Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23: 8996, 2006

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509200590490592
Blindness and Affect: Daredevils Site/Sight
PETRA KUPPERS
This essay focuses on the relation between vision and location: sight and site. Contemporary
lm theory has moved from an analysis of representation towards an analysis of affects.
It has also moved from a linguistic understanding of the working of lm to one that
is an embrace of the body as the location of reception: a nexus of social, cultural, and
phenomenological information and affects. The body as sight and sitethese are themes
I wish to play with in this essay, focusing on the representation of blindness in the DVD
release of Daredevil (Dir. Mark Steven Johnson, 2003). In order to bring these issues to
new media and the specic audience address of the DVD, I rst want to look back, to
some of the rst moments of cinema. In Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, Giuliana Bruno
investigated a microhistorical case as she looks at Naples rst movie theatre. Before its
history as a cinema, the place served as a hall for anatomy demonstrationsa practice that
left traces in the lms and practices exhibited there once it became a lm house. In her
analysis, she suggests that this cinemas location and use provide a lens through which to
see early cinemas fascination with the bodys landscape, in particular the womans body.
Her discussion is based around the practices of doctors, in particular, a man called Camillo
Negro.
Negro created the equivalents to neurologist Jean-Martin Charcots photographs of
hysterics in the French hospital Salpetriere by lming both hysterical subjects and his
healing procedures. Negros method consisted of pressing his sts hard into the pelvis
of the hysterical woman (rearranging their internal organs). In 1908, lms of these and
other procedures were shown in the Ambrosio Biograph movie theatre of Naples. In these
entertainments, the female body, its pathology, and violence enacted on it replaced the street
scene as mainstay of early cinematic practices, and joined sex scene and visual jokes on the
cinematic screen. Bruno sums up a contemporaneous reviewer of Negros presentations:
A lm reviewer pinpointed the threshold lm/anatomy/(psycho)analysis,
stating that the white lm screen was transformed into a vertical anatomy
table (1993; 73, citing DallOlio, 1908).
Medical spectacle, sexual/sensual excitement about naked women, and projection
mergeits this shift between planes (horizontal/vertical) and spatial re-arrangement that
I wish to pursue throughout this essay. In talking about visual excitement and anatomy,
Petra Kuppers is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant College, Rhode Island.
She is also Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series. Her book, Disability and
Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, appeared in December 2003 with Routledge, and her
new manuscript, provisionally entitled Bodily Fantasies: Medical Visions/Medical Performances,
focuses on the use of medical imagery in contemporary art and culture.
89
90 Petra Kuppers
Bruno cites Siegfried Kracauer, an early 20th century critic who has written about the life of
the city. He has coined such sonorous terms as the ornament of the masses, and he called
cinema the Gesamtkunstwerk of effects. In Abschied von der Lindenpassage, (Farewell to
the Linden Passage) 1940, he writes about the traveling properties of the modern city, and
its transporting mechanisms in the form of the shopping arcade and the cinema. He focuses
his thoughts by remembering his own times in the Lindenpassage, a gallery passageway
of shops and other city entertainment offerings, due to be demolished at the time of his
writing, a site/sight of which he now takes fond farewell.
That Lindenpassage gallery is a place of memories, and a lens for the collecting
of images. In this famous essay, Kracauer bemoans its passing, and he remembers the
good times, when, as a student, he hang out there (like contemporary students spending
time at the American equivalent to these passages, the mall). Memories evoked by the
marble-clad place include fantasies of lakes of blood, where fantastical city crimes had
been committedthats how the young Kracauer imagined the passage, before he rst saw
it. For him, the times of the Passage, the passage, was a time of excavating that which
bourgeois morals kept at bay: that which is very near, and that which is very far. It was a
place of extremes, of the forbidden, of lure and desire, of dead bodies, womens bodies,
and ones own mysterious body.
It is the place der Leib und Bild miteinander verbindet (50) that connects body and
image: the place of window-shopping becomes the place where body as experience and
image meet. One of the attractions of the arcade was an anatomy museum. Here, you
could see the mysteries of the human body, and in particular, the female body. A doctor
demonstrated an anatomy session to curious onlookers, excavating the organs out of a
waxen female body. (And if you happen to be an adult, which I gather Kracauer wasnt
for some time-span of these reminiscences, you could see special exhibits about venereal
disease).
