Last night’s Daredevil live tweet, under the #DaredevilDVP hashtag, was a blast. Alice Wong has assembled a Storify to archive the event.
“Marvel’s Daredevil” itself, the new Netflix series posted just yesterday, is pretty great, too. It’s dark without being gloomy, funny but not frivolous, and the action is exciting and violent without (yet) feeling dehumanizing … though parental discretion is most definitely advised. I have only seen the first episode, but the show is very promising.
As disability depictions go, Matt Murdock / a.k.a. Daredevil, the blind superhero isn’t bad, but not yet a revelation. The show indulges in a few blindness cliches, like face-touching and wishing to see again. But the show does interesting things with these themes and they feel more earned and specific than usual. My only concern is that if Murdock continues dropping clever one-liners about being blind, well into the series, the whole “Get it? I’m blind!” schtick could become stale. My guess is that the blindness stuff will fade into the background while we dig into the story.
By all means, watch Daredevil. But while you watch, ponder the fact that while blindness is an integral part of the Daredevil story, Netflix so far has not provided an Audio Description track that would enable blind viewers to enjoy the show fully. It’s bad corporate citizenship for Netflix to neglect Audio Description as it does for all shows, but it’s laughably terrible PR for them to leave it out of this show in particular, and to fail to respond meaningfully to people who have been asking about it since last summer.
manwithoutfear.com - July 17, 2014
