blindness Review, Revised.
I know I put this up here a few months ago, but I've revised it more than a bit.
It's quite clear that the National Federation of the Blind doesn't have enough real issues on its collective plate. Last year, they were attempting to block the release of the movie Blindness, a film made from a novel in which the population of a major city, possibly the world, was struck suddenly blind.
The novel in question was written by a Hispanic author, and in such literature, especially when the author in question is writing about events in another country than their's and in another language than theirs, they tend to do things differently. For example, in a great many books written by Hispanic authors there are a massive number of characters, none of whom are named. in addition, in such books, things happen, just because. You're left wondering, "how the fuck did this happen?" The answer in such cases is usually something along the lines of, "I-da-know. Next question?" Or possibly, "I-da-know. 900000000 red Chinese don't give a rat's ass." I guess the way they look at it is as follows. "If the reader doesn't have enough imagination to figure out a possible reason on their own, it's not my problem." You've got cases of precognition going on for no reason, or seemingly no reason, you've got things happening seemingly at random, but not quite, hell, you've even got a convenient ending in which everything sorts itself out after the world has gone to 19 different levels of hell without the benefit of a handbasket. In other words, you've got the perfect situation for those with imaginations to take the back-story in any direction they want to, or possibly come up with a sequel.
Immediately upon hearing the news that the novel was to be made into a movie, the nFB drafted a resolution to block the release of the film, claiming that it promoted stereotyping of the blind and reinforced bigoted ideas concerning the blind (how the hell can you compare a book like Blindness to Adolph Hitler's propaganda films?) regardless of the fact that they themselves never did so much as a second's worth of research into the literature of other cultures. I guess if it's not American, it must be bad. Now isn't that bigotry? As a matter of fact, there was even a web site dedicated to bashing the film, although the people maintaining the site and those drafting the aforesaid resolution probably never read the original novel to the end, or even beyond the first or second chapter.
I just finished listening to a DVS version of the film and I have to say that my original opinion hasn't changed one bit from what it was last year when I first heard of the NFB's stupid and ill considered attempt to block the release of the movie. Blindness is, before everything else, a post apocalyptic horror story, no different than Stephen King's The Stand, Night Surf, Trucks, The Mist, The End of the Whole Mess, Home delivery, Cell, or Graduation Afternoon, John Windom's Day of the Triffids, Armageddon and all the countless other "Asteroids Are Going To Hit Earth And Wipe Out All Our Asses" movies, George A. Romero's Dead movies, night of, Dawn of, day of, land of, and diary of, Lucio Fulci's Zombie and its late 80s sequel, Damnation Alley, the mad Max movies, Phase IV, the now infamous V mini series, War of the Worlds in all its forms, John Carpenter's The Thing, to say nothing of Andrea Bianchi’s gut-munching zombie outhouse explosion known as Burial ground. The only difference, in the case of Blindness, is that the plague that levels human civilization is not an invasion of flesh-eating living corpses, lumbering carnivorous plants, an unstoppable organism from deep space with the ability to perfectly imitate other life forms, machines that have finally had enough of mere organic vermin calling the shots and decided to run everyone in the world over or make them slaves, a small army of various monsters ranging from giant lobsters, to gigantic twelve-legged spiders, and including two foot long flies with stingers, tentacled things never actually seen, and unseen things that roar like a cross between lions and elephants, a phenomenon known as The Pulse, which, when heard over a cell phone, renders the hearer mindless and homicidal, a plague of senility, a nuclear strike on New York City, a huge asteroid preparing to hit the Earth and produce human pulp, Marsians intent on eating as many humans as possible after their fighting machines have stomped as many buildings and people flat as possible, lizard-like aliens whose mission on earth is to rob the planet of water and take as many sleeping humans back to their world as possible to use for food, super-intelligent ants that have decided that they could run the earth better than man could, or a hopped up version of the flue.
The story elements are pretty much the same, only with a decidedly Hispanic twist. You've got a sudden onset of an unknown plague that shows itself literally in the first five minutes of the movie. We've also got the medical community at a loss, just as in the dawn of the dead remake, or maybe not,, as I'll point out later. We've also got a desperate military trying to contain the situation, an attempt that ultimately fails miserably. We've got said military shooting people who attempt to break quarantine. hell, we've even got the nutball preacher claiming that the plague is God's punishment on humanity for its sins, although you've got to listen pretty closely to catch it. I'm not only going to give the story as it is told in the movie itself, but point up certain elements from the original novel, elements that the NFB, in its infinite unwisdom, interpreted as slams against the blind, and prove that they hadn't a single leg to stand on.
