Take me to your cinema...: Representations of blindness in popular film.

Abstract

This dissertation examines depictions of blind characters within four film genres: the classical melodrama, the slasher film, the racial passing film, and the science fiction film. I draw upon cultural traditions of interpreting blindness, film spectator theory, and deconstructionist theories of representation to explore how popular film's blind characters challenge the very possibility of a distinct, masterful, and privileged sighted (spectatorial) subject. Furthermore, I argue that these representations express film's struggles with its own powers as a visual medium. In the classical melodrama and the slasher film, blindness poses a threat to generic visual conventions and ideologies. My chapter on the classical Hollywood melodrama argues that the blindness of each heroine in Dark Victory (1939) and Magnificent Obsession (1954) circumscribes a feminized realm of power (rather than powerlessness, as critics often claim) and thus necessitates a patriarchal plot that actively works to contain each woman's aberrant vision. My chapter on the slasher film interprets the tactile mode of perception of the blind victim-heroes in See No Evil (1971), Peeping Tom (1960), and Proof (1992) as threateningly independent of the genre's privileged expressive mode of visual spectacle. The following chapters take up films whose narratives explicitly privilege blindness. A Patch of Blue (1965), Smoke (1996), and Suture (1993) depict scenarios of racial passing, a practice that exploits the simplistic equation of the image with truth. These films' blind characters provide a means to critique the tropes of color-blindness and blindness as insight for their problematic association with the activity--upon which successful passing depends--of reading racial and other identities from visual clues. Finally, I examine the idealization of physical blindness in X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963), Death Watch (1979), and Until the End of the World (1991), analyzing the interrelation of human vision and visual prosthetics as it is represented both within these science-fiction films' narratives and in their spectators' prosthetic interaction with film technology and narrative.