Blindness: Apocalyptic Patriarchy

Warning: Spoilers (for film and book).

Blindness is a film based on a book of the same name, it came out in 2008 & it boasts starts such as Julianne Moore, Danny Glover & Mark Ruffalo. Problem is, it’s sexist as hell. It starts with the First Blind Man, played by Yûsuke Iseya, suddenly going blind, a man helps him back home and he explains to him how everything is white, utterly white. He sees a specialist, Mark Ruffalo and as time passes he wakes up and he too can only see white. Then it starts to spread, infecting more people and eventually all the few people who were in Ruffalo’s office when Iseya visited him also have the ‘White Sickness’ disease. They are put in a quarantined sanatorium and left to their own devices – yep, they are given food and there are guards to shoot them for stepping out of line but no one even remotely tries to go in and help them lest they get sick themselves. Eventually outside help starts to run out because the entirety of the world has gotten sick and gone blind too.

However, throughout all of this the one person who is not blind is Ruffalo’s wife, played by Moore. For some reason, unknown in the film, she is immune to this disease. Great you’d think, that’s amazing she can help the officials and help get the world get back on track (with the help of already blind people who live ordinary lives) and hell maybe even she has antibodies that can be used to create a vaccine and a cure. Oh, wait – she’s a character’s wife… never mind! As I was watching it felt like there were a lot of pretty basic messages the film was trying to get across but none of those were that women are more than wives, not really. Yes, she achieves different degrees of success, yes she helps them all in the end but ultimately she spends the entire film selflessly helping her husband and everyone else. Somehow I doubt the film’s message was ‘women’s unpaid labour drives everything in the world and we should stop taking it for granted’.

Now I love pandemic films and zombie films and all that sort but unfortunately these films, and others, have a tendency to get pretty stupid when they try to make points about the nature of humans. I think the films that try to point out human nature usually say more about the writer than they do about the human race – human race by the way is a terrible film example of this, so too is Circle. They devolve into ‘everyone is an arsehole, expect children and except maybe women, but only some women, and even then fuck those women they can put up or shut up’ and it gets really old. Every new film, and in this case book, comes at the angle as though it’s fresh and original and maybe people will be less of an arsehole after watching this film. But no, they won’t because you can’t even make a film about being less of an arsehole without showing rape.

So after a couple of weeks when each ward in the sanatorium is full of blind people the one ward that is full of men, that is run by a man who literally declared himself king of his ward, has started stockpiling the food. He has a gun and first he takes everyone’s valuables and then when they are all gone he demands – yep, originality at its finest – ‘the women’. Or girls as he repeatedly calls them, because that’s what you want to do to the women you rape: infantilise them. So we have this film that’s really looking at people, their prejudices, how they come together, how violent men rip them apart, and then because apparently in an apocalypse the one thing you can bet never dies is patriarchy we get rape. It throws in the usual mess of well the women volunteer themselves and oh one of the characters is a prostitute, the men trying to point out that yes actually it would have been different if he had demanded all of the men to rape instead of the women, and it’s just all a total mess.

Then Moore’s character has to lead eight women to their rape, each woman is terrified and the men are acting like animals. Instead of cutting away, instead of feeling ashamed that the audience couldn’t just know that this is bad they carry on because hey narrative. They film Julianne Moore getting forced to her knees, they show other women being abused and raped whilst the one man who was born blind asks if he can suck on a faceless woman’s nipples. Then one of the men gets violent and he beats one of the women to death. Again, I’d say it was the film showing that rape, violence and murder are all on one great male violence spectrum but nothing in the film leads me to think it was anything other than hey of course this would happen because that’s what women do right – they die.

Later when it’s Ward Two’s time for the women there to be raped the man who was born blind stops by Moore’s ward and she tells him how one of the women died. He actually looks fucking sad, he looks shocked and mildly horrified. As though raping women was fine but hey he didn’t actually want them to die. If your audience is men, then do you really need to show women being raped for them to understand not to do it? Like they have no capacity for empathy to know that hey maybe raping, beating and killing women is a bit fucking much? Then Moore decides enough is enough, had to have the rape and murder first though because the threat of rape isn’t enough to stand up to (none of the men ever gave a shit by the way, one of the husbands was revolted his wife was going to be violated because it reflects badly on him, and one man got pissed off that the women didn’t want more nights of being raped). She takes a pair of scissors and she goes and stabs the ‘King’ in his throat, not before the camera showed us plenty of women being raped though just for good measure.

Then a woman burns the whole place down because fuck that shit. The world by then has already gone to absolute hell so there are no guards and Moore lets everyone out, she guides them home, there’s a scuffle about food and yada yada they all go back to her house to live out of their days. Until, spoiler the first guy who lost his sight, Iseya, can suddenly see again. Danny Glover gives us a voice over of how he’ll miss blindness because it might have given him a chance with a younger woman, that everyone is happy because it means they too might get their sight back, and hey what of this poor exhausted woman who’s been looking after everyone else. Personally, I hope she runs away and lives out her days not being sucked dry.

Throughout the whole film her husband treats her like rubbish, is unappreciative of the fact Moore is going through hell to stay and help him, and then he literally cheats on her. But she doesn’t give a shit, because of course she doesn’t. She’s a fucking saint. So he carries on pawing at her, saying how he can’t see her as a wife anymore because she’s more like his carer (not that that’s dealt with in anyway in this film), and it’s just all so annoying. It’s annoying because Ruffalo has played this character a million times; this sappy type of man who expects and demands unpaid emotional labour from fictional women who turn around and act like he’s a gift to women. It’s not enough to tell men that rape is bad, you have to also tell them that they aren’t entitled to shit. That women do not exist to make them feel better all the time, to pick up after them, and to do all of this at the expense of their own feelings, time, and desires.

Overall it was a disappointing and infuriating film and I should know now that nine out of ten films will be. More women need to be allowed to write films, to direct and produce films. We need the female gaze, the female voice to educate and entertain. Cause frankly I’m bored to death of the male gaze showing me the same thing while it’s male voice bores me with the same old stories. I’ve read great apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t have rape in, that doesn’t throw women to the outskirts, and you know what? It’s absolutely awesome. So I’ll say as I always say, step up men. Stop preventing women from getting a word in, pay attention to your own crappy behaviour and let’s stop acting like a patriarchal world will outlive us all.

I’ll leave you with the line from Wikipedia on the director talking about the rape scenes in the film:

“Meirelles explained his goal, "When I shot and edited these scenes, I did it in a very technical way, I worried about how to light it and so on, and I lost the sense of their brutality. Some women were really angry with the film, and I thought, 'Wow, maybe I crossed the line.'”