“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” –Moby Dick

From its publication in 2003 to its film release this past May, critics have queued up to decry nearly every substantive element depicted in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Much has been said and written about Brown’s representation of Catholic dogma, the organization Opus Dei, and the sexual life of Jesus.

One faction that has remained all but silent however, and one that was clearly maligned by yet another heavy handed and inaccurate portrayal of a disability are persons with albinism.

Readers of The Da Vinci Code will no doubt recall the cloaked and stalking Silas, who executes four people in one night in the service of the Holy Spirit. Many myths and stereotypes common to recent book and film portrayals of albinism are present: red eyes, a self-mutilating loyalty, and an abusive past that spawns a born-again brutality and lust for killing.

The Da Vinci Code may go down as the most popular film ever to depict albinism; it is not the first. For over half a century, albinism has been featured in dozens of films; the portrayals are nearly always negative. From misrepresenting albinism’s causes, perpetuating myths, portraying villains as lurking rapists, down to the derisive tone with which the word “albino” is delivered, Hollywood has used every aspect of albinism to tap our deepest fears.

Following a bit of background on albinism, this essay outlines five common ways albinism is portrayed in film.

From Noah to Ahab

Albinism is the inability to synthesize melanin, the dark pigment that colors the skin, hair, and eyes, where its absence causes the visual defects that classify it as a disability. Recessive genes from both parents are its cause in human beings, accounting for its relative rarity (occurring once in about every 17,000 births), yet the condition is common enough to warrant a spell-check entry in the Associated Press Style Guide.

From the angelic depiction of ark-builder Noah in the Book of Enoch (which Brown references in his novel), to Zeus incarnating as a white bull in Greek mythology, or Jesus in Revelation with hair white as wool; albinism has long resounded in the human psyche with a mythic, isolating energy.
What informs most modern book and film portrayals of albinism is Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851), which chronicles Captain Ahab’s maniacal hunt for the white whale that severed his leg. In Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the story’s narrator Ishmael expatiates on the symbolism of whiteness, transubstantiating the whale through his psychic dread of colorlessness into an embodiment of evil. In a famous passage, Ishmael notes human reactions to persons with albinism.

“What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him…this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.”

Novelist E.M. Forster said there are only two plots: someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Ishmael’s journey through the real and imagined auguries of albinism, which he calls both “the crowning attribute of the terrible,” and the “colorless, all-color of atheism,” anchored for succeeding writers a succinct, symbolic method to make a villain more appalling and to create the “ultimate stranger.”

By the time John Houston filmed Moby Dick in 1956-the novel’s second film treatment-characters with albinism had appeared in many hugely popular novels, among them H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, and Daphne de Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. Also in 1956, The Mole People gave moviegoers their first substantive story depicting persons with albinism, a tale of a lost subterranean civilization who live in terror of light, subsist on mushrooms, and enslave eponymous semi-human “mole people.”

Albinism’s exoticism had become an established motif that would soon transcend its mythological and sci-fi roots and be featured in over 80 films, many of them mainstream hits.
Common Arcs

1. The Stalker: Rape and Retribution _Albinism is frequently used to ratchet fear and the desire for revenge by turning a villain, a la Melville, into a pallid purveyor of doom: an outsider who stalks the beautiful, unsuspecting heroine in order to rape or abduct her.

Such films usually provide an early ominous glimpse of the villain with a kind of “reveal” in close-up just as he is about to seize the heroine. Either the woman is raped or murdered or suffers a terror that turns the plot towards retribution, during which the monster with albinism is subdued and destroyed.

The movie Albino (released in 1976 under three other titles) is the archetype of this story. Whispering Death is an African with albinism leading terrorist raids against white settlers. His first close-up comes just before he rapes and scalps Sybil Danning, who plays the daughter of a plantation owner. Her fiancée Terrick, who had that day quit his police job to marry, disobeys orders to hunt the killer down. In the penultimate scene, Whispering Death turns out to speak perfect English and his proud words about his deed while kneeling over a wounded

Terrick are intended to evoke and all but codify our deepest tribal fears:

“She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?…And she was very brave…At first she was silent, but then later she began to scream…You should have heard her: it was quite wonderful and very stimulating…She kept calling out your name…but you weren’t there to help her, were you?”

