LUCID FORGE

When people and groups protest against movies it’s both a blessing and a curse… but the free publicity, that’s what really counts. It was announced Tuesday that the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind planned on picketing 75 theatres across the US Friday, the opening day of Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago.


When people and groups protest against movies it’s both a blessing and a curse… but the free publicity, that’s what really counts. It was announced Tuesday that the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind planned on picketing 75 theatres across the US Friday, the opening day of Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago.



The film is about a city where a sudden plague causes widespread blindness in the people that catch the disease. Those affected are rounded up and quarantined in an asylum under abysmal conditions as the government uses methods of greater cruelty to maintain the social order. Inside the asylum meanwhile, the guards begin to go blind themselves, conditions for the affected continue to degrade and an uprising by a deranged few leads to the rape and deprivation of their fellow internees.

The blindness is used as an allegory for the breakdown of society, a way to tell a story about the balance of power in civilization and how easy the infrastructure of modern life can crumble around us. But using the state of being blind to tell this tale is uncool according to NFB spokesman Marc Maurer, who’s blind himself, thinks that the film will set back his group’s efforts to integrate the blind into the mainstream. "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," said Maurer. "Blindness doesn't turn decent people into monsters."



Maurer said that the protests will be spread though 21 states in what he’s calling the largest demonstration in the group’s 68 year history. Director Meirelles’ though doesn’t see the connection. Miramax, the studio releasing Blindness, said in its statement that Meirelles had "worked diligently to preserve the intent and resonance of the acclaimed book," which it described as "a courageous parable about the triumph of the human spirit when civilization breaks down." But Blindness is actually in good company because this has been the year of the movie protest. Earlier this summer, two comedies, The Love Guru and Tropic Thunder, got cited by activists for its negative depiction of certain minority groups. For Guru, it was the portrayal of Hindus, as Hindu-American groups demanded a pre-release screening of the film to decide whether or not is was as offensive to them as they thought. Thunder, meanwhile, had advocates for the mentally disabled protesting the use of the word ‘retard’ in reference to a movie character played by Ben Stiller’s Tugg Speedman.



On the indie side there’s Alan Ball’s Towelhead was cited by Muslim groups for the use of a derogatory slur as its title, a title shared with the book it was based on. Meanwhile, a newspaper reporter in New Orleans attacked Lionsgate for opening Disaster Movie, on the same weekend as the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He called it "an utterly insensitive premiere date," even though there was nothing in the film about Katrina. Even Beverly Hills Chihuahua hasn’t been immune, as 20 protestors picketed outside the LA premiere of the film urging people not to impulsively buy the diminutive dogs after seeing the movie.

Even before films come out now, we’re seeing advanced blowback. Obviously, the Vatican pre-emptively shot down the Ron Howard production of Angels & Demons, preventing the movie makers from using Church locations for the film, a sequel to the offensive-to-Catholics Da Vinci Code. Less obvious is 20-year-old Orange County resident Wyatt Barlup’s boycott; he decided to start picketing FOX headquarters in California after lawyers for parent company News Corp decide to sue Warner Bros for breach of contact over the Watchmen movie. Barlup is a Watchmen fan that doesn’t want to see the film’s spring release delayed because of pending legal action.



But the thing about all these protests is the question on whether or not they help or hurt the film. In the case of Love Guru and Tropic Thunder the controversy seems to have had little effect on how those films were eventually received; chances are it’ll be the same story for Blindness and Chihuahua. Angels & Demons may benefit, and certainly one would ever argue that the debates surrounding the alleged sacrilege of The Da Vinci Code did either the book, or the movie adaptation, any harm. Mostly, movie protests now seem mildly diverting, or even quaint, like protests against Weinstein Co.’s Superhero Movie over the delay in release of Fanboys (still due this fall… for now). But once, not that long ago, movie protests were deadly serious; or at the very least property damagingly serious.

Throngs of people came out in 1988 to demonstrate against Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ, but the chanting crowds in America were nothing as compared to the Molotov cocktail attack that injured 13 at a theatre in Paris. In England, death threats were made against Stanley Kubrick before the release of A Clockwork Orange; the film still wasn’t widely shown in the country until after the director’s death in 1999. The reverse can be true too; people worry that a film may promote violence against a group. Edward Zwick’s The Siege caused the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee concern over the film’s plot about Muslims being rounded up and interred following a series of terrorist attacks on New York. Years earlier William Friedkin’s Cruising had New York’s gay and lesbian community concerned over negative stereotypes. At the time, the Village Voice called it “the worst possible nightmare of the most uptight straight and a validation of Anita Bryant's hate campaign."

But no matter the severity, protests do seem to fade in time, whether that time is a few weeks or several years. Most of the time, it seems more about promoting a cause or a group than shutting down a film. After all, many of these movies are backed by major companies and studios that have already dumped millions into production, and as the Man says, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” If anything, these demonstrations allow us a place to start a conversation about the impact or validity about a film’s content, and in my mind that can never be a bad thing.