We saw “Blind”, a Korean movie, for this assignment. In the movie, we follow the woman Soo-ah who became blind in a car accident three years ago. She “witnesses” a crime and helps a police to find the perpetrator, even though her involvement makes her a subject to the perpetrator’s murderous wrath.
I found it hard to find blatant errors in the movie, maybe because I don’t have experience with being blind myself, nor have I met many blind people. However, I did notice that the protagonist seemed to be very good at finding her way as blind, and her sense of smell and hearing seemed very acute. While other senses usually get better when another is worse, I’m not sure if I buy that they get better so quickly. But maybe it’s just me who underestimate the brain’s plasticity.
Another thing I found curious was that she has lights turned on in her apartment sometimes. There are a few reasons for this that I can think of: perhaps the lights are for the dog or some plants (not that I saw any in the movie). Maybe the lamp is lit to show potential burglars that someone’s home. Or maybe it’s just for us, the audience, so that we can see what’s going on.
When Soo-ah gets out of the taxi she knows in which direction to go. The street is tilted upwards and she probably knows from where the car drove, and she has probably traveled there many times, but she seems very sure on which direction her destination is.
I’m not entirely sure how she drops a washing machine (?) in front of a door in order to trap the murderer in the other room. While it’s not impossible, it seems like she knew the distance between the machine and the door very accurately. For me, it’s hard to see how to estimate this distance without vision.
I’m also not sure what’s happening in the scene where she sets fire to the perpetrator. It seems like she knows where a mirror is placed, and manages to time to move away from it just when she is about to get hit by a bat. Instead, the murdered hits the mirror, and I guess the lit match she was holding is dropped on gasoline. Where the gasoline comes from is unclear, but I’d assume Soo-ah had poured it out and planned to set it on fire when the murderer was standing in it.
Finally, she managed to time her final hit on the murderer very accurately, even though she had never used the vibration tool before. I assume that a new aid would take some time to learn how to use it. Maybe she got lucky.
There are many things I wonder about a blind person’s daily life. A few interesting observations I had from the movie was Soo-ah’s cell phone, computer, and make-up.
The phone itself seemed like a quite normal phone except that it exclaimed things like “answer call” and such. How she found the correct name to call someone herself I still don’t understand; I just saw that she slid her fingers up a list of names.
Unfortunately, the scene when she uses her computer is very brief, but she had some kind of special keyboard. I wonder how it works and how a blind person finds their way to a specific website. I couldn’t hear if the key presses generated some audio feedback, but maybe it did?
I also found it fascinating that she bothered with make-up. Sure, she didn’t use mascara or eyeliner (which I can only imagine must be a nightmare to use without being able to see), but she used powder and lipstick with great care.
Non-excluding Design 