The basic story runs as follows. A man goes blind behind the wheel of his car, but it is not normal blindness. The condition is characterized by the victim's vision suddenly being replaced by a milky white nothingness. A seemingly philanthropic individual drives the victim home, after which, said individual proceeds to steal the victim's car. Now bare in mind that less than five minutes of the film's running time have elapsed so far, but we learn very quickly that we're not going to have much time for thought, as the majority of the plot moves like an express train. We learn, for example, in the first ten minutes of the film, that the condition is catching, the car thief from the first scene is the second victim of what is referred to in the film as The White Sickness, and in the original novel as The White evil. We learn that cases are multiplying with extreme rapidity. We also learn that the military is, as is usually the case in movies like this, more than willing to get involved, but only after they have donned their protective clothing, which usually consists of white plastic suits and gas masks, although what the fuck they thing gas masks are going to do in a situation in which nobody even has the faintest fucking idea how the shit spreads in the first place is a question nobody thought to ask. Another question that was left unanswered in the movie is how the hell the military knew where the hell all the victims were in the first place. at one point in the novel, a 911, or similar call is made and the caller is told that an ambulance is on the way. Now unless the medical community or the military had some idea as to what was going on from the word go, there's no way in Hell an ambulance could be dispatched to a location that quickly with the entire world falling apart around everyone's ears.
just to give one example of how completely screwed the world is in Blindness, early on, and this is strictly in the novel, a bank executive and one of his employees are taking the elevator to the tenth floor in the bank said executive is in charge of, when the power goes out, stopping the elevator between floors. Since everyone who could have either gotten the power back on or gotten to the two men trapped in the elevator has been struck blind by the White Sickness or the White Evil at the same time as the two unfortunate men in the elevator, it's pretty clear that nobody will be getting them out any time soon. Now there's a scary thought. Two people trapped in an elevator that happens to be stuck between the ninth and tenth floors of a building, either slowly starving to death or preparing to kill and eat each other! Now why didn't they put that in the movie!?
From here, we meet the main characters we'll be concerning ourselves with. There's an unnamed doctor, who is one of the first of the medical people to fall prey to the sickness, and who, in the novel, knew he was going to go blind about a minute before it actually happened, as did Car Thief (there's that precognition kicking in.) Then we have his wife, who like the rest of the characters in the movie is never named, and regardless of what the NFB people claimed, it was not only the blind who were unnamed, as the doctor's wife is perfectly sighted, as are the military thugs who show up at the Doctor's house with guns drawn and give him the choice to either come with them and live or stay where he is and get his brains blown all over his nice clean study wall (there's the military doing what it usually does in these types of movies, and the movie isn't even half an hour old yet!) There's the hooker known as dark Glasses, who falls prey to the White Sickness after turning a trick. We've got the older man known as Eye patch, for obvious reasons. We've got several others who played minor roles, including a receptionist from the hospital where several victims of the White Sickness were examined and who later turns out to be an accomplished firebug, the Japanese man whose car was stolen in the opening scene, the thief who stole the Japanese man's car, and the Japanese man's wife, who fell prey to the White Sickness at about the same time as the Doctor did, and who spent most of the first half of the movie in a withdrawn state, hardly even responding to her husband's attempts at communication, and then we've got Accountant and Barman, one of whom, Accountant, was blind from birth, and who, as is so often the case in these movies, makes a bid for power and wins, at least until he gets his own given back to him later in the movie.
Now, as for one of the NFB claims of slamming the blind. In the novel, the doctor's wife says something along the lines of "There's no need to give our names, as the blind have no identity," or something similar. Bare in mind, and I say this mainly to those who have common sense here, that the world has just begun a rather unique process of ending, people are either dying by the thousands, being shot by the military, being herded into trucks and taken away to be isolated, or being left to starve, the Doctor's wife is living with the possibility that she may lose her sight at any moment, just like her husband did, and as she was very close to him physically before he contracted the white Sickness, that's a pretty reasonable fear, and she is extremely depressed (wouldn't you be if a bunch of thugs in uniform just battered down your door and threatened to kill your significant other if he or she didn't accompany you to Christ alone knows where and when you go with him or her you discover that you're being locked up somewhere with assholes with guns outside who are more than willing to fill you full of so much lead someone could use you to write a letter home to your Aunt Alicia?) Taking that situation into account, I don't see a slam against the blind there in any way, shape, or form.
The military begins gathering up the infected and locks them in a hospital (how the hell did they find a hospital that was completely empty during an outbreak of some sort of unknown plague?) and proceed to inform their prisoners that if they attempt to get out, they will be shot dead, demonstrating that fact three times over in less than five seconds at one point. Other than that, their only job seems to be dropping food and other goods over the wall surrounding the hospital (how the hell were they getting hold of enough food for hundreds of people once a week while the majority of the worlds population is fucking blind and all production facilities have ground to a halt?) and shooting the odd attempted escape artist, and for escape artist, read Car Thief. They shoot him when he attempts to escape the ward, at least that's what the military assholes in residence claim, but they apparently can't shoot for shit. It takes several shots to finally bring him down, and that's after he finished up with an infection that was rotting one of his legs off.
