Sandra Bullock has won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in The Blind Side. This is one of my favorite films, and her performance is largely responsible for that. If there ever was a rendering of Nietzsche's idealized nobleman, it is her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.
(SPOILER ALERT!)
When she decided to help Michael, she did not try to feel his pain, help him in some passive way, look down on him, or try to appeal to a mythical status as a "special" person. Each of these is some combination of counterproductive, impossible, or condescending. She acted out of pure, overflowing generosity and took an active role in raising him up. When she knew she was right, she never asked for permission to do anything, much to the chagrin of weaker-willed and less wise people. When Michael was threatened by a common thug, her response was not to run and hide, since that would have left the problem unresolved; nor did she try to appeal the thug's "better nature," since a thug has none. She threatened violence, preferably at her own hand, in return. It worked.
Not surprisingly, this movie has generated a little dogpile of controversy. Perhaps most oddly, one reviewer, who at press time had not even seen it, pondered how it was that a "sports movie" could be Oscar material. If he had bothered to see it before writing that, he would have known that The Blind Side is not a sports movie. My first thought-out impression of it, which left my lips about three minutes after walking out of the theater, was that it is a movie which happens to be about about a poor black youth being adopted by a rich white family and who goes on to be drafted by the NFL, but is not a movie about class, race, or sports.
Predictably, however, the race issue simply will not die. That particular reviewer might have had a point about the movie's emphasis on the "pathologies the black gentle giant has escaped: the crack-addicted mother, the thugs of the country-ghetto housing project," but for the fact that, in not-terribly-fictionalized terms, it really happened. Michael Oher's biological mother was (is?) addicted to crack cocaine, and his biological father was murdered. For that same reason, it really happened, Ms. Anderson's bilious critique of the movie's portrayal of "the white folks who took him in" has no real ground to stand on. It is pure resentment. The truth hurts: we're not all white devils. Perhaps Dr. King would ask Ms. Anderson to judge the Tuohys, both real and fictionalized, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their [generous, patient, and uplifting] character."
Finally, Ms. Anderson calls it cynicism that Michael's adoptive father would remark that "Michael's gift is his ability to forget." This is not cynicism; it is is a cold, hard fact of life that we must forget a little bit in order to move on from the pain we have suffered. This is why Michael is far from the "superfluous" victim of white propaganda that she makes him out to be. Were it not for this remarkable trait of forgetting and not being bitter (just like the real Michael Oher), Michael could never have been free. This is because he not only had to be free from a terrible past, but free for a brighter future. The former is primarily external, but the latter must come from within. As he so frequently did, Nietzsche said it best: "Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your fiery eyes should tell me: free for what?" If you don't know this about Michael by the end of the film, you weren't paying attention.
Once again, congratulations Ms. Bullock, and thank you.
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