Strictly speaking, it would be virtually impossible to make a successful feature film in which the audience sees the world through the eyes of a blind person. However, the Norwegian director, Eskil Vogt, has accomplished something far better, creating a film, Blind, in which the audience sees the world through the mind of a blind woman.
In the process, he provides a special treat for psychoanalysts and those who are interested in the inner workings of the mind. In fact, the film uses blindness not simply as a tragic occurrence, but also much the way we use the analytic couch, as a vehicle to encourage the inner workings of the mind by reducing the “distraction” of immediate perception.
Ingrid
If the film has a presenting complaint, it is Ingrid’s recent and rapid total loss of vision. It began, we are told, with a spot that she thought was a defect in a contact lens. It quickly spread, independent of whether she was wearing her lenses.
The film opens, appropriately enough, to darkness, followed by a series of scenes that we learn are Ingrid’s attempt to recreate the world from her visual memory. She attaches some urgency to this attempt, explaining that she fears that eventually she will lose the memories and the ability to visualize internally if she does not exercise it.
Ingrid, when we finally see her, is an attractive, thin, young blonde woman. She has a husband, Morten, who appears to be devoted to his now blind wife. She tells us that they are living in a new apartment that she has never seen. It has broad spaces and spare furniture clearly intended to help her get around unobstructed. It is on a very high floor so that people can’t look in. She has to imagine it from touch and perhaps acoustics. We are not quite sure if the room we see is as it actually is, seen through Morten’s eyes or those of any sighted person, or if we are seeing it through Ingrid’s construction.
The first evidence of conflict appears as a tension between Ingrid and Morten over her resistance to leaving the apartment. At one point early in the film, she tells us, as Morten comes home from work, “He’ll start telling me how his day has been. Then, almost casually, ask me what I’ve done today. He’s trying to say that I should start going out again, not just stay in here.”
Ingrid has decided instead to experience the world through her memory and her imagination
“It’s not important what’s real as long as I can visualize it clearly.”
And so we have easy access to a blend of fantasy and reality. We see Ingrid at first through the course of a day sitting by her window with a cup of tea, visualizing her apartment and immediate surroundings. But as shadows appear and the room darkens, Ingrid moves further into the world of imagination, revealing more about her wishes, her fears, her internal conflicts.
Einar
We are riding up an escalator, looking at a woman’s red hair from behind. We next see a young man behind her. He reaches out to touch the ends of her flowing hair. We have entered the world of Einar. We see him, eyes glued to a computer screen, while Ingrid narrates,
“It came and went. He streamed and down- loaded vast amounts—watched it, masturbated, saw more, did it again. Maybe as often as four or five times a day, at least once or twice.”
Ingrid, who can no longer see, puts herself into the persona of a man who indulges in the guilty pleasures of a sexual voyeur.
“Then, loathing himself, he erased it all. Only to start downloading again, masturbate, delete everything, etc.”
The frustrated wish to see has become not simply a pleasure, but a sexual pleasure with the attendant guilt. We see a rapid series of erotic computer images as Ingrid tells us, “It was there waiting for him. Everything was accessible. Nothing seemed to have been left out.”
The accompanying dialogue, in Ingrid’s voice, is cool and detached, almost clinical as we examine Einar’s obsession and his fetishes while seeing erotic photos and brief videos. The blind woman seems to be making the very act of looking fetishistic as we see Einar walking through the streets of Oslo looking at women. If we look closely, we see that he looks at women with long hair hanging behind them, like the woman on the escalator. What is more, there is a sequence of women with their hair tied up behind them in pony tails or buns and that Einar, himself, has long hair tied behind in a bun. As the scene cuts back to Ingrid, imagining this, her hair is pulled back and tied in a short pony tail.
Through her identification with Einar, we see a barely displaced erotic fascination with voyeurism and exhibitionism. Einar shares something else with Ingrid. Unlike her, he sees the world and can get about in it easily, but he is removed from it. We see him hungrily looking at a computer screen, walking in the street looking at people he does not know, standing on an escalator and reaching out to touch the hair of a stranger. What we know about Ingrid is not only that she cannot see, but that she is also isolated, sitting all day alone in her apartment. To the extent that she experiences her sexuality through Einar, there is a strong suggestion that she experiences it as abnormal, fetishistic.
Einar’s voyeurism leads us to Elin.