That brings me back to the author of the book being Hispanic. Such questions as the ones I've asked here aren't really important. The important thing in such cases is capturing the readers' imagination and prompting those readers with a bit of writing ability to come up with a sequel, though the "where'd they get a hospital?" question is answered in the original novel. There was this abandoned mental hospital that wasn't working too hard and it seemed as good a place as any to house the infected.
In the hospital itself, things don't go much better. With nobody to maintain the place, particularly the plumbing, as the military thugs stationed outside could give a shit less as to weather or not said plumbing worked (they probably had chemical toilets they were using to do their business in,) the hospitals unwilling residents are soon faced with the usual result of disused pipes being asked to do what they are no longer capable of doing, IE taking down a huge amount of waste, over two hundred and forty people's worth, resulting in the terminal clog from Hell, causing those imprisoned in said hospital to seek other facilities in which to evacuate themselves.
That brings me to another thing the NFB said was a slam against the blind. Regardless of what there spokesperson clamed in the resolution to block the release of the movie, these people weren't pissing and shitting in the corridors because they were blind and had been supposedly reduced to the level of animals, they were doing it because there was nowhere else they could do it. I mean, does anyone think the military thugs outside had a handy pipe snake just sitting around waiting for the plumbing in a clearly abandoned building to fuck up? And even if they had actually had one, they had already made it clear that they weren't going to enter the hospital, so once again, no handy solution to the clog problem.
I hate to burst the NFB's bubble in this situation, but it does require a bit of sight to accurately unclog a toilet pipe. unless you can see what you're doing, you could just be moving the pipe snake, assuming there was one, back and forth in the pipe and getting nowhere other than hitting what is usually referred to as the trap, weather or not you've actually found the clog. And even if a totally blind person was fortunate enough to locate said clog and remove it, I doubt anyone wants to touch anything brought out of a shit pipe, and that's the only way a blind person could possibly know what non-treasures they've brought out of such a place. And as for where the prisoners trapped in the hospital were doing their business, it was either do your business on the floor or die of septic poisoning or ruptured guts. No slam against the blind there either. I'm sure if perfectly sighted people were faced with a similar situation, they'd do pretty much the same thing, with a couple added antics, such as mooning the soldiers when they saw them, waving their private parts at them, throwing cans and bottles at them, and generally making a royal pain in the ass of themselves and deriving an endless amount of amusement at the military thugs' expense.
Also, speaking of the plumbing, there is the little matter of the entire water system in the building being fucked nine different ways, resulting in obtaining fresh water, washing one's clothes, and bathing being an impossibility. once again, the people imprisoned in the hospital weren't filthy because they were blind and acting like animals, they were filthy because the showers that worked spat out filthy water when they worked at all and those that didn't work were totally detached from the main pipes.
The military dropped off sanitary products such as bleach and soap, products you can't use when you turn on the faucet and get hot and cold running crud. Sure, the water from the sinks would turn clear after about a minute, but who's to say the stuff wasn't full of every type of virus and bacteria known to man and a few new types besides, as evidence the attempt to clean car Thief's original wound and said wound eventually rotting his leg. And that leads me to another question. What the fuck were those people drinking. I doubt like hell they had a generous supply of bottled water, not after the military packed them all into a place in which every condition was substandard at best, totally unlivable at worst. With that kind of "don't give a shit" attitude, bottled water was probably the last thing on their minds. They were provided with drinks, although not really enough, probably various types of canned juice, but you can't wash yourself or your clothing in that unless you want to attract every fruit fly in town.
Now, as to the other things the inmates in the hospital turned prison get up to. As is so often the case in movies in which civilization ends, people turn on each other, steal from each other, rape each other, and in some cases, even kill each other. There's even a bit of extortion, a regular activity in such movies. At one point, during the extortion play, the self-proclaimed King of Ward 3 demands money, watches, rings, and necklaces (what the fuck would anyone do with such things when civilization is clearly fucked seven different ways and the shit is practically worthless?) I was reminded at that point of the, in the long run, unsuccessful defense of the shopping mall in both versions of Dawn of the Dead, and then the extortion gets even uglier. After everyone in the other two wards have been cleaned out of material possessions, Accountant, A.K.A. the personal assistant and chief thug to King of Ward Three and King of Ward Three A.K.A. Barman, demand that the women in the other two wards give themselves to Ward Three's men in return for food, the demands being enforced by a loaded gun (how the hell did Barman keep a loaded gun when the military had supposedly searched everyone on there way into the hospital?) Oh, I forgot, that's just another sign of the books country of origin and the habit Hispanic authors have of Just Becausing us when we least expect it. And here's where things get interesting. The first "Give us your women or starve" Extortion Night starts out with nine women in ward One, but ends with only eight, causing the doctor's wife, who retains her sight throughout the entire movie for reasons nobody even bothered to question, to plan a little revenge. Utilizing the distraction provided by the men of ward Three being busy humiliating the women from ward Two, she enters Ward Three and plants a pair of Scissors in the neck of the man, it was barman himself, by the way, responsible for the death of the unnamed woman from Ward one.
