Screen Machine

Review: The Blind Side

It’s shocking how few reviewers have addressed the racism of The Blind Side, writer-director John Lee Hancock’s “inspirational” sports drama about a poor black teenager named Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) who’s given an education at a Christian high school in Memphis, the chance to play offensive lineman for his new school’s football team, and a home with the rich white family of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (Tim McGraw and Sandra Bullock).

Maybe this is because of the film’s startling conclusion, which features ostensibly real footage (the “NFL Network” logo is visible in the upper right-hand corner of the frame) of the real Michael Oher being drafted by the Baltimore Ravens with the 23rd pick of the first round of the 2009 NFL Draft.

Prior to this scene, viewers could have been forgiven for thinking The Blind Side was simply a fictional film or, perhaps, a fictional film “based on a true story.” In fact, we have just been treated, in the preceding scene, to one of the most clichéd conclusions in contemporary cinema, in which the film tells us, via intertitles, what has become of its characters (“Michael Oher became an All-American at Ole Miss. and, with help from Miss Sue, made the Dean’s List”).

Although the goal of this technique may be to make a film’s characters seem more real, its overuse, and, more importantly, its (mis)use in “completely” fictional films (Animal House comes to mind) have lessened its ability to tie cinematic representations to a “real world,” to the extent that I watched this sequence feeling no more certain about the truth-status of The Blind Side than I had for the previous two hours.

This confusion only heightens the impact of the NFL Draft scene. The coupling of an outmoded “reality effect” with a newer, more effective one had me reeling. My slight cynicism (“Haven’t I seen this before?”) made my swing to complete acceptance all the more easy (“Wow, I guess this really happened!”).

Anyway, my point here is that maybe reviewers haven’t wanted to talk about racism because of this concluding scene — because suddenly they’re not just talking about a film, they’re talking about “real” things that happened to “real” people. How can The Blind Side be racist if it’s (based on) a “true story?”

Things get a lot more complicated, though — it’s not that The Blind Side is racist. In fact, to dismiss it as “just” a racist film would be premature and unfortunate. Race is complicated, film is complicated, and sometimes racism is part of what makes a film “work”—after all, given the narrative, if there wasn’t some racism here, would The Blind Side even be credible?

So this is the problem that the film ultimately presents for us: is it brave for depicting the sometimes-racist attitudes that undeniably exist in American society? Or does it shamelessly adopt that same rhetoric to sell tickets to the very demographic (white southern Republicans—”red staters” if you must) that seems most often to hold such attitudes?

What’s most frustrating about The Blind Side, I think, is its refusal to fall on either side of this dichotomy. There are “racists” in the film—Leigh Anne Tuohy’s friends who worry about Michael raping the Tuohys’ daughter, for example—who are clearly looked on with derision. Then there’s the “redneck” fan at one of Michael’s football games who spouts mild racial epiphets for a few minutes before Leigh Anne tells him to shut up. From these scenes, it’s clear that the film at least has some kind of anti-racist ideology: it’s against explicit racism—essentially, the kinds of things that most quickly pop into people’s heads when they think of “racism.”

And yet, one can’t help but wonder at the subtle — and sometimes not-so-subtle — racial undertones that underscore the film’s very premise. I’m not even talking about the idea of a white Christian family plucking a black teenager from poverty and giving him a home — let’s ignore that for now. But the way the film ties white ‘philanthropy’ — “Is this another one of your charities?” Leigh Anne’s friend asks her at one point — to personal and even sexual fulfillment is somewhat disturbing. I’m thinking here of a particular scene in which the Tuohys, lying in bed, seem to get off on their recent efforts to help Michael:

SEAN: Why are you smiling?

LEIGH ANNE: I don’t know, I’m just happy.

SEAN: Does this happiness have something to do with Michael?

LEIGH ANNE: No! It has everything to do with Michael.

They start making out but keep talking as they do:

SEAN: Happy’s good.

LEIGH ANNE: You know what I think we should do? We should start a charity for kids like Michael.

SEAN: Okay.

LEIGH ANNE: Maybe fund a program at Wingate.

SEAN: Sure.

LEIGH ANNE: Lord knows that school could use a little color.

SEAN: Mmm hmm.

SEAN’s not really paying attention here—he’s more focused on kissing Sandra Bullock.