Elin
He spies a young woman with straight blonde hair in a window across from his. Einar sees that she is watching a TV show, some kind of panel show, involving, interestingly, another woman with flowing blonde hair and a man with a long straight beard. Not surprisingly the group on TV begin to ask whether it is worse to be deaf or blind, the man with the beard responding that as a musician, being deaf would be terrible, but on the other hand there is his love of “porn, so it wouldn’t be so hot if you’re just left with the mood.” Both Einar and Elin, the woman he is watching, laugh at this last comment. We can easily imagine that Ingrid is laughing with them, something we will see later in the film.
“Elin moved to Oslo from Sweden over ten years ago—to study and work part-time. A newly divorced mother with a ten-year-old child, she took the consequences of their dysfunctional relationship. Having nothing in common but their son, he’d ignored it, escaping into his work.”
As this is said in Ingrid’s narrative voice, we see Elin vacuuming, her hair done up in a bun or truncated pony tail. As this scene continues, Ingrid tells us that Elin has been quietly snubbed by her friends, who had originally been her husband’s friends, and still are. Like Ingrid, Elin is in a new apartment. We are told that Elin’s friends in Sweden are far away, “Updates on Facebook from lives she’d lost touch with long ago.” Like Einar, Elin’s contacts are on the internet, and far removed.
From these three short sketches we have a sense of someone who is isolated and lonely, frustrated sexually and also hungry for relatedness, able to only imagine the world of other people. We experience them not quite as a multiple personality—we continually are experiencing the film from Ingrid’s perspective—but as one person experiencing the world from different perspectives.
As we move on with Elin’s story, an additional element is added. Elin’s only consistent contact is her child, but she notices that they are alone, having no interaction with other married couples with children. We soon see that Elin is even in danger of slowly losing her child, who wants to spend more time with the father and his wife and their friends’ children. In the middle of this narrative, Elin’s child, a boy, becomes a girl, Kim, as Ingrid modifies the story. This further amplifies the sense of disconnectedness, a child who can be either gender, no matter. Or is it a sign of uncertainty?
Morten
Now Morten, Ingrid’s husband, enters her imaginary world. Einar meets him at a movie. They had known each other in school. Einar asks if he has “kids and so on.” It seems a reasonable question, but if we were sitting behind the couch, we might mentally file another association to children. Morten gives a shake of the head and says, “Remember that girl I used to deal with when … .”
Einar remembers Ingrid as “The pretty one studying Norwegian?” and “She’d flash her tits when drunk.” We can imagine Ingrid thinking about herself being talked about by Einar as a sexual object. Morten shows Einar his wedding ring and then explains that she’d been a teacher for several years, but not any more, at which point he deflects the conversation back to Einar, who says that things “ground to a halt after university.”
Morten, now a character in Ingrid’s fantasy
world, shows Einar his gym bag, saying that going out to the gym is approved alone time, as opposed apparently to going to the movies. In a later scene we will see Ingrid sniffing the contents of his gym bag as if to see if he has really been working out in them.
“Maybe it was the Waldorf School, or his parents’ divorce when his sister was six, but a large part of Morten’s self-image was about being there for others. A colleague of Morten had mentioned all the casual sex on offer on the internet dating sites. Morten had spent a lot of time thinking about it afterwards.”
Morten displays these traits as he sympathetically listens to Einar describing his dis- ability after a question about his going to the movies, as he did when they were younger.
“No, I get tired of going alone all the time. … I had anxiety issues, couldn’t take the exams, and so it basically ended with me and the PC, staying at home.” When Morten asks Einar if he’s tried online dating, he responds that he has, but “Nobody wants to be with someone who has issues. Not in the long run.”
Even as they talk about sexuality and relatedness the fear of being defective and unwanted, at best pitied, enters directly into consciousness.
Sexuality: Desire and Jealousy Conflated
Like an analysis in which the associations deepen, these themes are presented more directly in the next scene, in which we see Ingrid and Morten in their bedroom, where Ingrid is undressing in a sexual, provocative way. She asks him if her hair is graying and he tells her she looks great (slightly reminiscent of a reassuring comment to Einar in the last scene). She stretches in a sexy pose, looking pleased. “You sure?” “Hmmhmm.” She giggles and we see him smiling up at her from bed, his chest bare.
But then she hears the slight tapping of computer keys. Now we see him in bed wearing a tee shirt and working on a laptop. The scene has changed for her, gone from a sexy, intimate encounter. He tells her he is working on some “mails” for work, concerning a party on Friday at which they will show off the model of their new architectural project. She asks if many people are coming and when he says yes, she says, “Good. Then they won’t miss me.”
Clearly disappointed, Ingrid takes a new tack, incorporating his typing into her fantasy. She imagines him looking at a dating site and soon has him exchanging sexy comments with a woman online.
The woman asks if his cock is hard and we see him visibly react as he answers, “Ja.”