The other images of the passage that deal with that which is extraneous to the settled
bourgeois body are the fascinating images of traveling, all offered for sale in a small shop
dedicated to travel souvenirs. Buy your little world fantasies herehave the world in the
palm of your hand. Kracauer remembers an old panorama that was hidden deep in the
bowels of the Passage: a panorama of the world that was now replaced by the fantasy
machine of the cinema. The Lindenpassage, then, was a place of precarious and titillating
experiences, combining the near and the far, the visual and the visceral.
The fascination with the other is palpable in Kracauers prose. The work of the passage,
later replaced by cinema, is a visual and memory transportation device, allowing you to see
things you can only fantasize about. The panorama, the anatomy theatre, and lm take you
where you are not, and open up a world of fantasy encounters.
Both Brunos archeology of cinema sites/sights and Kracauers place of memory,
then, trafc in the elemental moments of fantasy: other bodies, other places, other ways
of being in places. In the main cinematic text I am going to focus on, Daredevil, this
fascination with the other body and the other panorama of the city becomes the core of a
cinematic fantasy. Contemporary lm-making in the post-cinematic period relies on a host
of new technologies for its creation and receptionsurveillance cameras, hand-held cheap
technology, internet-streaming and distribution, IMAX challenges to traditional feature-
formats, etcthese are all examples of the proliferating practices of post-cinematic media.
As always, deep connections exist between technologies and content, and in this essay, I
wish to pay attention to the sensory specics of these moments, and I want to link them
back to the host of bourgeois titillations described by Kracauer.
Daredevils Site/Sight 91
With this, I also bring a specic frame into the viewnder of cinematic studies: a
performance analysis, or an attention to the lived, phenomenological moment unfolding in
the reception situationsimilar to the memory work of Kracauers narration of the arcades
effect on his life as a boy and young student. But let me dene rst what I mean with the
subjects of new media: An iconic example of post-studio, new media cinema production
is The Blair Witch Project (Dirs. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999). In it, we nd
the following juxtaposition: At the center of the lm, and at the center of the production
and reception machinery, are students who are very media-savvy, who are both able to
comment on the production of mass-market imagery, and able to deal with the technology
of video making. In the narrative, they meet the forest: a place where their technological
skills are useless to them in terms of their survival. The phenomenological experience of
being lost in the woods is interestingly captured and intensied by the hand-held cameras
and by the students willingness to use their cameras as intimate recording devices. In this
plot, high technology meets the dark places of pre-technological intensity. This scenario
has become a pretty standard feature of the incredibly successful teen-ick horror scene.
The body, disoriented in an unfamiliar landscape, often accessed through media technology,
becomes vulnerable and the terrain of a hunt. Technology mediates the horror, but is useless
in warding off the source of horric dismemberment. At the heart of these lms, the body
is exposed as the scene of weak esh, stripped off the carapaces of civilization, and unable
to withstand the onslaught.
Daredevil shares some features with this new foundation narrative of contemporary
cinematics: a body and its perception upset by movement in strange locations. But it is
of a different ilk than The Blair Witch Project: sleeker, with a full Hollywood production
budget, but emerging out of a similar aesthetic lodged in individual sensorial experience,
visceral affect, and webbed communication networks. I want to speak about Daredevil as an
example of a new media product that addresses different embodiment issues and disability
issues in interesting and seductive ways.
For those of you who are not familiar with the old Marvel comic hero, or with the new
Hollywood lm, Daredevil is a dark superhero, in the Batman vein. He became disabled as
a child, when he ran into a vat of acid. He is blind, but, like many disabled super-heroes,
he is a supercrip: he has the ability to see by focusing on sound waves washing over his
environment. This incredibly heightened sensory access allows him to swing freely across
the rooftops and canons of New York, his particular Gotham, save people, and punish
perpetrators as obsessively as Batman did.
From a disability studies perspectives, Daredevil presents a pretty standard narrative
in which blindness stands for heightened non-visual perception skills, and for supreme
if childlike black and white morality. The lm also milks a form of Christ-like
martyrdomDaredevil is a good catholic boy, and guilt and devotion frame the narrative.
But beyond that, the lm offers an interesting amalgamation of sensory framings and
playfulness that speak in a different way to diversity issues. Daredevil is interested
in different kind of enworldedness, forms of being physically and sensorially in the
world.