The next day, the vengeance continues, as another woman from Ward one, the receptionist, enters Ward Three and sets the mattress on which Accountant is sitting on fire, resulting in the deaths of the majority of the ward 3 asshole brigade, as well as the destruction of the entire building (what the hell was that building made of anyway?) The thing looked like it was made of stone, but burned like wood.
It is at this point that we discover that the plastic suits and gas masks worn by the military did about as much good as windshield wipers on a billy goat's ass. The doctor's wife leads the Ward one survivors to safety, only to discover that the guard posts are empty and the gates are unlocked.
The survivors return to the city, which looks like a tornado has swept through it, where their course leads them past a dog eating human corpses by the side of the road (either the author of the novel or the writer of the movie script must have read War of the Worlds at some point,) to and through a grocery store where a couple of them, including the doctor's wife, are nearly killed by desperate and hungry people (Stephen King's The Mist, anyone?) to and through a church in which all the statuary has been blindfolded, and where our obligatory "This is God's punishment for the sins of man" preacher is holding court (there's Stephen King's The mist again,) and eventually to her own home, where they remain, till the sickness begins to reverse itself, with the first victim in the movie regaining his sight for no remotely understandable reason.
All in all, Blindness is just like a few hundred other Plague Levels Human civilization stories, only written by a Hispanic author, with the cause of the plague and its reversal leading back to one enormous "What the fuck?" just as the doctor's wife's immunity from the White Sickness is never explained, or for that matter, never even questioned, unlike john Windom's Day of the Triffids, in which the population of the world was struck blind by a shower of man-made green meteors, and the immunity some had from their effects stemmed from the fact that their eyes were covered, or they were somewhere where outside light couldn't get to them. Other than that, it was run of the mill and wouldn't have gotten even one one hundredth of the publicity it got if not for the NFB sitting on its collective ass and bitching about it.
Seriously, the NFB needs to find some worthy causes to fight for and stay the fuck out of Hollywood's business. every time they involve themselves in something like this, the movie isn't really that good and would have died under the weight of its own inconsistencies, but Blindness will probably be remembered for the next thirty years or so as the movie the NFB said was such a slam against the blind community.
Being blind myself, I kept my ears open for the supposed slams against the blind and found absolutely none. What the NFB didn't keep in mind when they decided to embark on their fool's cause to get the movie blocked was that people who are not blind from birth are not, and I repeat, are not going to suddenly be able to cope with the loss of their site, especially when they're doing what they normally do one second and are suddenly and unexpectedly blind the next, or in the case of the novel, warned a bare minute before everything went white. The NFB seems to think that just because the majority of their members were blind from birth and can cope that someone who has been sighted all their lives who suddenly went blind is going to instinctively know how to do the same. Now how the fuck does that work? I don't think there's a blindness center of the brain that automatically kicks in when someone loses their fucking sight!
So rather than doing something to actually benefit the blind, they're wasting valuable time and money protesting movies. Now am I the only one who sees something completely wrong with that?
Things I learned from the NFB.
1. although we're supposed to be trying to make life easier for the blind, we're not going to target Freedom Scientific and force them to lower the price of their screen reading software and Note takers, we're going to prostitute ourselves to the very companies responsible for state-funded robbing of the blind and publicly make assholes of ourselves by fighting a losing battle by protesting a movie that not only costs millions of dollars to make, but has the backing of the entire film making industry behind it.
2. Rather than actually doing something to improve the quality of life for the blind, we're only going to show ourselves at times when doing that will make us look incredibly stupid.
3. Even sighted people have a blindness center of the brain that causes them to know how to cope with a sudden loss of vision.
4. certain books like Day of the Triffids that concern themselves with the majority of the world's population going suddenly blind are immune from nFB protests because they're classics, whilst others, such as Blindness are excellent fodder for protests as the authors are virtual unknowns.
5. Protesting movies is fun, especially when you look like an asshole doing it.
6. Hey, we've found the perfect method of swelling theater audiences! Protesting movies!
7. Protesting movies better fills our time than finding actual employment for the blind with actual companies rather than allowing them to rot away in sheltered workshops.
8. Although the Fundy Christian protests of the movie The last Temptation of Christ failed miserably and made it the most popular movie of the late 80s/
early 90s, we're going to take our lead from the fundies and try what has already been tried and hope for a different result, regardless of the fact that that is a sign of insanity.
9. If we hear about a book written by an author from another country, we're not going to take that into account. Instead, we're going to attempt to force our own American ideas onto a book that was written by someone who doesn't share them and call him or her a bigot, whilst showing that the only bigots around here are us.
10. Even though the world is ending, we don't accept that the worst is brought out in humanity with the absence of the laws that usually keep it in check.