As the dialogue continues on the computer screen, Ingrid suddenly gets angry and pokes Morten with her elbow. He puts the computer away, but she continues to imagine the woman’s sexual dialogue. She turns to him and begins to touch him under the covers. They kiss and begin to make love.
We cut to her walking naked and wondering what she looks like now, fearing that she has let herself go.
“It must feel weird to get a blow job from a blind woman, even your wife. It probably makes him feel guilty, as if he’s exploiting me or something. The poor guy probably feels obliged to give the handicapped woman a sex life.”
I don’t think this requires commentary.
We see her imagining a further dialogue, a question from the woman about whether he and his wife have children. Does he want to leave her? He answers he does but can’t now, it’s complicated. Once again, the association to children that appears like a chance occurrence in context. Once again, the suggestion that Morten will leave Ingrid.
Dissolving Boundaries
Now, we see that the woman who is texting Morten is Elin. Ingrid’s fantasy world is meshing with her real life. Suddenly, as she is texting to Morten, Elin has an episode of blind- ness. It is as if Ingrid has momentarily completely identified with her as Elin talks to Morten on line, setting up a meeting.
Morten meets Elin at the restaurant that we had seen earlier had been his and Ingrid’s favorite. She asks about his wife, asks about why they don’t have children, does he want
children? He says he can’t think about himself right now. She tells him, “If that’s how it is, maybe you must.”
Suddenly, Elin goes blind, regains her eye- sight, then goes blind again in the ladies room. She tries to hide it from Morten, but it is obvious as the waiter tries to hand her a dessert menu. He asks her if she can’t see and she admits to it. He even then questions if someone is pulling his leg. Ingrid is drinking wine as she writes out this episode. It moves rapidly and eventually we see Einar looking on through his window as Morten has sex with Elin.
Now, Elin is very close to being Ingrid and Ingrid close to being her own rival. As can happen in the world of primary process, Ingrid can turn the bitter disappointment of losing Morten into the fantasy of being his mistress. She is both identified with the successful lover and the jealous onlooker as the characters converge.
Pregnancy
Everything moves towards Morten’s big business party at which he and his colleague, Ove Kenneth, will display their new architectural model. He has planned this as Ingrid’s coming out. He is persistent against her pleas that she cannot do it.
That quietly persistent theme of pregnancy and children now becomes louder. On the day of the event, Ingrid tries to bruise her face by deliberately walking into a door frame. As she tries to ease the pain in her face, she momentarily touches her belly and moves to an image of a sonogram. Elin is pregnant. In a tragi- comic scene, we see Elin, now permanently blind, trying to text Morten from a tram. The humor comes from the fact that as Elin’s cell phone reads out her texts and his responses, we see the shocked looks of the other passengers, unwilling eavesdroppers. Morten tells Elin that he is busy with the big party coming up tonight. When she answers that something has happened, he texts back angrily to her that she should stop nagging and then dis- misses her seemingly angrily, saying “have a good life.” This version of Morten, unseen, can easily drop his lover. Elin texts back , “I’m pregnant, you idiot. I’m coming to the party,” but cancels the message and deletes it.
The stage is now set. Ingrid is determined not to go to the party, but has laid plans to “send” her now blind (and pregnant) doppelganger, Elin.
Confrontation
As she finishes writing the scene of Elin on the tram, Morten comes home, ready to go to the party. Ingrid tells him she can’t go because she bumped into the doorframe. Her face must be bruised. He asks how she feels, then tells her that there is no bruise, which we see as well. She complains that she doesn’t have enough time, has nothing to wear, but he is undeterred, giving her a dress he has bought. He tells her she looks stunning and it appears she might agree, but she asks the size and when told tells him it’s too tight. He urges her to wear a dress she has worn before. She insists it is also too small, she has gained weight.
“For my sake. You know how important this is for me.”
“Why? Can’t you let me just stay here?” “You said you’d go.” “No, I said I’d try.” Before he leaves, he tells her,
“I know this is difficult for you, but you know you can’t go on like this, just staying in here. If you’re not going to even try, I don’t know if I can take it anymore.”
Now the underlying fear that has driven this “analysis” is out in the open.
Crumbling Defenses
Clearly upset, Ingrid starts drinking wine and writing the plot on her laptop. Elin staggers into the party with her cane, dressed hideously, asking for Morten, mistaken for Ingrid. She is directed upstairs to a private room. Morten comes to the door to talk with her, and as she tells him she is pregnant, has taken a test at the doctor’s office, we see a series of women in various stages of undress sneaking out past the unseeing Elin. In the background, we hear Ingrid laughing. Inside
the room are Morten, his friend, and a group of scantily clad women, all unseen by Elin, but seen by Ingrid as she drinks her wine and types out her story. We sense that she is drunk.