This emphasis on phenomenology also characterizes many critical approaches to
cinema. The cinema of rollercoaster rides invites immersion and participation, and plays
with sensory overloadRobert Stam calls it the cinema of sensation, and Rick Altman
likens it to the experience of a rock concert. Sensory access and phenomenological readings
have made a thematic renaissance at the same time as new media and their address to the
sensorium entered the academic eld of critical theorywriters such as Laura Marks and
Vivian Sobchak have shaped a new interest in these approaches to the subjects sensory
92 Petra Kuppers
experience in the cinema, and a line of lm criticism drawing from Deleuze investigates
sense affect (see, for instance, Kennedy).
In particular, Maurice Merleau-Pontys work has become part of this renewed interest
in embodiment and sensorics. He writes about the blind mans access to the world:
The blind mans stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer
perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the
scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. (1962: 143)
With this, and with many other examples of disabilitys difference, Merleau-Ponty stresses
competence in the experience of enworldedness: the blind mans body is habituated to and
skilled in his interaction with his sensory data.
If one leaves aside the supercrip aspects of Daredevils persona, it is this habituation
to his world that is at the heart of the Daredevil lm. His disability becomes emblematic
of the city he moves in: sound pervades everything, and its a noisy, close and dirty city of
sensorial overload. Daredevil moves in this world fully adapted, fully enabled: he is a child
of this city.
But beyond a narrative analysis, I wish to focus on dispersed identication and visceral
affect in this cinematic text. How are we as spectator/viewers/auditors drawn into the
spectacle that is Daredevil?
In its DVD package, Daredevil is as much about the making of Daredevil as about
the actual narrative developed in its plota narrative already citational and pastiche in its
reference to the old comics. Like many contemporary media products, Daredevil is packed
with extras, special features, commentaries, etc. On the level of the lm itself, special
effects and the mechanics of vision appear very prominently: while they are integrated into
the narrative, they also bulge out of it, arresting it, and playing with its certainties. Watching
Daredevil is a rollercoaster ride, predicated on immersion and kinesthetic sensation, like
the Matrix movies (1999, Matrix Reloaded, 2003, Matrix Revolutions, 2003, all directed
by Andy and Larry Wachowski) or a whole number of other contemporary vehicles.
This multiplicity of attentions and audience addresses lend themselves to a form of
dispersed identication: a meta-level of narrational involvement that can identify both with
the characters and their plight and with various thematized lmmaking positions. Multiple
narratives open up when this new media product is investigated in this light: beyond the
narrative of the lm, another track of the DVD audio option offers us a ride along with the
director and producer, listening to their commentary on the why and how of the images
we see. Like spectators watching a doctor addressing them, and manipulating the womans
dead or hysteric body, the audiences of the Blair Witch or of Daredevil are invited to admire
both the skill of the director, the materiality of the medium (be it lm, DVDs, or fragile
human esh), and the opening for fantastical knowledges about dark and other places. This
last pleasure is opened up by another commentary option: it is possible to watch the whole
lm with an audio description mode. This mode is traditionally associated with disability
access.
Visually impaired viewers can listen via induction loops to this commentary in cinemas
appropriately equipped. Interestingly, disability access is clearly not the focus for including
the audio description on the DVD: its presence is not mentioned on the DVD package
(although the other alternative language access modes are listed). This means that this
highly desirable feature for this particular consumer segment is not highlighted to them.
Indeed, in an informal survey of visually impaired DVD users on disability e-lists, I
found not one who was aware that the Daredevil DVD offered this feature. Clearly, the
Daredevils Site/Sight 93
audio description mode is a gimmick, something aimed at normate (i.e. non-visually
impaired) viewers. By accessing the lm through the audio description mode, a viewer
can precariously experience a different sensory world, a hyper-access of visuals combined
with visual description: blindness becomes a site/sight of fantastical engagement, a play of
what if, allowed by the technology of soundtrack menus. Directorial skill, the material
as matter, and the fascination of the different sensorium, all of these modes of address are
foregrounded in the display theatricals of Daredevil, as well as the nostalgia effect of comic
aesthetics, reminding the slightly older crowd of different childhood pleasures. A further
pleasure offered by Daredevil is on the limits of character/narrative involvement and lmic
materiality: the level of visceral affect.
With visceral affect I refer to the sensory universe created in Daredevil. Like many
other contemporary movies, Daredevils rollercoaster ride involves a visual/audio feast that
tugs at the viewers senses in a form of kinesthetic translation: the visuals set up a sense
of dislocation, of disequilibrium. Watching the hyper-mobile camera roll and skip echoes
in my kinesthetic sense: my own body as viewing body feels echoes of the mobility on
and also of the screen. The echo establishes a shared eld between screen and viewing
spacea form of translatory embodiment, a direct rather than a fantasy effect on the
viewers body. It is easy to see how, within this kind of space aesthetic, Merleau-Pontys
work on phenomenology becomes again resonant for lm studies.