11. We don't need sighted people, although there are plenty of things we, as blind people, just can't do.
It's quite clear that the National Federation of the Blind doesn't have enough real issues on its collective plate. Last year, they were attempting to block the release of the movie Blindness, a film made from a novel in which the population of a major city, possibly the world, was struck suddenly blind.
The novel in question was written by a Hispanic author, and in such literature, especially when the author in question is writing about events in another country than their's and in another language than theirs, they tend to do things differently. For example, in a great many books written by Hispanic authors there are a massive number of characters, none of whom are named. in addition, in such books, things happen, just because. You're left wondering, "how the fuck did this happen?" The answer in such cases is usually something along the lines of, "I-da-know. Next question?" Or possibly, "I-da-know. 900000000 red Chinese don't give a rat's ass." I guess the way they look at it is as follows. "If the reader doesn't have enough imagination to figure out a possible reason on their own, it's not my problem." You've got cases of precognition going on for no reason, or seemingly no reason, you've got things happening seemingly at random, but not quite, hell, you've even got a convenient ending in which everything sorts itself out after the world has gone to 19 different levels of hell without the benefit of a handbasket. In other words, you've got the perfect situation for those with imaginations to take the back-story in any direction they want to, or possibly come up with a sequel.
Immediately upon hearing the news that the novel was to be made into a movie, the nFB drafted a resolution to block the release of the film, claiming that it promoted stereotyping of the blind and reinforced bigoted ideas concerning the blind (how the hell can you compare a book like Blindness to Adolph Hitler's propaganda films?) regardless of the fact that they themselves never did so much as a second's worth of research into the literature of other cultures. I guess if it's not American, it must be bad. Now isn't that bigotry? As a matter of fact, there was even a web site dedicated to bashing the film, although the people maintaining the site and those drafting the aforesaid resolution probably never read the original novel to the end, or even beyond the first or second chapter.
I just finished listening to a DVS version of the film and I have to say that my original opinion hasn't changed one bit from what it was last year when I first heard of the NFB's stupid and ill considered attempt to block the release of the movie. Blindness is, before everything else, a post apocalyptic horror story, no different than Stephen King's The Stand, Night Surf, Trucks, The Mist, The End of the Whole Mess, Home delivery, Cell, or Graduation Afternoon, John Windom's Day of the Triffids, Armageddon and all the countless other "Asteroids Are Going To Hit Earth And Wipe Out All Our Asses" movies, George A. Romero's Dead movies, night of, Dawn of, day of, land of, and diary of, Lucio Fulci's Zombie and its late 80s sequel, Damnation Alley, the mad Max movies, Phase IV, the now infamous V mini series, War of the Worlds in all its forms, John Carpenter's The Thing, to say nothing of Andrea Bianchi’s gut-munching zombie outhouse explosion known as Burial ground. The only difference, in the case of Blindness, is that the plague that levels human civilization is not an invasion of flesh-eating living corpses, lumbering carnivorous plants, an unstoppable organism from deep space with the ability to perfectly imitate other life forms, machines that have finally had enough of mere organic vermin calling the shots and decided to run everyone in the world over or make them slaves, a small army of various monsters ranging from giant lobsters, to gigantic twelve-legged spiders, and including two foot long flies with stingers, tentacled things never actually seen, and unseen things that roar like a cross between lions and elephants, a phenomenon known as The Pulse, which, when heard over a cell phone, renders the hearer mindless and homicidal, a plague of senility, a nuclear strike on New York City, a huge asteroid preparing to hit the Earth and produce human pulp, Marsians intent on eating as many humans as possible after their fighting machines have stomped as many buildings and people flat as possible, lizard-like aliens whose mission on earth is to rob the planet of water and take as many sleeping humans back to their world as possible to use for food, super-intelligent ants that have decided that they could run the earth better than man could, or a hopped up version of the flue.
The story elements are pretty much the same, only with a decidedly Hispanic twist. You've got a sudden onset of an unknown plague that shows itself literally in the first five minutes of the movie. We've also got the medical community at a loss, just as in the dawn of the dead remake, or maybe not,, as I'll point out later. We've also got a desperate military trying to contain the situation, an attempt that ultimately fails miserably. We've got said military shooting people who attempt to break quarantine. hell, we've even got the nutball preacher claiming that the plague is God's punishment on humanity for its sins, although you've got to listen pretty closely to catch it. I'm not only going to give the story as it is told in the movie itself, but point up certain elements from the original novel, elements that the NFB, in its infinite unwisdom, interpreted as slams against the blind, and prove that they hadn't a single leg to stand on.
