Daredevil Message Board

[jumonji]

There was one thing I mentioned in a certain thread (that we need not speak of) that I wanted to get back to. It was introduced obliquely, was somewhat off-topic and got obscured by a bunch of other stuff, and most people probably missed it anyway while doing the sane thing and staying away althogether.

What I did was that I mentioned my uneasiness with the way Matt has to hide his powers and contrasted this with how other superpowered people go about hiding their powers and why I think there is a difference, and why what Matt is doing might be more morally ambiguous. There are, of course, plenty of extenuating factors, and the “act” is ultimately necessary, but I still feel ambivalent about it. (And no, I am in no way suggesting that this is on the same level as acting on both sides of the law or even habitually beating people up).

When I broached this subject, the reaction seemed to be 1) that I was nuts for bringing it up and 2) that what Matt is doing is exactly the same as what anyone else with powers who do not reveal these openly is doing. This opinion can, I suppose, be summarized as “a secret identity is a secret identity is a secret identity.” My take on it was that there is a difference between hiding you powers passively, like Peter Parker who probably doesn’t have to alter his behavior one bit in order to supress whatever urge he might have to climb walls, and doing so actively. Peter’s not climbing walls is just that, and walking around on his two feet probably doesn’t strike him as being the least bit unnatural. He’s not lying so much as not telling the whole truth.

When it comes to Matt it’s not as simple as just saying “well he is blind so the white cane is part of his civilian ‘costume’.” Just so we’re clear on one thing here: blind people in the real world exhibit a whole range of behaviors and employ a number of techniques that vary significantly from how sighted people do things. Many of these techniques are quite efficient and get the job done nicely but they are essentially different due to the obvious need to do things non-visually. Whenever Matt exhibits any such behavior or engages in some form of “blind strategy” that doesn’t come naturally to him, he is in fact putting on a show. Whenever he does something he wouldn’t do when only surrounded by people who know his secret, he is consciously doing something for the sole purpose of hiding his powers. Necessary? Sure. Fake? You bet. However…

… all this is very much dependent on how his senses actually work. In fact, this was part of the reason I asked those question in the radar thread regarding whether or not the radar sense is always “on.” If effectively using his powers (including the radar sense) to make sense of things around him actually requires some non-negligible amount of active concentration, his “act” becomes much less of an act and more of a relaxed state of being. I prefer this interpretation myself for this exact reason (and because it makes his actual skills much more impressive), because the things he does in his everyday life then strike me as much less disingenuous. If using his radar sense to get some image of his surroundings is analogous to flexing a muscle that he may not always choose to flex then he’s completely off the hook as far as I’m concerned. In that case, it really is much closer to what Peter Parker is doing. How all this is supposed to work obviously depends on the writer (and the reader), but Bru/Lark seem to portray the radar sense as not being something he’s constantly tuned in to. Just looking at his actions and the sequence of events after he returns home in issue #104 (this is not a spoiler of any kind, I promise) makes it clear that he is not, in fact, “seeing” things all the time, and there’s even actual “wall touching” going on. So basically, if this is the way his senses work (that is, he needs to concentrate, even just a little, in order to be “less blind”), I have no problem with any of it. If they don’t, it does sort of strike me as me as being kind of morally ambiguous.

So, again, is this something anyone else has though about? Input, comments?
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The Other Murdock Papers

[Francesco]

[Katerine]

I was thinking about this thread a lot at 2:00 this morning, while I was trying to sleep. Had a whole reply worked out in my head, and hopefully I won't completely jumble it up now.

This is actually something that I'd put a lot of thought into over the last few months, and I've arrived at the following conclusion:

Matt was blinded at a fairly young age (by "fairly young," I mean he was probably about 11, although the different books are a little vague on this point. Given how well he adapted, he had to have been pretty young, though). He lost his sight, and in its place, gained an ability that, contrary to what might be popular opinion, does not replace sight, so much as overcompensate for being blind.

He is blind. He cannot see. This means that there are a lot of things, both practical and recreational, that sighted people take for granted, which he simply cannot do:

• He cannot enjoy a TV show or a movie.
  
  
• He cannot "look" at a photograph of Foggy and tell you that the picture is of his best friend (I refuse to believe that it is humanly possible to translate a two-dimensional image designed for sighted people, into a three-dimensional image of a person you've never actually *seen*, solely by touch. In one of Millar's storylines, he identified a photo of his father by touch - the only way I can think of that he's could do that, is if he owns the same photo of his father, knows it to be of his father, and knows what that photograph feels like. Otherwise, he can probably tell the difference between a picture of a person and a picture of... a river, but that's about it.
  
  
• He cannot drive (early comics notwithstanding, he has very little way of reading traffic lights, and no way at all of reading traffic signs).
  
