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Representations of Blind People in Films and TelevisionBy Tanya Temkin (calico@lmi.net),Disability researcher and writer living in Berkeley, California In the 1944 film Pride of the Marines, World War II hero Al awakens in his hospital bed to discover the horrific consequences of his injuries. He exclaims, "No! No! I can't be blind! Not my whole life!" He rejects attempts to teach him Braille and other help, and when he encounters his fiancee Ruth, they have this interchange: Al: You think I want to live out my life knowing every day of the year that you married me out of pity? I got too much pride for that. I'd rather live alone. Ruth: ...you want to feel sorry for yourself! Besides being a typical World War II melodrama, this film reflects and perpetuates common conceptions of people who are blind and partially sighted. Our blinded hero is angry, embittered, and pushes other people away. His sighted girlfriend gives him a comeuppance, telling him to change his bad attitude. He "overcomes" his disability by finally admitting to himself and his fiance that he loves her. This vignette raises several interesting questions. What are the typical depictions of people with blindness and low vision in films and TV? How have they changed over time as these popular media have grown and developed? What popular attitudes about blind people do films and TV both reflect and influence? And how has the blind community responded to these characterizations? These questions interest us not only because blindness is the most commonly depicted type of disability in popular films and TV [1], but because the answers can help us shape strategies to influence how we are depicted in these media. What I offer here is an overview of how early and modem commercial films and TV programs treat the subject of blindness. I will focus on those films and TV shows produced in the United States, examining shows intended as "entertainment" rather than documentary records of the experience of people who are blind. Consider this an introduction. Several writers have explored in depth the treatment of people with blindness and other disabilities in commercial media; many of them are referenced in this paper. I encourage you to read them. Better yet, if you view any of these films that are available on video or DVD, you can come up with some answers of your own! Paul Longmore of San Francisco State University has noted that movies about people with all types of disabilities tend to reinforce certain stereotypes. These stereotypes are probably too familiar to you: the disabled person as a courageous overcomer, as bitter and maladjusted, as totally dependent on others, and as being less than human, to name a depressing few.[2] We find that moviemakers tend to apply a special set of stereotypes to people with a range of visual impairment, from severe nearsightedness to total blindness. A handful of the earliest short silent films, made in the first decade of the 20th century, explored the comic potential of low vision. They featured nearsighted incompetents whose poor vision created slapstick havoc for themselves and everybody around them. They were the antecedents of the modern-day Mr. Magoo, who we will discuss later. Other films from that time depicted beggars who feigned blindness to evoke sympathy and alms. In one filmed version of a vaudeville sketch, a boy leads a supposedly blind beggar onto a stage. The beggar holds out his hat while the boy holds up a sign saying "Pity the Blind." After a woman drops a coin into the hat and pauses to adjust her stocking, the beggar lowers his dark. glasses and ogles the woman's bare leg.[3] As the technology of film evolved, filmmakers reified people with blindness as impoverished tragic victims, whose sufferings were finally relieved by death. Typical of this subgenre was the popular 1907 film His Daughter's Voice, whose heroine is a young sighted woman who sings on the streets for a living, with her blind father accompanying her on his violin. After the daughter is killed while trying to defend her father from an attacker, the grief-stricken old man sits alone in his room, listening to gramophone recordings of his daughter's music. He collapses under the weight of his grief and impoverishment and dies, with a vision of his daughter floating before him.[4] This film inspired a number of others featuring tragic blind violinists. While these films reflected the dire economic circumstances of people with blindness, who at the time had few job prospects and no worker's compensation or disability insurance, the films implied that death was a merciful alternative. As filming further overcame its technical challenges, moviemakers started to produce pieces based on masterworks of literature and drama. Many of these films used staples of Victorian melodrama such as "helpless" children and young women, particularly those with physical disabilities or blindness. Typically, they are rescued by good-hearted sighted people who intervene with protection, familial love, or financial help.[5] These innocents are dependent on the kindness of relatives and strangers to shield them from a life of victimization and hardship. Not coincidentally, most blind victims on the early and modern-day screen are female, reinforcing the notion that both women and people with blindness are powerless and in need of special protection. At the same time, films about people with blindness introduced the theme of curability, either through divine intervention or the miracles of modern medicine. Martin Norden, who has exhaustively studied depictions of physical and sensory disability in early cinema, credits the prolific D.W. Griffith as being most responsible for promoting romantic depictions of people "cured" of their blindness or physical disability.