For Merleau-Ponty writing his last, unnished work, visual representation is in a
productive tension with a form of tactility, the physical extension of vision. This tactility
of vision is part of the spatiality of sensate experience:
We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible,
every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility and that there is
encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching,
but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as,
conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without
visual existence. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968:134)
Daredevils frisson between the visceral, the kinesthetic, and the visual, the spectacle, can
be read in the light of this implication of visuality and tactilty as deeply connected sense
experiences.
This sense of a binding element connecting the world is itself visualized and thematized
in the lm: the Daredevil character is able to read the world by a form of sonar or echo:
he reads the sound waves coming to him as they travel over objects in the world, outlining
them for him. The color used to present this sound-images is blue: water, sonar is the
main association that opens up to me. The materiality of the world becomes accessible in
these images. Everything is connectedeverything exists in the same stratum, not in the
separation of vision but in the connectedness of touch.
This emphasis on liquid and its vibrational qualities, its viscosity and extension, can be
found elsewhere in the lm, as well, in particular in the opening scene. The credit scene plays
with the bodily/sensorial difference and with the fascination of the city as a place of visceral
affect. In it, the names of people involved in the production swoop into the eld of vision as
Braille dot arrangement, emerging out of a cityscape and the lightened windows of a city at
night, to dissolve into normal English lettering. The directors audio commentary informs
the viewer that the Braille is actually correct, i.e. the appropriate dot/space translation of the
English wordsbut this knowledge is of course highly specialized, and not accessible to
the people who actually do use Braille as a communication device. No matter how mobile
94 Petra Kuppers
the computer graphics, and how three-dimensional the presentation, these Braille letters
are not for touchingthe way an actual visually impaired person would read them.
At the end of the credit sequence, we are thrust into the lm proper, and the rst
shot echoes the nightly cityscape, which was the base for the credit sequence. We see a
conventional NYC skyline, recognizable from so many movie openings. But as we are
watching this image, its materiality, its character as image becomes accessible: the image
wavers, and it becomes clear that what we are seeing is a reection of the skyline in a
pool of liquid. The medium of the image wavers as a drop disrupts the surface, and as we
continue watching, we see that the medium of the image, the liquid in question, is blood
dripping down from above. Crime, blood, bodies, and city scenes are yet again joined, as
they were in Kracauers account of the Lindenpassage, and in Brunos evocation of the
Naples cinema.
Blood as the basis of the image: the extensive qualities of the liquid I mentioned above
take on yet another charge with this highly evocative bodily matter. Vitality and life, death
and contagion are all connected with blood, and a strange pull of revulsion and kinesthetic
pleasure in the mobile camera combine into a strange cocktail of affects. Temporal distortion
also helps to create a sense of the viscous, the exible, the density of the moment. Blood,
thicker than water, creates a visual/tactile cohesion.
These notions of cohesion, expansion, touch/vision as the center of Daredevils play
with blindness emerge in the rst scene of the young future Daredevils blind life. The boy
is in the hospital: after witnessing a traumatic scene where his beloved father is revealed
as a common thug, the boy runs from the scene of his fathers crime, and right into the
path of a forklift. As the camera mimics his path, I wince in anticipation: it looks as if hes
heading straight for the twin spears of the rolling lift, a move that would lead to the Oedipal
gouging of eyes. But at the last second, the forklift moves sideways, and instead of slashing
the boys eyes, its spears slash a vat of acid, and the scene dissolves as liquid spews from
the wounded vat, right into the trajectory of the boys run.
The next moment is lled with sizzle and tension: we see the abstract image of what
is recognizable as a nerve, zzling and dying with transported energy. The image makes
sense: it references medical photography familiar to contemporary viewers from highly
successful TV shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-present). Just as wax
gures were a stand-in for actual bodies in the Naples anatomy shows, so todays body
thrills are not necessarily predicated on masses of realist gore and blood, but instead
on newer, more contemporary ways of seeing the insides of the human body. Medical
visualization techniques have created visual literacies in the viewers: MRIs, X-Rays, Cat
Scans are no longer densely unreadable, but have become visual conventions. In the same
way, this computer generated vision of a nerve strand is readable, and translates into body
knowledgeits a new form of medical realism, stripped off gore and liquids. For a lm
invested in liquid and viscosity, it is interesting howsqueamishly a burst eye-ball is avoided:
that level of kinesthetic effect reminiscent of Luis Bu nuel (Un Chien Andalou, 1928) is still
reserved for lms outside mainstream distribution.