After Whispering Death is wounded, Terrick forces him to run for his life, and finally shoots, stabs, and kicks his corpse off a cliff.

The same arc is found in comedies as well, notably Foul Play (1978). Goldie Hawn plays a librarian unwittingly drawn into an assassination plot after a stranger hides film in her purse. She’s pursued by a gang that includes Whitey Jackson, whose library attack begins her terror. At a pivotal moment, Hawn stabs a traitor from Jackson’s gang and flees to her kitchen phone. The killer pounces again, but is cut down by a knife flung from an open window. Hawn turns and she and the audience get a prolonged gawk at Jackson’s silent, glaring face-from which she swoons. The hero, a detective played by Chevy Chase, is there when she comes to, and the plot’s absurd unfolding begins. In the dénouement, Chase rescues Hawn at an opera house by shooting Jackson through the neck.

2. Evil in name

The word “albino” is considered fiercely negative and dehumanizing by most disability advocates, and the disdainful way this word is spat out onscreen seems intended to reinforce albinism’s loathsomeness.

Here are three examples: In Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1965), a frustrated Jimmy Stewart sees his daughter dancing with a blonde boy and intones, “He looks like an albino!” In an early scene in The Eiger Sanction (1975), when Clint Eastwood is told Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting, he quips, “Oh, the impatient albino.” In Hustle (1976), Burt Reynolds stops his partner from brutalizing a suspect. His partner later sneers, “There’s something about that al-bi-no, something personal, right?”

Whether noun or adjective, punchline or slur, hearing the word “albino” tells us these characters are not people, but freaks.

3. Distressing strength, gleeful cruelty

Another motif used to make albinism more ominous and inescapable is unusual strength, combined with a high capacity for inflicting and receiving pain.
Dan Brown’s Silas, with his spiked cilice cinching his thigh, is reminiscent of Mr. Joshua, the assassin played by Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon (1987). In one scene, Busey unflinchingly lets his boss burn his arm with a lighter to demonstrate his loyalty. There is no trace of visual defect as he shoots people from a helicopter, and though he loses the kung-fu showdown with star Mel Gibson on partner Danny Glover’s lawn, he manages one last lunge and is cut down by the slow-motion, synchronized shooting of the two cops’ guns.

So happy is he in his home guard duties, the bleeding-nosed Bosie, in Cold Mountain (2003), jumps with joy. In one scene, he dances deftly atop a split-rail fence. When he reaches an end-post, he leaps and comes down savagely. A woman’s hand is wedged beneath the rails. Her screams finally flush her sons (both deserters) from hiding and they run to her aid. After the first is cut down, Bosie, in one stylized motion, steadies himself on the rail, does an eerily timed back flip (his second of the film), and with a flourish, extends his arm to shoot the other son. The guardsmen are murderers to a man, but there is an almost kinetic ecstasy for evil that sets Bosie apart.

In Stick (1985), the brutal assassin Moke reaches his full potential with a self-damning drop from a penthouse railing while still trying to shoot up at Burt Reynolds. It’s a breathtaking stunt (flawlessly executed by the late Darr Robinson), and a dramatic touch worthy of Christopher Marlowe. Albinism comes off as the one essential trait needed to provoke this screaming, nihilistic plunge, simultaneously fusing Moke’s soulless character, the plot’s need for retribution, and the audience’s desire for his demise.

4. Disturbing causes and effects

When Cold Mountain director Anthony Minghello wanted to remake Bosie into “an albino,” he asked actor Charlie Hunnam to research albinism. According to Luna Eterna, on her site on albinism in popular culture, Hunnman discovered that albinism is often the product of incest, that most have 20/60 vision, and are susceptible to nosebleeds.

Albinism does not speak to the rational part of the brain, so even “research” can yield gross and comic inaccuracies. After the thoroughly negative tone built into most of these portrayals, it seems almost trifling to note how often the basic facts presented about albinism are untrue.