[6] Griffith's 1909 feature The Light That Came, for example, features a facially scarred, exploited young woman who falls in love with a poor blind violinist at a party. He is told by a doctor that an operation could cure his sight, but the cost of the surgery is beyond his means. His beloved puts up the money, and is afraid that when he regains his sight, he will be repelled by her appearance. He has the operation, sees his beloved and, predictably, reaffirms his love for her.[7] Presumably, they live happily ever after. The return of injured soldiers from the battlefronts of World War I spurred federal legislation to provide job training and placement for veterans with disabilities. Cinema of the time, however, did not reflect progressive rehabilitative goals, and continued to depict disabled characters cured through operations or divine intervention, as in D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm. (This is the well-known tale of the adventures of two sisters, one blind and one sighted, before and during the French Revolution. The sisters become separated and the blind sister is taken in by an evil woman who forces her to beg; the other sister narrowly escapes the guillotine. Eventually the sisters are reunited and a doctor restores the sight of the blind sister.) Representations of people with blindness and other disabilities became more diverse during and after World War II. Now, disability became something to be adjusted to and "overcome" through a positive attitude and self-acceptance. In the movies, disabled people's own bitterness and self-pity, not societal barriers and lack of access, stood in the way to a happy and fulfilling life. Like the hero in Pride of the Marines, they needed a stem rebuke by a nondisabled friend, relative, or lover to get over their bad attitudes and get on with their lives. Hollywood did not entirely let go of its interest in curing blindness, however. For example, the 1954 release Magnificent Obsession depicted a well-bred woman accidentally blinded by a careless idle rich man, who falls in love with her, renounces his irresponsible ways, returns to the study of medicine, and eventually uses his medical skills to save her life and restore her sight. This film, at least, presented a blind woman who was intelligent, independent, and open to new experiences. The dominant theme in blindness- and other disability-focused films, however, was the process of individual adjustment and overcoming of adversity. Information on depictions of people with blindness and low vision in the early days of television is hard to find. If we look at programming in the 1960s, we find that television offered blind characters in occasional episodes in network serials. They ran the gamut from dependent, maladjusted whiners to independent, inquisitive individuals trying to break free of others' overprotectiveness. TV depictions of people with blindness became more frequent in the 1970s. That decade's series Little House on the Prairie included a lead character who becomes blind and goes about her life, although she does hope for a "cure."[8] Cinema and TV of the 1960s and 1970s produced several depictions of blind women stalked by malevolent sighted males, continuing the play on gender- and disability-based dynamics of fear and powerlessness. The much-acclaimed 1967 film Wait Until Dark introduced a new motif for future besieged blind women. Susy, the heroine of this movie, is intelligent, resourceful, and at ease with her blindness. She outwits the three men who enter her apartment, cut her phone lines, and otherwise terrorize her. By breaking every lamp in her house, she puts her sighted attackers at a disadvantage. Wait Until Dark was followed by so many TV episodes and movies in which blind women handicap their attackers by depriving them of light that, as Lauri Klobas comments, "[it] makes one wonder if 'Turn Out the Lights When in Danger' is assumed to be part of the basic education for people with severe visual impairments."[9] In the 1970s, movies started to treat characters with blindness and other disabilities in a more incidental fashion, as people pursuing careers, dealing with family problems, and otherwise coping with the regular struggles of life.[10] They deal effectively with others' attitudinal barriers. For example, the upbeat 1972 film Butterflies are Free told the story of a young blind man's romance with a free-spirited, sighted hippie woman, and his efforts to get free of his overprotective mother. An artistic, talented teenager is featured in the 1984 music video Hello. Explicitly political content appeared in the 1984 made-for-TV drama Love Leads the Way, based on the life of Morris Frank. This film related the story of Frank's struggle against social prejudice and his successful lobbying efforts to gain full access for blind people accompanied by their trained dogs. Still, a few strains of the old "overcoming" theme were present in movies of this time. In Ice Castles, a 1972 feature film, an aspiring young competitive skater becomes partially sighted in a skating accident, feels sorry for herself, then "triumphs" by concealing her vision loss from the cheering spectators. The 1982 Canadian film If You Could See What I Hear, based on the true story of TV newsman Tom Sullivan, managed to offend audiences and critics with its overly cute depiction of the protagonist skydiving, picking up women, driving, and otherwise over-achieving. Films of this time became more nuanced in their treatment of blindness itself. In older films, characters frequently referred to their blindness as "living in darkness," implying that people with blindness are always incapable of seeing light and dark. This also served as a metaphor for their actual or feared exclusion from community life. Later films offered more realistic portrayals of the range of impaired vision, as well as the struggles faced by people who regain their sight. Blink, a 1994 thriller with a rather contrived plot, portrayed a young woman who plays the violin in a Celtic band-the blind violinist figure again!