At the end of the nerve journey, we nd the boy in a hospital bed. A strong, dark,
vibrational sound shakes the foundation of the image, like the step of a giant coming nearer.
Visually, we are cued to the origin of the sound: its the saline solution of the hospital
drip, dripping drop by drop downwards. The boys eyes are covered by a bandage (a sign
of blindness much used in Hollywood cinemas history), but the emphasis on loud sound
alerts us to his sensory world.
Soon, as he looks around himself, bewildered, we become alert to other soundsloud,
intrusive: the cityscape emerges yet again, this time not as a visual convention (such as the
Daredevils Site/Sight 95
reected skyline of the opening credits) but as a aural landscape. And as individual sounds
reach uscar horns, shouts, brakes, motor sounds, chattera blue wash breaks through the
walls of the hospital rooms, like sonar shadows of the sounds origins. The scene becomes
one of sensory overload: sound/vision synesthesia is translated into bodily affect, and the
boy reacts physically to the onslaught, until he cowers in the corner of the room, hiding
from the opening walls. The spell nally breaks, and order is restored when one sound
drowns out the city cacophony: the tolling of church bells. In this regular beat of the bell,
the ashes of blue sonar even out, nd a rhythm. Chaos recedes.
In this scene, everything becomes connected to everything else: the (visually) solid
walls loose their solidity when audio waves becomes the main focus of sensual orientation.
Instead of presenting blindness as a mode of living characterized by isolation and lack of
access to the world, Daredevils imaginative play instead radically opens up the boundaries
of the human embedment in space. Architecture relates now to sound penetrability, and
distance comes to mean differently in a world that is not visually ordered. The city as visual
grid/Braille dots becomes a city of sound waves, of ordered and disordered multiple and
overlapping sites of connection, like a liquid surface set in motion and delivering stimuli
far from the movements place of origin.
With this, Daredevil presents an interesting fantasy of non-normate sense/body
relations, site/sight. The freak here is not so much the now blind boyhis actions later in
adulthood are certainly strange, but more than adequately explained by feelings of guilt,
Catholicism, and original sin (of the father). His disability isnt presented as limiting
or psychologically crippling: his problem is his family background, not his sensorial
difference. Thus, instead of being the site of horror, his blindness becomes the point of
fascination beyond the horric: self and other merge on the boundaries of a visual/cinematic
engagement that mimics and plays seductively with the possibilities of different ways of
seeing the city. Like Kracauers anatomy bodies and world panoramas in the Lindenpassage,
Daredevil arouses and titillates, mixing nearness and farness, allowing for access in different
ways. While playing with the DVD and its different menus and ways of seeing the lm, the
viewer can engage in a ride of bodily difference.
Daredevil opens up a freakshow of blindness. We are back at the site of cinema: the
sight/site of otherness, citing different registers of otherness and their intersection with
cinematic pleasures. The frisson of traveling elsewhere is well captured in Daredevil: the
visceral effects of the swinging, swooshing travels across the upper reaches of New Yorks
rooftops create a tenuous thrill, a form of bodily echo. On the foundation of this physical
echo, difference becomes a theme park ride: vision becomes alienated, different, engaged in
a playful travel. For the duration of these scenes, you too can fantasize what it would be like
to be blind and see with sound echoes. Space and spatial journeys become defamiliarized,
and solidify back in strange (blue) ways: the roller coaster of spatial disorientation confuses
pleasantly the senses, and lures with its simultaneous draw of representational difference
the blind freakand intimate affectentering the senses of blindness. Like Negros early
lm theatre, and Kracauers panorama cum anatomy theatre, Daredevil harks back to the
spatial and embodied pleasures of visual excitement.
Works Cited
Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1992.
Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1993.
96 Petra Kuppers
DallOlio, Mario La Neuropatologia al cinematografo in La Gazzetta di Torino, Turin, Feb. 18th,
1908, npag.
Kennedy, Barbara. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2003.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Abschied von der Lindenpassage. In S. Kracauer: Der verbotene Blick. Ed.
Rosenberg, V Johanna. Leipzig: Reclam, 1992, 4955.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Smith, Colin. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1962.
. The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes. Trans. Lingis, Alphonso.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1991.