Blindness

I took a day off today and Nick and I went to see Blindness. I bought a copy of Blindness when it was first out in Hardback. It's a first addition. Those were the days. It won the Pulitzer for Literature. And a well deserved Pulitzer it was. It's a great book. I go to movies made from great books with trepidation and am usually disappointed by the film versions of great literature. I would not go to Atonement because I so loved Ian McEwan's book and knew that the casting was all wrong for starters, and the ads were horrible. Big Hollywood productions of well written books are almost universally badly done. The film, Blindness, however, is perfection.

I will only go to midweek matinees because I don't like people all that much and they especially annoy me at movie theaters. For probably ten years I wouldn't enter a theater. There were fine films made, but I had to wait to see them until I could rent them. But in Nick I have the perfect movie date. We seem to have the same taste in movies and like the private screening aspect of a 1:00pm movie at an art house theater on a Wednesday We go a little early and sit in the empty theater and talk. When the movie starts we don't talk at all, ever. Ever ever. That would ruin it for me. There is no audience noise to distract from the experience. No noisy popcorn eating, no candy wrappers, no soda sucking through a straw to make me want to kill my fellow man.

I'm not a movie reviewer. I won't pretend to try to give you that here. But it's a film about the catastrophic effects of a mass epidemic of blindness that manifests without warning and results in visual white-out. Sudden and blindingly white, easily spread, creating panic instantly. I know this film was not in black and white, but like the characters in the film, I see it now in my minds eye as shockingly white and terrifyingly dark. I came out of the theater with the sense that I was living in an alternate reality the way the European films of the 1950's and '60's made me feel. It is the feeling of having experienced something profound.