The Blind Spots Of The Blind Side
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
The news is everywhere. Retired NFL star Michael Oher — commonly affiliated with John Lee Hancock’s 2009 Best Picture nominee The Blind Side — has publicly denounced what was allegedly not a proper adoption but rather a conservatorship agreement set up by the Tuohy family (Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy famously welcomed the struggling Oher into their family and helped him with his football career); what this means is that, according to Oher, the Tuohys retained any money that he could have earned through royalties for themselves. I’m not going to get into these details because I am a film critic and columnist and not a litigious fellow, but this news prompted many to recount The Blind Side, particularly because of the fondness people have for this film. With this recent revelation, it feels impossible to hold the film’s story and message in any sort of regard.
I was indifferent to The Blind Side. I saw it once in theatres and found it bland (perhaps mediocre at best), but I got around to rewatching it for the first time in over thirteen years in response to these allegations. If a film could age like sour milk left out in the boiling heat, then The Blind Side is days-old cheese left on the sun’s surface itself. The Blind Side is four continents over from mediocre. Bad doesn’t even begin to describe it. However, I will also not get into the filmic reasons why this film is bad because that’s not what my focus is today. Instead, I will use The Blind Side as the pitch-perfect example of why white-saviour films are such a problem (in case it wasn’t so blatantly obvious).
The term has been used quite frequently, but in case you missed it, white saviour films (or narratives) are ones where persons of colour depend on the strength, wit, or capabilities of white people; you will also find that there are similar films where the stories are focused more on how the white characters are benefitting from these events in what should be the stories of other races (see how Green Book is based more on Tony Lip being shaped and bettered by learning than it is about the difficulties Dr. Don Shirley faced as a Black pianist travelling through the south). I think the big misconception people have is that the label of “white saviour films” discredits white stories. This simply is not the case. What is happening instead is the realization that voices are being silenced in favour of others for problematic reasons. Is it an issue that Green Book is told through Tony Lip’s perspective? Not exactly. Is it an issue when Dr. Shirley is reduced to being a flawless character that Lip has to be coddled by to stop being as racist as he is? Yes. It’s a bad look, and it’s also flat-out poor writing regardless of how problematic it is.
The Blind Side has this kind of writing in spades and the resurgence of this film’s place in pop culture is an opportunity to get into what how concerning this writing truly is (it often gets shrugged off as harmless, when that couldn’t be further from the truth). Firstly, this encourages the rewriting of history via untruths. Oher wasn’t clueless about football when he met the Tuohy family. In fact, it was a sport he followed and understood. It was a game he was already playing and one that he excelled at. However, in The Blind Side, it’s implied that he picked up more and more on the sport through the Tuohy family’s compulsive viewing of games, so the film doesn’t even give him the dignity of allowing him to even be a fan of the game; even this passion has to have come from someone else. At least Green Book has Tony Lip learning from Dr. Shirley, albeit in his own peculiar, stubborn way. The Blind Side is exclusively Oher learning from the Tuohy family. The Tuohys only learn about Michael Oher (who he is, where he came from, and his upbringing), but never from him. Meanwhile, Oher is someone who can barely think for himself and is told everything of value to him by the Tuohy family, as if he couldn’t make it out of a paper bag until he is given instructions. Yeesh.
We can only dig deeper from here. Oher is made out to be a kid that struggled in school academically. Even if this was factual (which it apparently isn’t), the way The Blind Side depicts Oher as a character that feels akin to Forrest Gump is viciously insulting. His intelligence quotient is said to be a mediocre eighty in the film quite early on, and he is shown struggling to even comprehend basic sentences when reading or writing. Again, even if this was how Oher really was as a person, the insensitivity of The Blind Side is astronomical: he is painted out to be a hopeless moron that can only be pulled out of these pits of despair by other people. Stories can tactfully show someone in need of help and those that assist them, but The Blind Side doesn’t know how this is feasible.
This film isn’t about how Oher defied the odds or got into the NFL with the help of loving people. It’s about how the Tuohys took in this kid and became the most admirable family in the United States. There’s a huge difference. There’s a pivotal scene many will remember quite early on when Oher is given a proper place to sleep when all parties agree that he will be staying with the Tuohys for longer than expected. Oher brings up that he’s never had “one” before. Leigh Anne remarks that this is his first room to himself. Oher corrects her and states that this is his first bed. It’s a rare moment where the film feels sincere with what it is trying to accomplish, but then you notice the exact same tactic utilized at least a couple of times afterward to the point that you will be screaming “We get it! Mike Oher didn’t have anything and now he has everything!”
