My students loved movie days.  Some a bit too much – Yay!  Awesome!  It’s movie day! – come on, please try to contain the excitement, I wasn’t that unentertaining.  I really worked on my stand-up game for class, not bad even if I say so myself.

In any case, I used to show “Blindness” based on Nobel Prize author Josê Saramago’a book, starring Julianne Moore, an un-Hulk like Mark Ruffalo, and a very unlikable Gael Garcia Bernal.

The brief synopsis – a worldwide contagion of blindness occurs, panic ensues, chaos reigns.  The first group of those affected gets sent to quarantine at an abandoned asylum.  Except one of them, Moore, can still see.  No one else knows.  She takes care of the others, fighting off predators and guards, watches her husband Ruffalo cheat on her.  There are multiple scenes difficult to watch, this was before trigger warnings came into fashion, today I probably couldn’t show it.

My students would leave stunned and disturbed after viewing it.  One even asked me specifically whether I would debrief them, he was so thrown off his guard.  Because I had to watch it so many times, I was desensitized and probably didn’t pay enough attention to discussing its lessons.  

I used the movie to illustrate servant leadership – to lead in order to serve, to serve in order to lead, to make others better, at great cost.  Exactly the opposite I saw in the news and personal experience.

In the movie, the others regain their sight after Moore leads them to safety.  In the book, the government executes her.

The more mature and seasoned me would have drawn the connection with MLK, JFK, Lincoln, Gandhi, and others in the same vein.