  
• He cannot describe a person to somebody else in a way that they would find even remotely useful.

And so on. There are many other things as well that sighted people can do, that he lost the ability to do when he was blinded.

My point is that being blind, especially when he was a kid, was probably a very traumatic, scary, and painful experience for him. It was traumatic because of what happened with his father afterwards (the whole blackmail thing). It was scary because he was told he was never going to see again, and because, in addition to being blinded, he was assaulted by a whole bunch of other senses that he had no basis for understanding. And it was painful because, well... a canister of radioactive waste exploded in his eyes and got into his bloodstream.

Now imagine that you're a teacher, or another kid, at Matt's school. Matt comes back to school after being blinded, and everybody fawns over him because they feel sorry for him. He's clearly blind. But then, you see that he can find the doors and hallways, dodge people, and do all sorts of other things without using his cane.

What are you going to think? Are you going to think that maybe you were wrong in your assumptions about what a blind kid should and should not be able to do? No. I guarantee you - your first thought is that he found a way to fake being blind in order to get attention. And you're going to confront him about it, and accuse him of faking being blind.

Now imagine you're Matt. You're still in a lot of physical pain from the accident, you've been told that you're never going to see again, and you're still trying to get a handle on how to make sense of everything screaming in your ears. And now somebody is accusing you of faking the whole thing.

It would only take one or two times for this to happen, for Matt to come to the conclusion that it is much, MUCH better to live down to people's expectations, rather than confront that accusation again, and again, and again.

In one early comic (I think it was from the Lee/Ditko era, actually), Matt contemplates that he feels so much freer to be himself when he's being Daredevil. Because then, he doesn't have to pretend to be more helpless than he really is. But really, he has to pretend when he's being DD too - he's pretending to be sighted. He can't just let people know the truth either way, because sighted people have so many preconceptions that they just can't handle the truth.

Anyway, that's just the way I look at it. Wholly aside from the point made before about how it's necessary to hide his secret identity, I think the "deception" started long before Daredevil came into being, and it's not about pretending - it's about psychological survival.

[jumonji]

It's one thirty in the morning and I should be sleeping, but... I just wanted to post a reply before I went to bed. Knowing, me it won't be quick or concise, but I'll do my best.

Additional thoughts on the whole idea of "faking it": I completely see the need for him to do the "fully" blind thing (unless he chose to be open with his powers, which he wouldn't want for a whole host of reasons). His only other option would be to try to pass for fully sighted all the time. Why no in between? Well, there is no form of visual impairment known to man that would allow someone to discern shapes and not see any color, to walk around completely unaided and still not be able to tell anything about an image held two inches from one's face. The eyes don't work like that, and that combination of ability and disability shouldn't logically exist.

So, can he pass for sighted? In many situations, yes. Reliably in all situations? No way. Both Francesco and Katerine have touched on this so I won't rehash too much of it, but there are undeniably quite a few things that he either can't do at all can't do as well as the average person. While the "my other senses more than compensate" line sounds good in theory, it's based on some pretty flawed logic. It's the kind of logic that says "it doesn't matter that I can't see the movie since I can pick up what everyone in the theater had for breakfast." It's like comparing apples and pears. Everytime he's faced with a situation he gets a piece of a puzzle. An average sighted person with normal senses get another piece of the puzzle. In some situations, his is bigger. At other times, his piece might be smaller. Matt can pick up on an enormous amount of stuff that no "normal" human can even begin to comprehend. Yet he would very frequently miss things that are in "plain sight" to anyone else.

The only way he can be sure to get all the information he needs is to "act" fully blind. He still gets all the input that only he can perceive, but by openly admitting that he can't see, he can be pretty sure that he will be provided with any information he couldn't get otherwise. For him, blindness is not a mobility issue at all, it's an access to information issue. If he were to pass on whatever special accomodations he is entitled to by law, he would have had a much harder time as a student and be less able to do his job. It's really his only option, but I still feel a little uneasy about the whole thing. It's like so many other things in life one might feel ambivalent about. "I hate having to do this, but I have no other choice." That's how many of us feel about a lot of things. I accept and understand this particular choice, but the way he mislead Foggy all those years doesn't sit well with me.

As for what he does and doesn't fake... That's an issue that's wide open to all kinds of interpretations. The cane use is obviously fake (unless he's at a mold-infested construction site with three jack hammers going at the same...). The braille use isn't in my opinion. It seems logical to me that he would have a fairly strong preference for it over regular print. As for the various "blind techniques"... Well, anything that sighted people use a mirror for, he'd obviously have to do by touch alone (shaving etc). Ultimately, for me, it's the fact that not all of what he does is an act that ultmiately makes the act itself both forgivable and necessary.
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The Other Murdock Papers