Now, I don’t know what to think of this scene, really. Watching it, I had an extremely visceral negative reaction. But at the end of the day, the issue here is an ethical one: why should we do “good” deeds? Should it be because they feel moral, like “the right thing to do?” Or should it be for personal enrichment? Does it matter? Is there a difference? I think my disgust here indicates that like it or not (and I don’t like it, I don’t think), I’m pretty deeply invested in a somewhat absolutist moral worldview, one that insists on a separation of hedonistic behaviors—sex, pleasure, etc.—from the “political” realm. So maybe criticizing this scene is on some level deeply conservative. What, after all, is the difference between a scene like this—blending the sexual and the sociopolitical—and, say, the sex scene in David Cronenberg’s Crash?

But the scene does hint at a larger problem for the film, which is the way that it makes Michael’s entire story subordinate to the mild ups and downs of the Tuohy family. “Am I a good person?” Leigh Anne asks her husband toward the end of the film. As if she could be anything but. The point, though, is that this is the whole raison d’etre of the film: to show a white Christian family trying to do good things. And when the film ends, we’re not with Michael—we’re in the car with the Tuohys. They’ve dropped him off at college, and they’re driving home, and Leigh Anne has this disgustingly satisfied look on her face.

It’s strange: here we have a film based on a book about Michael Oher, and yet on screen, he’s been pushed to the side to make room for Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw. Michael’s character makes this failed balancing act even easier. The film leaves his past nearly a complete mystery, allowing viewers to fill it in with their own stereotypical images of black urban poverty. It’s a testament to the unfortunate strength of this stereotype that The Blind Side hardly need explain any of this: the signifiers are already so embedded in American popular culture that we all “know” what might be there. Drugs? Check. Violence? Check. Multiple pregnancies? Check. Absent fathers? Check.

Now obviously those are circumstances that do affect many people’s real lives, but the significant thing here is that we have a film about a character based on a real person that doesn’t even take the time to explore those circumstances as they might have unfolded for the real Michael Oher. It’s easier — and, in a scary kind of way, more effective — to let the viewers do that work themselves. All the film does is tell us, over and over, how mysterious Michael is. “Michael’s gift is his ability to forget,” Sean says, halfway into the film, leaving viewers with no idea of what he might even be forgetting. “Most of his files have been lost,” a caseworker at some kind of adoption/state bureaucratic something-or-other facility tells Leigh Anne a few minutes later, with such vagueness that one can’t help but interpret it as some kind of awful metaphor for Michael’s entire identity.

All this stuff is really weird, but it starts to make sense when you think about the film from a marketing perspective. After all, The Blind Side was made for white people—particularly white people in the south. That’s why it made over a quarter billion dollars and that’s why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences felt the need to nominate it for Best Picture and give Sandra Bullock Best Actress—it’s all a desparate attempt to stay relevant to as many Americans as possible, even if they might be people whose political and social views are somewhat of an anathema to the “Hollywood mentality”.

That’s why the film seems unable to “pick a side”: critically examining racism or indulging in it? It’s doing both, of course, because that’s the only way to give it any kind of mass appeal. But at the same time, that means it can’t do either in any kind of serious or meaningful way. None of the characters make much sense — there are lines that you can tell were written in after a billion focus groups, to try to squeeze every last dollar out of this film. “Who’d have thought we’d have a black son before we knew a Democrat?” Sean says, after they hire a tutor for Michael — a tutor who absurdly confesses to the Tuohys that she’s not a Republican.

It’s this kind of pandering to specific demographics that gives the film such an ultimately disappointing political message. “How did you get out of there, Michael?” Sandra asks him in what might be, for me, the film’s climactic moment. “There” is “the projects,” of course, and Michael’s response is weird, weird, weird:

MICHAEL: When I was little and something awful was happening, my momma would tell me to close my eyes. She was trying to keep me from seeing her do drugs or other bad things. And when she was finished, or the bad things were over, she’d say, ‘Now when I count to three, you open your eyes. The past is gone, the world is a good place, and it’s all gonna be okay.’

Michael’s an absurdity, an eighteen-year-old who barely seems to know anything about the problems that he and millions of other poverty-stricken kids face. And, of course, the way past those problems, for The Blind Side, is to “close your eyes” to them—ignore them, basically, and hope you make it out. In this world, there’s no such thing as welfare, social programs, poverty reduction, etc.—it’s basically up to God. “I read a story the other day about a boy from the projects,” Leigh Anne says, beginning the film’s final voiceover:

No daddy, in and out of foster care. He’d been killed in a gang fight. In the last paragraph, they talked about his superb athletic skills, and how different his life might have been if he hadn’t fallen behind and dropped out of school. That could have been anyone. It could have been my son Michael. But it wasn’t. And I suppose I have God to thank for that.

Sam Kaplan studies film and art history at Haverford College.

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