As Morten talks to Elin, the boundaries are increasingly blurred as all four characters con- verge on a scene that moves from one room to another.
Morten begins by trying to convince Elin not to have the baby while his friend and a group of women look on in a room that looks like the site of an orgy.
“Have you thought about what you want to do? … I’m there for you, no matter what you decide. … You’ve had children. They can be a handful even if you can see. What if something happens?”
Here there is a slip as Elin becomes openly confused with Ingrid as we see Ingrid on her sofa, looking very drunk.
Morten argues, “It’s a hereditary disease. You want your child to risk going through this?”
A confused Elin reminds him that her blind- ness started with an accident. The boundaries are blurring as the film comes to closure and Ingrid drinks her wine.
Morten continues to push for Elin to end the pregnancy, telling her she won’t be able to see the baby, to see what it looks like, “Never see it grow, never see it smile.”
Now, with the boundaries evaporating, a bottle is knocked over in the scene with Elin and Morten (and probably in Ingrid’s apartment as she imagines it).
Elin leaps up and angrily says to Morten, forgetting who she is, “You think I want your child? You bore me! Why did I marry you any- way? Why did I do it?”
Morten looks around the room, suddenly aware of the fantasy he is part of, saying, “What is all this? Do you think I’m into this crap?”
Elin answers, “No, you’re too boring.”
He replies, “Boring. Is it boring not to snort coke and have sex with, with …”’
Elin asks, “With what?”
Now, clearly talking to Ingrid, he answers angrily, “Damned if I know. You made it up. What sort of immature crap is this?” He picks up a cucumber that seemed intended as a sex prop and hands it to Ingrid, now standing in the room in Elin’s clothes. Now the dialogue is directly between Morten and Ingrid as he goes on.
“Why must everything be so over the top? Sexualized? Is this who you are?”
As they go on talking, the scene shifts rapidly back and forth, to a bare room with a stray dog and back to the room with the prostitutes, as Morten asks,
“And why are you so mean to her?” He clearly means Elin who is now staggering away from the party.
After his friend leaves the room so they can be alone, he asks her, “And why would I ruin everything for Elin and … and … Einar? Why not just let them get together?”
“That guy? With her?”
“Why not? Good things can also happen to people, you know. Let them get together.”
We see Einar looking on. “I’m just having fun,” she answers. “Is it fun imagining that I date other women? Is that it? You want me to find a nice girl like Elin? Is that what you want?”
“No. Nobody wants to be with someone who has issues. Not in the long run.”
He sits her down and suddenly they are in the restaurant they used to go to together, the one she’d placed him in with Elin.
“Do you really think I’d bring anyone else here? I love you. You know that? But look at yourself.”
They both look at Ingrid in a drunken sleep on the sofa.
Resolution
Now back in their kitchen, she, still in Elin’s dress, is looking for more wine.
He tells her she shouldn’t drink if she’s pregnant, adding, “Why won’t you tell me?” “I’m not sure I’m … You want me to be?” He tells her what we have heard him say earlier. “You can’t go on like this, you know.” “Is that what you’re going to tell people, that it wasn’t because I went blind, that’s not why it didn’t work out?”
Morten disappears from the scene, and as Ingrid begins to waken on her sofa, we see Elin falling on her way home. Einar sees her, helps her up, helps her home.
Ingrid, wakens to the light of day, goes out looking for a pharmacy. Back home, we see her doing a pregnancy test, leaving the indicator by the bathroom sink where Morten finds it. He tells her what it shows. She is pregnant.
“So what do you think?” she asks. He answers with a big smile. We move to a country scene where Elin and her daughter smilingly wave to Einar, Elin having reassured Kim that the man who has been staring at them is “… nice. He helps me sometimes.”
She asks Kim what Einar is doing now. “He’s waving back.” Now Einar can look and be related. The film’s closing words are spoken by Ingrid to herself or perhaps to us after having imagined herself lying in front of Morten, touching her genitals.
“We’ll make it work. He just has to stop being so boring.”
This is, after all, even on the surface, a story about a couple that for years has been unable to have a child. That, as much as the blind- ness, appears to be the hidden defect. In her blindness, Ingrid finds creativity in all senses of the word, and Morten is able to prove his ability to love, to believe in love in uniting Einar and Elin, and to create new life despite “being so boring.”
In the end, we see that Blind is a tale, a fantasy, about love and relatedness overcoming real and perceived defects, culminating in an act of creation.
Published originally in the PANY Bulletin Fall, 2015