The basic story runs as follows. A man goes blind behind the wheel of his car, but it is not normal blindness. The condition is characterized by the victim's vision suddenly being replaced by a milky white nothingness. A seemingly philanthropic individual drives the victim home, after which, said individual proceeds to steal the victim's car. Now bare in mind that less than five minutes of the film's running time have elapsed so far, but we learn very quickly that we're not going to have much time for thought, as the majority of the plot moves like an express train. We learn, for example, in the first ten minutes of the film, that the condition is catching, the car thief from the first scene is the second victim of what is referred to in the film as The White Sickness, and in the original novel as The White evil. We learn that cases are multiplying with extreme rapidity. We also learn that the military is, as is usually the case in movies like this, more than willing to get involved, but only after they have donned their protective clothing, which usually consists of white plastic suits and gas masks, although what the fuck they thing gas masks are going to do in a situation in which nobody even has the faintest fucking idea how the shit spreads in the first place is a question nobody thought to ask. Another question that was left unanswered in the movie is how the hell the military knew where the hell all the victims were in the first place. at one point in the novel, a 911, or similar call is made and the caller is told that an ambulance is on the way. Now unless the medical community or the military had some idea as to what was going on from the word go, there's no way in Hell an ambulance could be dispatched to a location that quickly with the entire world falling apart around everyone's ears.
just to give one example of how completely screwed the world is in Blindness, early on, and this is strictly in the novel, a bank executive and one of his employees are taking the elevator to the tenth floor in the bank said executive is in charge of, when the power goes out, stopping the elevator between floors. Since everyone who could have either gotten the power back on or gotten to the two men trapped in the elevator has been struck blind by the White Sickness or the White Evil at the same time as the two unfortunate men in the elevator, it's pretty clear that nobody will be getting them out any time soon. Now there's a scary thought. Two people trapped in an elevator that happens to be stuck between the ninth and tenth floors of a building, either slowly starving to death or preparing to kill and eat each other! Now why didn't they put that in the movie!?
From here, we meet the main characters we'll be concerning ourselves with. There's an unnamed doctor, who is one of the first of the medical people to fall prey to the sickness, and who, in the novel, knew he was going to go blind about a minute before it actually happened, as did Car Thief (there's that precognition kicking in.) Then we have his wife, who like the rest of the characters in the movie is never named, and regardless of what the NFB people claimed, it was not only the blind who were unnamed, as the doctor's wife is perfectly sighted, as are the military thugs who show up at the Doctor's house with guns drawn and give him the choice to either come with them and live or stay where he is and get his brains blown all over his nice clean study wall (there's the military doing what it usually does in these types of movies, and the movie isn't even half an hour old yet!) There's the hooker known as dark Glasses, who falls prey to the White Sickness after turning a trick. We've got the older man known as Eye patch, for obvious reasons. We've got several others who played minor roles, including a receptionist from the hospital where several victims of the White Sickness were examined and who later turns out to be an accomplished firebug, the Japanese man whose car was stolen in the opening scene, the thief who stole the Japanese man's car, and the Japanese man's wife, who fell prey to the White Sickness at about the same time as the Doctor did, and who spent most of the first half of the movie in a withdrawn state, hardly even responding to her husband's attempts at communication, and then we've got Accountant and Barman, one of whom, Accountant, was blind from birth, and who, as is so often the case in these movies, makes a bid for power and wins, at least until he gets his own given back to him later in the movie.
Now, as for one of the NFB claims of slamming the blind. In the novel, the doctor's wife says something along the lines of "There's no need to give our names, as the blind have no identity," or something similar. Bare in mind, and I say this mainly to those who have common sense here, that the world has just begun a rather unique process of ending, people are either dying by the thousands, being shot by the military, being herded into trucks and taken away to be isolated, or being left to starve, the Doctor's wife is living with the possibility that she may lose her sight at any moment, just like her husband did, and as she was very close to him physically before he contracted the white Sickness, that's a pretty reasonable fear, and she is extremely depressed (wouldn't you be if a bunch of thugs in uniform just battered down your door and threatened to kill your significant other if he or she didn't accompany you to Christ alone knows where and when you go with him or her you discover that you're being locked up somewhere with assholes with guns outside who are more than willing to fill you full of so much lead someone could use you to write a letter home to your Aunt Alicia?) Taking that situation into account, I don't see a slam against the blind there in any way, shape, or form.
The military begins gathering up the infected and locks them in a hospital (how the hell did they find a hospital that was completely empty during an outbreak of some sort of unknown plague?) and proceed to inform their prisoners that if they attempt to get out, they will be shot dead, demonstrating that fact three times over in less than five seconds at one point. Other than that, their only job seems to be dropping food and other goods over the wall surrounding the hospital (how the hell were they getting hold of enough food for hundreds of people once a week while the majority of the worlds population is fucking blind and all production facilities have ground to a halt?) and shooting the odd attempted escape artist, and for escape artist, read Car Thief. They shoot him when he attempts to escape the ward, at least that's what the military assholes in residence claim, but they apparently can't shoot for shit. It takes several shots to finally bring him down, and that's after he finished up with an infection that was rotting one of his legs off.
