Oscar Week: The Blind Side
My review of The Blind Side is up at a bright wall in a dark room for Oscar week although this pretty much sums up why it shouldn’t even be a contender. Read and enjoy, or at least, consider. Also, this now makes me a regular contributor to BWDR so I’m sure you’ll be hearing some more from me on there.
THE BLIND SIDE
by Anaïs Escobar
I really thought that I was going to be the only person at my afternoon screening of The Blind Side yesterday, seeing as it has been out for a few months now, but I was mistaken. Five other people paid to see that movie and kept turning around every once in a while to look at the girl in the ponytail in the back row who could not stop laughing at almost every turn. Have you ever felt that way? You know, when you are so horrified and angry that you can’t even imagine that you’re watching something serious and so you laugh? This was me yesterday at this screening and while I have grown less shocked in the 24 hours since I saw the film, I am no less angry.
By now you have heard all about The Blind Side, the true story of an underprivileged black boy named Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) who is taken in by a rich white couple, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (Tim McGraw and Sandra Bullock). Michael is given not only shelter and clothes and an education but the coaching and tutoring needed to become a football star sought by every major university. I’m totally spoiling this for those of you who have been living under rocks for the past few months but Michael not only becomes a star at Ole Miss (alma mater of the Tuohys) but was eventually drafted into the NFL and is now playing for the Baltimore Ravens. This movie was supposed to make me feel good then, right? False.
I sat through a two hour self-congratulatory tale about white saviors. The true story of the Tuohys taking in this boy and helping him is indeed a wonderful act of kindness, but this movie does nothing but to allow its white heroes to pat themselves on the back. I mean, the film just started off early on the wrong foot with little brother S.J. Tuohy (Jae Head), who fits the obnoxious sitcom kid stereotype perfectly, complaining from the backseat that he didn’t get to play the Indian Chief in his school play because there was a “multicultural bias” and the part went to a boy who was Chinese. I kept looking to the empty seats around me hoping someone would appear who could look back at me with the same kind of horror I felt. The Tuohys are told by their friends that they are doing such a great thing for Michael, with the implication constantly being that they are such good Christians for this act, that we should be so moved that these conservatives are willing to help an underprivileged boy. Director John Lee Hancock even agrees: “This movie would be pretty boring if it were a story about northeastern bleeding-heart liberals who take a young underprivileged kid into their home”. You read that correctly.
That’s the main problem here, The Blind Side is nothing but stereotypes. Despite being a true story, none of these characters feel real because they are played as caricatures. Every black person in this movie is in a gang or addicted to crack, and not one is portrayed as redeemable, or layered even. There is a mixed message where the Tuohys love Michael as if he were their own but there is no effort to do anything but make him fit in with their own culture. In one scene after the Tuohys buy Michael a pick up truck, which he asked for, Tim McGraw’s character turns to his wife and daughter and says with a chuckle, “Well, Michael thinks he’s a redneck”. Of course, because the only thing Michael would want to be is a white person. There is a divide between Michael beginning the film feeling completely ostracized in his very white private school setting and then finding his place as he tries to fit into white culture. The film is filled with shots of a black hand and a white hand clasped together but these images are for show only as Michael replaces his past with this new gospel of rich, white conservatism.
As for Michael himself, he is little heard in a movie that is supposed to be his story. The movie tells us he is scarred from his childhood, but we hear little of his desires or opinions as he falls into place as the Tuohys’ newest charity. He is physically built to play football but he is never asked if he wants to, or even, what he likes. In fact, it isn’t until the end of the movie that Sandra Bullock’s character even asks Michael what he wants. This occurs after the NCAA comes knocking and asking Michael if he was in any way influenced in choosing Ole Miss for college, seeing as the Tuohys both went there and are donors to the school and football team. Michael runs away, feeling used for his athletic talent, and this is of course denied by the Tuohys but isn’t this what happened? Didn’t they influence this decision by having his tutor tell him that there are dead bodies underneath the football field at University of Tennessee, their hated rival? Once she finds Michael, Leigh Anne of course tells Michael that he can go to any school he chooses but it feels too little, too late. Michael ends up choosing Ole Miss anyways because “his family always goes there” and you can just see the vacant smile reminiscent of racist early film portrayals of black people. It’s nothing if not disgusting.
The film also cannot decide who Michael is. His teachers and the Tuohys keeps telling us he is intelligent but he is treated like a 5-year-old child at times. Apparently, he can absorb information by osmosis in biology class but then is expected to fall for the spooky lie about the bodies underneath the field at Tennessee. He also cannot play football appropriately before Leigh Anne gives him the most patronizing speech ever about protecting his teammates as if they were herself and the rest of the Tuohys. This makes sense in the thread of this film when you consider that Michael comes into this family to be their protector and to help them finally feel whole. The Tuohys help him but he is there to help them feel complete. He is also there to help their favorite football team since that is his main skill, to play football. They only encourage him to raise his GPA in order to obtain a football scholarship. God forbid the boy wants to do anything else! No, of course not, because he is not smart enough, says the film. Or is he? It can’t decide since he is only a wise, knowing soul when it suits the story. The movie ends and I know nothing about Michael at all.
I am entirely comfortable in saying that this film is completely insidious. The films asks us to feel grateful that there are white people out there who can help save black people. No, I’m sorry, that there are white people out there who can save black athletes from the nightmarish hood The Blind Side portrays. Don’t we save potential black astronauts or underprivileged poets? I guess not, unless they can also play left tackle for your alma mater.
I grew up in the suburbs amongst people like this and this film is just another portrayal that lets them know that actions like these are okay. It’s a cancer, one that reeks of white paternalism and the idea that black people couldn’t improve their lives without the help of white people. “Who would’ve thought that we’d have a black son before we had a Democrat in this house?” Tim McGraw asks Sandra Bullock as they sell Michael to the highest bidding football coach, the chasm between black and white wider than ever. Yes, this is post-racial America. Now, the real Michael Oher is earning millions of dollars a year playing professional football and I wonder if he’s happy, if that’s what he wanted. Most of all, I’m still wondering who he is.
Anaïs Escobar is a writer and student living in Florida. She tumbls here.
