Blindness, a novel of 1995 that was translated into
English in 1999, was written by the Portuguese Communist Nobel
Prize winner, José Saramago, in a clever style. Though common to
his other novels, it has a particular appropriateness to
Blindness — the story of an unexplained contagion that
renders its sufferers blind and spreads rapidly among the
population of an unnamed country. Mr. Saramago writes without the
ordinary visual cues of punctuation and paragraphing, so that you
can’t tell immediately who is speaking. None of the characters
even has a name. In a way the reader is reduced to the level of
the blind dramatis personae, who have to tell everything
from a person’s voice alone. Likewise, the narration is all mixed
up with the dialogue, so that there is no sense of the narrator
as a distinct presence, either omniscient or unreliable. His
storytelling can barely be made out against a cacophony of the
voices of his characters, reporting their own concerns.
This is a deliberate example of what philosophers call a category
mistake, and the loss of the categories by which we attempt to
make sense of the world becomes a metaphor not only for the
characters’ blindness and the nightmarish world they find
themselves living in but also for the larger disappearance, along
with the physical ability to see, of the moral vision of a whole
country. All this comes across, if not equally clearly, in the
new movie based on the book, which was directed by Fernando
Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener)
from a screenplay by Don McKellar. Though movies are inescapably
visual and therefore have a harder time of blurring the
categories, either between characters or between characters and
narration, this one certainly has a heroic try at it, and it is
not entirely unsuccessful.
It helps that the situation of the blind characters — who are
shut up in an empty mental hospital under armed guards to prevent
them from spreading their terrible disease to others — swiftly
degenerates into a nightmarishly Hobbesian (or Marxian?) world in
which the strong oppress and exploit the weak without fear of the
forces of law and order, who stay as far away as everyone else
for fear of going blind themselves. The film is a sort of
variation on The Lord of the Flies, only with marooned
adults rather than children, in which sympathetic liberal-minded
characters are temporarily overborne and almost destroyed by more
primitive, might-makes-right types who have come into their own
in a situation of weakened authority giving way to anarchy. Also
as in Golding’s novel and the film made from it, a deus ex
machina arrives at the end to make it all right for the
liberals, who are fortunately not destroyed, instead being left
merely sadder but wiser.
Here, the sympathetic liberals are a caring and compassionate
ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), who catches the disease when he
attempts to treat its first sufferer, at the point when no one
knows what is going on, together with his even more caring and
compassionate wife (Julianne Moore). Her love and concern for her
husband leads her to pretend to be blind — so that she can go
into quarantine with him — even though she alone of those who
are exposed to the illness (so far as we know) retains her sight.
The thug who is empowered by the epidemic, though he suffers from
its effects himself, and who proclaims himself the King of Ward
Three, is played by Gael García Bernal. He is helped to exercise
his power over the liberals, along with his other unwilling
subjects, by Maury Chaykin as a man who, having been born blind,
suddenly finds himself much better able to cope with the handicap
than any of those around him.
The moment of crisis in the film comes when the King of Ward
Three, having collected up everyone else’s valuables as the price
of releasing the government-supplied food ration (or a portion of
it) that he has taken charge of, announces that now those in the
other wards, if they want to keep eating, will have to send him
their women. There follows the briefest of moments when we see
the shock of liberal and feminist pieties and assumptions about
the world confronted with genuine evil and not just “sexism” and
the other imaginary ills and oppressions of the so-called
Patriarchy. It quickly fades. One woman insists on being raped
rather than submitting to be bossed around by her husband, while
the sensitive, liberal-minded doctor greets the news with what,
in the circumstances must look like Solomonic wisdom: “I think we
should ask if there are any volunteers. People should do whatever
they feel like doing, according to any morality they feel they
have left.”
I’m sorry to say that the sublime comedy of this moment of
self-delusion and what ought to have been — but of course isn’t
— a swan-song or dying hymn to the liberal gospel of feeling was
not intended, either by the author or the film-makers. This is a
great pity, because that black humor is the only thing in the
movie that could possibly have saved it from its own, terminal
compassion. For behind this film there lurks that most
characteristic feature of all the features of the progressive,
liberal worldview, namely a fear — or is it, perhaps, a hope? —
that “reality,” which is to say the moral model we all have to
live with, is of goodness rendered helpless before the
irresistible force of evil.
That, you may remember, was also the conceptual model on display
in last year’s Oscar-winner as Best Picture, the Coen brothers’
No Country for Old Men, so the auguries may be good for
Blindness — if not so good for the culture that is increasingly
paralyzed by similar assumptions. Whatever its other
shortcomings, the movie does at least as good a job as No
Country at flattering the liberal audience’s sense of its
own fine feelings. So many objects of compassion, so little time!
We may even want to add these poor, fictional blind people to the
almost equally fictional victims of Darfur or Rwanda (for do we
not also see them only in the form of flickering images on a
screen?) — or any of the others of what the King of Compassion,
the celebrity-philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, calls the world’s
“black holes.” And the beauty of it is that we can all just do
whatever we feel like doing, according to any morality we feel we
have left.