That brings me back to the author of the book being Hispanic. Such questions as the ones I've asked here aren't really important. The important thing in such cases is capturing the readers' imagination and prompting those readers with a bit of writing ability to come up with a sequel, though the "where'd they get a hospital?" question is answered in the original novel. There was this abandoned mental hospital that wasn't working too hard and it seemed as good a place as any to house the infected.
In the hospital itself, things don't go much better. With nobody to maintain the place, particularly the plumbing, as the military thugs stationed outside could give a shit less as to weather or not said plumbing worked (they probably had chemical toilets they were using to do their business in,) the hospitals unwilling residents are soon faced with the usual result of disused pipes being asked to do what they are no longer capable of doing, IE taking down a huge amount of waste, over two hundred and forty people's worth, resulting in the terminal clog from Hell, causing those imprisoned in said hospital to seek other facilities in which to evacuate themselves.
That brings me to another thing the NFB said was a slam against the blind. Regardless of what there spokesperson clamed in the resolution to block the release of the movie, these people weren't pissing and shitting in the corridors because they were blind and had been supposedly reduced to the level of animals, they were doing it because there was nowhere else they could do it. I mean, does anyone think the military thugs outside had a handy pipe snake just sitting around waiting for the plumbing in a clearly abandoned building to fuck up? And even if they had actually had one, they had already made it clear that they weren't going to enter the hospital, so once again, no handy solution to the clog problem.
I hate to burst the NFB's bubble in this situation, but it does require a bit of sight to accurately unclog a toilet pipe. unless you can see what you're doing, you could just be moving the pipe snake, assuming there was one, back and forth in the pipe and getting nowhere other than hitting what is usually referred to as the trap, weather or not you've actually found the clog. And even if a totally blind person was fortunate enough to locate said clog and remove it, I doubt anyone wants to touch anything brought out of a shit pipe, and that's the only way a blind person could possibly know what non-treasures they've brought out of such a place. And as for where the prisoners trapped in the hospital were doing their business, it was either do your business on the floor or die of septic poisoning or ruptured guts. No slam against the blind there either. I'm sure if perfectly sighted people were faced with a similar situation, they'd do pretty much the same thing, with a couple added antics, such as mooning the soldiers when they saw them, waving their private parts at them, throwing cans and bottles at them, and generally making a royal pain in the ass of themselves and deriving an endless amount of amusement at the military thugs' expense.
Also, speaking of the plumbing, there is the little matter of the entire water system in the building being fucked nine different ways, resulting in obtaining fresh water, washing one's clothes, and bathing being an impossibility. once again, the people imprisoned in the hospital weren't filthy because they were blind and acting like animals, they were filthy because the showers that worked spat out filthy water when they worked at all and those that didn't work were totally detached from the main pipes.
The military dropped off sanitary products such as bleach and soap, products you can't use when you turn on the faucet and get hot and cold running crud. Sure, the water from the sinks would turn clear after about a minute, but who's to say the stuff wasn't full of every type of virus and bacteria known to man and a few new types besides, as evidence the attempt to clean car Thief's original wound and said wound eventually rotting his leg. And that leads me to another question. What the fuck were those people drinking. I doubt like hell they had a generous supply of bottled water, not after the military packed them all into a place in which every condition was substandard at best, totally unlivable at worst. With that kind of "don't give a shit" attitude, bottled water was probably the last thing on their minds. They were provided with drinks, although not really enough, probably various types of canned juice, but you can't wash yourself or your clothing in that unless you want to attract every fruit fly in town.
Now, as to the other things the inmates in the hospital turned prison get up to. As is so often the case in movies in which civilization ends, people turn on each other, steal from each other, rape each other, and in some cases, even kill each other. There's even a bit of extortion, a regular activity in such movies. At one point, during the extortion play, the self-proclaimed King of Ward 3 demands money, watches, rings, and necklaces (what the fuck would anyone do with such things when civilization is clearly fucked seven different ways and the shit is practically worthless?) I was reminded at that point of the, in the long run, unsuccessful defense of the shopping mall in both versions of Dawn of the Dead, and then the extortion gets even uglier. After everyone in the other two wards have been cleaned out of material possessions, Accountant, A.K.A. the personal assistant and chief thug to King of Ward Three and King of Ward Three A.K.A. Barman, demand that the women in the other two wards give themselves to Ward Three's men in return for food, the demands being enforced by a loaded gun (how the hell did Barman keep a loaded gun when the military had supposedly searched everyone on there way into the hospital?) Oh, I forgot, that's just another sign of the books country of origin and the habit Hispanic authors have of Just Becausing us when we least expect it. And here's where things get interesting. The first "Give us your women or starve" Extortion Night starts out with nine women in ward One, but ends with only eight, causing the doctor's wife, who retains her sight throughout the entire movie for reasons nobody even bothered to question, to plan a little revenge. Utilizing the distraction provided by the men of ward Three being busy humiliating the women from ward Two, she enters Ward Three and plants a pair of Scissors in the neck of the man, it was barman himself, by the way, responsible for the death of the unnamed woman from Ward one.
