The Blind Spot

"The Blind Side" vs. "Precious" -- our writer makes the case for what these two Oscar nominees actually say about race.

“The Blind Side,” on the other hand, a film about a real act of compassion, has been dismissed as a feel-good movie or, in the words of one critic, “balm for the conflicted soul of white America.” That it’s a true story is not supposed to have any bearing on its authenticity. Real stories can, of course, be made to seem phonier than the most contrived films. But “The Blind Side” sticks very closely to the facts outlined in the Michael Lewis book that’s the basis for the film. And the direction by John Lee Hancock shows all the taste and understatement that Lee Daniels is incapable of.

The intelligence of the film is visible in the way that Hancock consistently refuses to jerk tears. Over and over, given the opportunity for a close-up, Hancock employs a long shot. Given the chance to have Sandra Bullock well up on screen, Hancock honors the character’s no-nonsense manner, allowing her to close the moment with an “Alright, then” before exiting the scene.

Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, a rich, white Republican, married to her college sweetheart (country singer Tim McGraw, gracefully partnering Bullock with an understatement that matches Hancock’s), and determined as a bulldog. One cold night, she notices Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a young black man from her kids’ private Christian school, wandering the Memphis streets in woefully inadequate clothing. She instinctively takes the kid in and, eventually, the Tuohys became Michael’s legal guardians. Michael’s combination of size (around the time he came into the Tuohy’s lives, Michael Oher was around 6’4″ and 345 lbs.) and speed became his ticket to success, making him the object of a recruiting campaign by every major college football coach.

Writing that description makes me realize why so many critics thought they knew what they were going to see before they saw it. (That they seem to have reviewed their expectations, is another matter.) The trailer made me avoid the picture until a friend whose judgment I trust told me he’d had a good time at it.

The critical derision of “The Blind Side,” though, has only partly to do with critics’ failure to see what was in front of them. The argument that the film is covertly, or openly, racist, or that it’s intended to make racial problems go away via a do-gooder fairy tale, is about the desire to suppress an inconvenient narrative.

Just as “Schindler’s List,” despite being a true story, was called dangerously false because most Jews didn’t survive the Holocaust, “The Blind Side” is false because, in the words of one Salon reader, “Rich Republican woman saves poor black kid. Please.”

Can we agree that the lady did a nice thing, showed lots of courage, and stuck to her guns? Can we also agree that racism and class distinctions that continue to rend America won’t be solved when every wealthy person, or every church adopts someone less fortunate?” Sure. Even writer/director John Lee Hancock agrees with that — which is why he ends the film with the story of a minor character, one who has the athletic ability that should have brought him success, but who ends up gunned down in the projects where he lives. But in the fantasy of “The Blind Side” being a celebration of the white samaritan, facts just get in the way of a larger truth.

Towards the end of that New York Times op-ed piece on “Precious,” Reed made sure to take a swipe at movies that teach “Redemption through learning the ways of white culture… A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is ‘Dangerous Minds,’ where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.” Of course, Reed’s point would collapse if he actually bothered to ask those black and Latino kids who in real life were helped by LouAnne Johnson (the teacher whose memoir was the basis for “Dangerous Minds”) if they cared about the color of the teacher who made sure they weren’t passed over by the public education system — or the color of the writers on her syllabus.

The people who have written about “The Blind Side” as the latest installment of the benevolent white savior narrative have very carefully avoided discussing how Michael Oher feels about being sheltered and fed and clothed and educated thanks to Leigh Anne Tuohy and her family. And it’s that avoidance that’s far more racist than anything they claim to see in the movie.

The attacks on “The Blind Side” (just like the attacks on “Schindler’s List”) depend on the strategy of ignoring the truth of individuals in order to make a larger point about the group those individuals belong to. In other words, it’s exactly the strategy that racists have always used to spread lies about the objects of their hatred.

Michael Oher’s success doesn’t deny the young black men who aren’t as lucky as he was. Both Lewis’ book, explicitly, and Hancock’s movie, implicitly, explode the notion of college sports as one of the few remaining American meritocracies. (And both offer a nuanced ambivalence about the idea of sports as a vehicle to success.) That young man, whose murder we learn of at the film’s end, had the athletic ability to get out of the projects. What he didn’t have was someone who could put him in front of the people who could start him on that path. You cannot, as critics of “The Blind Side” have tried to have it, both acknowledge the advantage that the rich and the white have in this society and then decry a movie in which blacks do not magically have the ability to overcome the advantages of race and class all by themselves.

What comes out of the anti-”Blind Side” pieces is something like the argument right-wingers have long used against welfare and other social programs: helping people takes away their dignity and self-respect. Reading the movie’s critics, you’d think Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t just take Michael in, but played his football games for him as well.

Would the reaction against the movie be as strong if the Tuohys had not been white Republicans? It’s hard to say. And it’s likely that if you looked at who the Tuohys voted for over the years, you’d see a list of candidates who stood against the very programs that could have helped Michael Oher. Which only goes to show that, face-to-face with a kid in need, they acted like human beings and not ideologues. The critics condemning them as this season’s benevolent white masses should learn to do the same. Talk about the blind side.

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