One of the most enduring myths is that persons with albinism have red or pink eyes. Lack of pigment leaves irises blue or gray, with dark, though vascular pupils whose translucency tinges red in direct light. Nonetheless, the red-eye myth persists. Burt Reynolds can’t escape their glow. In Hustle, he philosophizes, “Don’t you think we ought to show a little compassion for a man that goes through life looking at the world through red Easter Bunny eyes?” In Stick, Reynolds stares down the assassin Moke, saying, “I never saw anybody with bunny eyes before.” Reynolds also encountered the banjo savant with albinism in Deliverance (1971).

Viewers are led to believe that the cause of albinism in Powder (1995) was the hero’s mother being struck by lightning while pregnant. Generations of life under the earth’s surface cause albinism in The Mole People, and in The Omega Man (1971) albinism is the first stage of sickness, one that also includes psychotic illusions, afflicting survivors of global germ warfare.

There are different types of albinism distinguished by amounts of coloring and degree of visual acuity, but another myth found in film is that of a “pure” albino. In The Eiger Sanction, Dragon tells Clint Eastwood, “You know I’m something of a distinction: a total albino. Even the slightest direct light causes me intense pain.” Albinism’s photophobia results in squinting or closing one’s eyes to brightness; no type necessitates Dragon’s life in a dark sterilized room.

5. Isolating Compassion

Even the rare film that attempts to portray albinism with compassion or some degree of normalcy lapses into ignorance.

Powder uses albinism to create Einstein’s supposed vision of man’s next evolutionary stop. The messianic Jeremy literally has an electromagnetic personality, compassion that enables him to read minds and channel images into people, and an IQ so high, it is immeasurable. Pure evil replaced with pure good, however, comes off as equally isolating. The movie’s core question is whether Jeremy can survive in a world of prejudice, fear, and hate long enough to cultivate and share his amazing gifts. When he runs into a field at film’s end and returns his body to the universe, bowing to a bolt of lightning, the answer is an explosive no.

One of the most normal characters with albinism, and one of the few still living at story’s end, is Whitey (Casper), a waiter befriended by Jim Carey and Renee Zellweger during their flight from corrupt federal agents in the comedy Me, Myself and Irene (2000). When Carey (or rather, his evil alter ego) first sees Whitey at the restaurant, he yells, “Holy Jesus in Heaven, it’s a giant Q-Tip!” Yet within an hour, Whitey begs to join them, calling the pair, “the best friends I’ve ever had.” Whitey was abandoned by his family who moved to Phoenix. He couldn’t go with them because of his fair skin. Though the touches are all comic, the underlying image of albinism’s complete isolation is clear.

Such portrayals take on great power as the medium of film-which functions like a dream-delivers images directly into the psyche. Since most roles are played by actors who do not have albinism, and since these characters are never featured on lobby cards or the Tonight’s Show, the only place they exist is in the dark theater. When there is nothing in popular culture or most peoples’ experience to balance these negative images, they remain in the subconscious, linked to our deepest fears, and exemplifying the old definition of mythology of “things that never happened, but always are.”

What is even more troubling to albinism advocates is the impunity in which writers and directors operate. Since 2003, the National Organization of Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) has stepped up its response to Hollywood directors over portrayals in The Matrix Reloaded, The Time Machine, and Cold Mountain.

The work has paid off. According to Vail Reese, for the first time since 1989, no films featuring albinism were released in 2004 or 2005. NOAH fought the inescapable release of The Da Vinci Code with letters to director Ron Howard requesting the film drop the book’s albinism angle. The attempt failed. British actor Paul Bettany portrayed Silas as one with albinism. Whether the film’s success results in more negative uses of albinism, or NOAH’s advocacy creates awareness (particularly in the wider disability community), and raises an action-oriented consciousness of this enduring cultural wrong remains to be seen.

Resources

www.skinema.com – A comprehensive site compiled by dermatologist Vail Reese chronicling albinism in film

www.lunaeterna.net – A site exploring albinism in popular culture (film, literature, fashion, art) designed by New York writer Claire Acher (aka Luna Eterna)

www.albinism.org – Website of the National Organization of Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) which provides information on the medical, social, and cultural aspects of albinism.

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