The next day, the vengeance continues, as another woman from Ward one, the receptionist, enters Ward Three and sets the mattress on which Accountant is sitting on fire, resulting in the deaths of the majority of the ward 3 asshole brigade, as well as the destruction of the entire building (what the hell was that building made of anyway?) The thing looked like it was made of stone, but burned like wood.
It is at this point that we discover that the plastic suits and gas masks worn by the military did about as much good as windshield wipers on a billy goat's ass. The doctor's wife leads the Ward one survivors to safety, only to discover that the guard posts are empty and the gates are unlocked.
The survivors return to the city, which looks like a tornado has swept through it, where their course leads them past a dog eating human corpses by the side of the road (either the author of the novel or the writer of the movie script must have read War of the Worlds at some point,) to and through a grocery store where a couple of them, including the doctor's wife, are nearly killed by desperate and hungry people (Stephen King's The Mist, anyone?) to and through a church in which all the statuary has been blindfolded, and where our obligatory "This is God's punishment for the sins of man" preacher is holding court (there's Stephen King's The mist again,) and eventually to her own home, where they remain, till the sickness begins to reverse itself, with the first victim in the movie regaining his sight for no remotely understandable reason.
All in all, Blindness is just like a few hundred other Plague Levels Human civilization stories, only written by a Hispanic author, with the cause of the plague and its reversal leading back to one enormous "What the fuck?" just as the doctor's wife's immunity from the White Sickness is never explained, or for that matter, never even questioned, unlike john Windom's Day of the Triffids, in which the population of the world was struck blind by a shower of man-made green meteors, and the immunity some had from their effects stemmed from the fact that their eyes were covered, or they were somewhere where outside light couldn't get to them. Other than that, it was run of the mill and wouldn't have gotten even one one hundredth of the publicity it got if not for the NFB sitting on its collective ass and bitching about it.
Seriously, the NFB needs to find some worthy causes to fight for and stay the fuck out of Hollywood's business. every time they involve themselves in something like this, the movie isn't really that good and would have died under the weight of its own inconsistencies, but Blindness will probably be remembered for the next thirty years or so as the movie the NFB said was such a slam against the blind community.
Being blind myself, I kept my ears open for the supposed slams against the blind and found absolutely none. What the NFB didn't keep in mind when they decided to embark on their fool's cause to get the movie blocked was that people who are not blind from birth are not, and I repeat, are not going to suddenly be able to cope with the loss of their site, especially when they're doing what they normally do one second and are suddenly and unexpectedly blind the next, or in the case of the novel, warned a bare minute before everything went white. The NFB seems to think that just because the majority of their members were blind from birth and can cope that someone who has been sighted all their lives who suddenly went blind is going to instinctively know how to do the same. Now how the fuck does that work? I don't think there's a blindness center of the brain that automatically kicks in when someone loses their fucking sight!
So rather than doing something to actually benefit the blind, they're wasting valuable time and money protesting movies. Now am I the only one who sees something completely wrong with that?
Things I learned from the NFB.
1. although we're supposed to be trying to make life easier for the blind, we're not going to target Freedom Scientific and force them to lower the price of their screen reading software and Note takers, we're going to prostitute ourselves to the very companies responsible for state-funded robbing of the blind and publicly make assholes of ourselves by fighting a losing battle by protesting a movie that not only costs millions of dollars to make, but has the backing of the entire film making industry behind it.
2. Rather than actually doing something to improve the quality of life for the blind, we're only going to show ourselves at times when doing that will make us look incredibly stupid.
3. Even sighted people have a blindness center of the brain that causes them to know how to cope with a sudden loss of vision.
4. certain books like Day of the Triffids that concern themselves with the majority of the world's population going suddenly blind are immune from nFB protests because they're classics, whilst others, such as Blindness are excellent fodder for protests as the authors are virtual unknowns.
5. Protesting movies is fun, especially when you look like an asshole doing it.
6. Hey, we've found the perfect method of swelling theater audiences! Protesting movies!
7. Protesting movies better fills our time than finding actual employment for the blind with actual companies rather than allowing them to rot away in sheltered workshops.
8. Although the Fundy Christian protests of the movie The last Temptation of Christ failed miserably and made it the most popular movie of the late 80s/
early 90s, we're going to take our lead from the fundies and try what has already been tried and hope for a different result, regardless of the fact that that is a sign of insanity.
9. If we hear about a book written by an author from another country, we're not going to take that into account. Instead, we're going to attempt to force our own American ideas onto a book that was written by someone who doesn't share them and call him or her a bigot, whilst showing that the only bigots around here are us.
10. Even though the world is ending, we don't accept that the worst is brought out in humanity with the absence of the laws that usually keep it in check.
11. We don't need sighted people, although there are plenty of things we, as blind people, just can't do.