A Dearth of Vision

I used to go to the movies a lot. I loved the movies. I loved the big screen, the popcorn, the transient, sweet sense of being in communion with the rest of the audience. I loved, still love, the accumulation in my memory of scenes, shots, dialogue and soundtracks, of heroes and villains and stars, all available for delicious recall, forever. I didn’t even mind waiting in line.

But about five years ago, this pleasure of the movies or, more precisely, of going to the movies, began falling victim to sabotage by the advancing symptoms of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited, progressive condition that is killing off the photoreceptor cells in my eyes. Everybody has a couple of normal blind spots, two points where the line of sight is obstructed by the internal physiology of the eye. But with RP, as it’s called, the world becomes a canvas of paint splatters, a city seen in time-lapse photographs taken at night with its lights blinking out.

And so it went, for me, with movies: Images, no matter how brightly shot and projected, get dismembered and disappear on their way back to me from the screen, victims of a retinal death squad. Light and dark, foreground and background compete for visibility as if I were a cheap camera without exposure settings. Just as in real life, for me, backlit faces and figures become mysterious silhouettes.

Important bits of business--love scenes in darkened rooms, money changing hands under tables, the lifted eyebrow--are completely lost. Fast cutting makes action scenes look like strobe-lit Rorschach patterns. At “Schindler’s List,” I had to sneak out two hours into the epic-length picture and walk around the lobby for 20 minutes. I was exhausted, not by sorrow and pity for the Holocaust’s victims but for myself.

These days, I wait for a movie to be released on video. I pull the 20-inch RCA up close and crank up the brightness and contrast beyond all normal measure, and it’s not so bad. Which is not to say I don’t miss the big screen, the communal experience of watching a movie with a theater full of strangers; I do. So when I got a postcard inviting me to attend a premiere demonstration of Theater Vision, my curiosity and hope were aroused.

The big theater at Paramount Studios is filled to capacity with people who don’t fit the usual movie audience profile, all of us either partially sighted or totally blind. For the promise of Theater Vision, we have come to watch, or at least sit in the presence of, Paramount’s 1994 blockbuster “Forrest Gump.” Theater Vision, the card explained, broadcasts an audio description track by FM signal, thus allowing even the blind to “watch” movies.

Since the passage of the 1991 Americans With Disabilities Act, the vision-impaired have been regaled with a host of adaptive modifications to the public environment. We have Braille-encoded ATM keypads and elevator buttons. We have chirping traffic lights, at least in such benign cities as Santa Monica. And now a technology to enable the blind to “access,” as they are wont to say, the movies?

I’m skeptical that Theater Vision will restore what I’ve most been missing--the small gestures, the visual details. Still, as I wiggle the button speaker into my left ear and turn on the palm-sized receiver, I have hopes. Hopes that Theater Vision will be a revelation. That it will be like standing blind on the floor of Yosemite Valley while the perfect guide--poet, painter, forest ranger and geologist all in one--makes the hooded visage of Half Dome, the implacable face of El Capitan, the skinny, sparkling tumble of Yosemite Falls all body forth in my visual cortex like virtual reality.

Finally, after a round of speeches and a youth chorus performing two inspirational songs that make the treacly “We Are the World” of 10 years ago sound as edgy as heavy metal by comparison, the house lights go down and the curtain parts. Our descriptive soundtrack narrator, sportscaster Vin Scully, reads the opening credits and then tells us, “A feather floats down through the sky over downtown Atlanta.”

I can see that (the feather shot is brightly lit and held for a long time), although I wouldn’t have known it was Atlanta. Fine. Then here comes Forrest (Tom Hanks), who sits himself down on a bus stop bench next to this poor African American woman, who is probably footsore and weary after a long day of something like domestic labor, and whom the script forces to submit to Forrest’s unsolicited monologue. Rosa Parks as the Wedding Guest.

We are taken through the travails of Forrest’s handicapped boyhood. His miraculous, redemptive discovery that he cannot only walk, after all, but run like the wind, the blossoming of the friendship that will become his first love, his audience with JFK.

All through this, I am fiddling with the little earpiece, trying to get Scully’s voice to come in clearly. And even though the copy he is reading seems a little dull, still I appreciate being tipped off as to what I should try to focus on. Until the dullness becomes exasperating.

Forrest’s girlfriend wants to relieve him of his blessedly oblivious virginity. Forrest doesn’t seem to be getting her seductive drift. So she, young, lovely and inexplicably longing for his goofy touch, makes the simple, cunning gesture of removing her blouse. Her back is to the camera. I can see we’re being shown Forrest’s face, the reaction shot. But I can’t see his expression, just his silhouette sitting motionless across from her silhouette. Having seen Tom Hanks in many roles before the RP took hold, I try to picture him showing astonishment. I want to hear something like, “Forrest’s jaw drops. His eyes tell us that even he, slow, simple Forrest, knows this moment will be forever indelible.” The script directions probably read like this. All I get from Theater Vision, though, is something like “Forrest just stares.”

“Forrest just stares?” I feel betrayed, disconsolate, peevish. I silently curse every real and imagined flaw of the film. But I keep watching, waiting for the Theater Vision revelation, hoping against hope, valiantly trying to suspend disbelief.

But then Forrest arrives in Vietnam to the accompaniment of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and it all breaks down for me. As the dark, slashing guitar chords erupt from Paramount’s monster sound system and pound the auditorium like a Rolling Thunder bombing run, I realize that this is the first moment of “Forrest Gump” I’ve enjoyed, and the enjoyment is purely auditory. “There must be some kinda way out of here,” insists Hendrix, and by the time the song fades, I have plucked the bug out of my ear, pushed my way past a row of bent knees in the dark and made it out to the lobby, which has been set up for a post-screening reception.

Eyesight to the blind? I don’t think so. This Theater Vision thing hasn’t restored my failing vision with words; that’s what poetry does. Pablo Neruda describes waves breaking against the cliffs like spider webs. He says Death is standing in the harbor, dressed in the uniform of an admiral. These images, I can see. “Forrest just stares,” I can’t. I drop the little black receiver onto one of the white damask-covered refreshment tables and walk out.

I love the movies as much as the next person. Until they started getting optically elusive, movies entertained, informed and sometimes even inspired me all my life, from the postwar Nazi-hunter and cowboy-hero Saturday serials I saw as a kid to “Zorba the Greek” (“The one unforgivable sin is when a woman calls you to her bed and you do not go”) and “Annie Hall” (“I understand that all the good meetings are taken”) and “Chinatown” (“Don’t chew the Venetian blinds, Curly”) and too many others, high and low, American and foreign, to name here.

And, with cinema’s slow fade to black, I feel the loss of cultural coin, especially in Los Angeles, where movies and the business of making them are followed with more ardor and fidelity than the play of world events.

But, to paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s great closing line in “The Enforcer,” you’ve got to know your limitations. Movies for the blind? With narration as evocative as a 15-second stock market report on the evening news? I’d give up “Touch of Evil,” “Atlantic City” and all of Scorsese and just get somebody to read me a good book.