on Friday.

"Our objection is that the movie sends a negative, unrealistic message about what it means to go blind," he said.

Other signs that protesters, who were part of a nationwide campaign organized by the federation, carried echoed that sentiment: "Blindness Is Not a Tragedy" and "Blindness Is Not Mindless."

"In the movie, people can't take care of themselves," LaBarre said. "They degenerate into animals. They defecate and urinate on themselves and all over. It's only when their sight returns that they turn human again."

LaBarre and other protesters say such ugly messages wouldn't be so bad if they weren't layered on top of fears people already have about blindness.

"The only greater fears people have than blindness is cancer and AIDS," LaBarre said.

"What people need to know about blind people is that we're normal everyday people living normal lives. We have families. We have jobs. We want to get out that message."
Sighted people may not interpret the film in the same way.

For instance, Gazette film critic Brandon Fibbs hated "Blindness," but he doesn't understand why blind people would picket it.

"Every person goes blind over the course of a few days," Fibbs said of the film. "Society implodes overnight. That's the point of the film - the frailty of mankind and our propensity for inhumanity."

"It's a spiritual blindness, not a physical blindness that the film wishes to address," Fibbs said.

The writer, José Saramago has said much the same, arguing that blind people who protest the film are misunderstanding what he calls a "blindness of rationality."
LaBarre doesn't buy it.

"Here's the deal - why did they use blindness for their metaphor?" he asked. "What if they instead used gay people or African-American people to make their point? Why does blindness have to equate with lack of rationality?

"They very deliberately picked blindness as a metaphor, and that's not the metaphor we live under."