This heavy-handedness is what many white saviour films use to get their points across because they typically don’t have a properly fleshed-out story to deliver. Instead, they have tropes. X person does Y to better Z person who can’t cope on their own. Of course, the film implies that Leigh Anne Tuohy is a force to be reckoned with that plays by her own rules, but because of the narrative choppiness that doesn’t explore her character enough, what she does just kind of happens. She marches across the gridiron during football practice and calls the shots. She hounds the coach during a match by calling him via mobile phone. She just winds up in the ghetto where Oher once lived and confronts potentially dangerous people. You can sense this invisible veil surrounding her that will protect her from all harm. That isn’t how life works. Had we gotten more familiar with her as a person and what makes her tick, many of these actions would read better. But we don’t get this exposure. We instead are taught “This character is perfect and everything else falls into place”.
So much of the film provides a voice for the Tuohy family and not for Oher, and it comes as no surprise that he apparently had very little to do with the actual production of the film (even though it relies on him almost entirely to exist). In this following clip, we can see much of what I have discussed already. Leigh Anne pauses a practice that she doesn’t actually run to tell Oher some pointers. Despite how great Sandra Bullock is in this scene (and almost all of them), her monologue renders Oher useless. Had The Blind Side made Oher realize how much the Tuohy family means to him with him having a great practice and then telling his folks that he imagined them as his teammates, we’d have a story where a character develops and becomes a stronger person on their own. Instead, The Blind Side cannot let him actually grow. He must be spoon-fed at almost every turn.
The Blind Side suffers from poor story structure and characterization across the board. Daughter Collins Tuohy seems to be a little perturbed by Oher’s inclusion into the family until she has a change of heart on a dime and is suddenly thrilled that he’s her new brother. Was she a little racist? Threatened? Who knows because the film never dives into this subplot and instead just skims off of the top of the context here. Son S.J. is written like a forty-year-old man in a young kid’s body who feels like both Oher’s sidekick and guardian angel, which is just ludicrous in any way you can imagine it. He “teaches” Oher much about football, and these scenes read like The Great Gazoo trying to get Fred Flintstone to listen to his instructions. Father Sean Tuohy is reduced to a bit of a pushover who lets his wife dictate everything, so he naturally just comes around all in favour of making Oher’s supposed adoption as effortless as possible. When it comes to the Tuohy family, there is almost zero conflict. They are here to be Oher’s miracle workers.
The only possible threshold they must cross is late in the film when Oher is approached via investigation as it is suspected that he only wants to attend the University of Mississippi because he was groomed into playing for the institute that the Tuohys are affiliated with. This proves to be an even bigger problem for Oher who distances himself from the Tuohys and returns to the ghetto, where he is almost killed in a matter of hours. Once he is under the Tuohy roof again, he is safe. As for the Tuohys themselves, Oher quickly changes his mind and believes that they didn’t have any ill will regarding which university he wished to play football for (he ultimately decides to pick “Ole Miss” anyway because that’s where his family went, making these sequences next to pointless).
Everything that happens is either for Oher to depend on the Tuohy family or for the Tuohy family to appear sinless. I don’t think a film about this story is good in hindsight because of what Oher has stated recently, but back in 2009, such a concept isn’t the worst idea. It’s how the film is shaped that is the issue. Without even bringing up the plethora of fundamental filmmaking errors here, The Blind Side prioritizes its central focus — making the Tuohys look impeccable — over everything else, including what the real story is: how a kid got from the bottom of society into the big leagues. His chapter with the Tuohys is only a part of the whole picture. When people claim they have issues with white saviour stories, this is what they are talking about: the diluting of a person to being nothing more than plot points and character traits of another.
Don’t start some campaign to take back Bullock’s Academy Award (I’ve already seen petitions form). She just did her job (and a great one at that), had nothing to do with the true story, and is going through enough with the loss of her partner. If that’s what you take from this article, you’ve missed the point entirely. The Blind Side does not take its audience seriously, nor does it actually honour what race-related films can accomplish with proper conversations about societal injustices and achievements. The very title — based on the football term referring to the area where a left or right tackle can protect another player — implies that Oher needed the Tuohy family to get to his goal, which may be true to varying degrees but it is quite a problematic title in hindsight; it literally admits that it is a white saviour film as early as possible. The only thing that has aged well about this title is the apparent discovery that Michael Oher was blindsided by the Tuohy family; if this is true, then The Blind Side only looks far worse as a film that tells one perspective of another person’s story.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.