-whose vision is partially restored by corneal transplants. Before her surgery, she travels all over Chicago confidently with her trained dog; afterwards, she is hesitant, ill at ease with her new partial vision, and is stalked by a murderer with an obsessive attachment to her cornea donor. (She dispatches him by shooting him rather than turning off the lights.) In the feature film At First Sight, based on the true story of Shirl and Barbara Jennings, the blind protagonist is comfortable with his life working as a masseuse in an upper New York state resort. The woman with whom he becomes romantically involved encourages him to undergo surgery to restore his sight. After the operation-which he at firsts resists-he has problems with visual agnosia, and his life as a sighted person becomes in some ways more problematic and his love relationship more strained. His sight eventually deteriorates and the two separate, but by the film's end they resume their relationship on a hopeful note. But has popular cinema really stopped stereotypical depictions? One enduring stereotype that has persisted since early cinema is that of the blind person with heightened sensory perception. In the 1921 silent film Footfalls, a blind cobbler is able to detect a murderer through his superhuman sense of hearing.[11] Films and television shows since then are rife with blind characters with extraordinary senses of smell, hearing, and possibly ESP. The 1992 feature Scent of a Woman earned Al Pacino an Oscar for his portrayal of an arrogant, obnoxious ex-Marine who can detect his paid companion's shrug, mock-salute, and other gestures. He determines the name of a flight attendant from her voice and perfume. Such depictions undermined the credibility of Pacino's character. Stereotypes die hard in part because of the social functions they serve. As Paul Longmore notes, the model of the person with a disability who overcomes his or her own social maladjustment serves the cultural ethos of personal character as the determinant of success or failure.[12] Even the stigmatizing attitudes held by nondisabled characters are primarily a problem of individual insensitivity rather than institutionalized bias. Stereotypes also serve an entrepreneurial purpose for makers of commercial films and TV programs, who are in the business of selling audiences what they (or their sponsors) think audiences want. British researchers Guy Cumberbatch and Ralph Negrine observe that stories about overcoming stir audiences' tender emotions, and characters with disabilities are used to enhance atmospheres of deprivation, mystery, and menace.[13] Certainly the enduring theme of the sightless, victimized woman plays on the anxieties of sighted viewers and encourages them to identify with the character as fearful and vulnerable. The image of the preternaturally sensitive blind person encourages viewers to admire such abilities while at the same time imposing a comfortable distance between the sighted audience and the sightless character. How can people with blindness, low vision, and other disabilities ensure that the way they are depicted on screen reflect the realities of their lives? Well, they can't, completely, since commercial media aim to sell entertaining images, not present social documentation. We can, however, work to ensure that Hollywood doesn't present images of us that are any more unrealistic or insulting than images it presents of people without disabilities. One way this has been done is through active collaboration. People with disabilities have worked closely with media makers to ensure that screen characters with disabilities are dealt with in a respectful and non-patronizing manner. Although the film At First Sight received poor critical acclaim, it was successful in presenting a believable blind character, largely because the director and leading actor worked closely with blind people in developing the film, especially with the real-life character on whom the film was based. Where collaboration isn't an option, confrontation has succeeded. When the Walt Disney Company announced plans to make a live-action film featuring Mr. Magoo, the blind community objected. They pointed out that the Magoo character had for fifty years presented an image of people with low vision as incompetent and bungling. At first, the Disney people couldn't understand why blind folks were upset about a character who wasn't blind, merely nearsighted. They just didn't get it. While protests by the National Federation of the Blind and others didn't block the release of the film, Disney was forced to append a statement at the end of the film noting that it was not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or nearsightedness.[14] Fortunately, the film was a box office flop. But we don't want to spend our energies on purely reactive strategies. In our collaborations with makers of films and TV programs, we can offer them technical assistance and advice, but we need to understand the technology, business, and culture of their industry. We want those of us with an interest in the skills and technology of screenwriting, direction, and other aspects of commercial TV and film production to have the opportunity to learn and use those skills. This will help ensure that people with blindness and other disabilities can author and shape the stories told on screen. References
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