First off, Blindness is an existentialist morality tale - not a date movie. Let me state that clearly, directly, immediately. If you don't believe me, ask my wife.
OK, now on with the review. Your senses will be immediately engaged by Blindness, which is good, because you're going to need them. The film opens with a tight shot of a traffic signal switching intermittently between red and green, against a sonic backdrop of car horns and revved engines. Gradually we are introduced to the presenting problem: A man has gone mysteriously, suddenly blind in the driver's seat of his car, immediately inconveniencing everyone around him. A number of people intervene to give aid, including one man who offers to drive him home and wait there with him for the man's wife. This good Samaritan winds up stealing the man's car and himself going blind, the first link in a staggering chain of events forcing an unmanageable number of people into an abandoned asylum. This government quarantine facility serves as a microcosm of the whole world's descent into moral and material chaos. Like I said, not a date movie.
Saramago's characters - both the good and the evil - are stunningly profound, delivering proverbs that indict the world his readers inhabit while staying true to the world they themselves inhabit. Most of these proverbs from the book are absent from the film but shape the story that's told there:
"This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice."
"Destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere."
"Without a future, the present serves no purpose."
"Today is my responsibility."
It's the tension between these proverbs that build the story. None of the characters is named, a detail that's highlighted in the novel but made perfectly subtle in the film. The result is that we focus on the activity and relations between characters rather than identify entirely with one person.
The closest we come to personal identification with a character is the woman played by Julianne Moore. She remains sighted throughout the film, the wife of the eye doctor who examines the first blind man and is subsequently blinded himself. The doctor and his wife discuss the strange case over dinner - he speculates that it might be some form of agnosia, a "psychic blindness" in which the patient can no longer comprehend the images that are still finding their way to his brain; she speculates that there may be some etymological connection between agnosia and agnosticism and observing that "there's a lot of judgment in that word."
The disorientation that so often accompanies agnosticism is reinforced in the film through its use of color, camera angle and context. Languages, dialects and ethnicities are shuffled freely to make it hard to locate this city. A mix of architecture styles and landscapes and even iconography add to that sense of dislocation; the symbols of government are more international than national, a reminder that this could happen anywhere, to anyone - that the whole world is more vulnerable than any of its constituent parts likes to think.
We don't often see full shots of full people; we see only legs here, only half a person's head there, only some of the necessary information to make a scene make total sense. The viewer thus experiences his or her own sense of blindness, something not easily achieved in film. What does catch our eye are sharp knives hung from walls, a convenience for the sighted but calamitous for the sightless. We see steps and furniture and street corners and other everyday items become life-threatening to those who can't see and who suffer the indifference of the world they inhabit. We see all this in stunningly stark colorlessness; the film is mostly washed white and dreary grey, with only occasional color interrupting a scene.
The effects of this despair, this loss of sight and loss of autonomy and even loss of freedom and security, are predictable. People's better and worse natures emerge. One man's crass self-indulgence earns him an injury that would normally be treatable but here leads directly to his death. One ward of the quarantine seizes power and the viewer is witness to rape, murder and dehumanization on a stunning scale. Again, this film is not a date movie; it will regularly cause you to gasp and turn away.
It's that sheer scope of horror, in fact, that makes the film's sacramental imagery so important. Baptisms abound; the rain announces a turning point from the descent into madness to the beginnings of restoration; these are the first smiles we witness. A dog refuses to feast on the dead and instead licks away the tears of a suffering woman, a visual representation of yet another potent proverb from the book: "Tears are often our salvation." A man who can't tend to his own needs is washed carefully and respectfully by an unidentifiable woman.
Beyond baptism are other reminders that grace is tactile, communal, primal. The serendipitous discovery of food is Eucharistic, with tearing and sharing, with pouring and serving. A wedding of sorts takes place between two people who could not be more different but who, knowing one another only by voice, have come to love one another. Their marriage is witnessed by silent, unseeing onlookers. A church, serving lately as a shelter for those who cannot see, is refashioned so that the people of God - from the saints to the Savior - are made blind in solidarity with a world gone blind.
We are tempted to expect, in a film made in America, that we will get to the bottom of the matter at hand - that we will learn why these people have gone blind, or why the wife of the eye doctor has not. We expect to see some victory in the midst of so much defeat, and there is victory, but not to the degree to which we each assume we would rise. This film gives the lie to such arrogance, and in that sense this film is deeply Christian. We are invited by Blindness not to seek a solution but to hope for deliverance.
While reading the novel Blindness I also read Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright's commentary on John 9, in which a blind man is healed by Jesus and then put on trial for it. We, in continuity with the people of ancient Israel according to Wright, assume that there is indeed a connection between present disability and previous sin. The only question then is, whose sin was it? Jesus firmly resists any such analysis of how the world is ordered. The world is stranger than that, and darker than that, and the light of God's powerful, loving justice shines more brightly than that. But to understand it all, we have to be prepared to dismantle some of our cherished assumptions and to let God remake them.
Blindness calls for an ethic that is consistent with our brokenness. The ultimate fiction is that we can somehow inoculate ourselves from the hazards of life, that we can somehow solve whatever dilemma we are met with. The ultimate fiction is that we are gods, sovereign over our own destiny. Instead we are created beings, held accountable for how we conduct ourselves in a world that for whatever reason is too often characterized by indifference and malice. The film shows what the novel's doctor tells: "If we cannot live entirely like human beings, let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals."
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The Burnside Writers Collective fundraising campaign has begun. If you can donate a few bucks, we'd be grateful. Here are a few ways we want to say thank you:
Donations under $35: A Burnside sticker.
$35-$59: A copy of Donald Miller's upcoming book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and a Burnside sticker. The book is due out in 2009. We may or may not be able to get copies before they hit the stores. Regardless, you'll get when we get it.
$60-$99: An autographed copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, a book of your choice penned by one of our contributors* (list of options below) and a Burnside sticker.
$100-$199: An autographed copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, two books penned by our contributors, a Burnside t-shirt and a Burnside sticker.
$200 or more: An autographed copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, all five books penned by Burnside contributors, a Burnside t-shirt, a Burnside sticker and your name listed as a Burnside Patron on the new site.
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